The appeal is addressed “to all on whom peace in the Donetsk and Luhansk lands depends.” The bishops call for a halt, to prevent bloodshed and to end the “mad escalation of passions.” The text does not name the aggressor and offers no assessment of what is happening. What we have before us is a symmetrical call for peace on both sides of the border, and it ends with the line that is carried in the title and which deserves to be quoted in full:
“Peace to Ukraine! Peace to Russia! No to war!”
The text was published on the website of the Apostolic Orthodox Church in Ukraine in three languages. The epigraph from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 26, verse 52, recalls Christ’s words to the disciple who raised a sword at Jesus’s arrest. For a church that in recent years has existed in several jurisdictions, such a document became a way to declare a single voice.
The appeal was signed by Metropolitan Stefan and Bishop Sergiy of Boryspil from the Apostolic Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Metropolitan Vitaliy and Archbishop Grigory of Varangia, that is Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko, from the church in Russia, as well as Metropolitan Mikhail from the church in the USA. Metropolitan Vitaliy (Kuzhevatov) was re-elected head of the Apostolic Orthodox Church at a council in Kyiv in October 2013.
A Church That Survived a Schism
The history of this church in recent years is full of schisms and renamings. At the council of 18 October 2013 in Kyiv, the election of senior hierarchs for a four-year term was established, and Oleg (Vedmedenko) became Metropolitan of Kyiv instead of Viktor Veryaskin. In November 2015, Vedmedenko and the Vladimir bishop Mocharnik announced the creation of the Ukrainian Independent Autocephalous Orthodox Church. The Synod of the Apostolic Church in Moscow released them and recognised the new entity as a sister church, transferring the Ukrainian Metropolia to autocephalous self-government. Already on 23 December 2015, a unification council was held in Kyiv, at which the Apostolic Orthodox Church in Ukraine came into being, and Stefan became its metropolitan.
Stefan, born in 1942, took part in the work of the Spiritual Council of the Maidan in 2013. On 1 December 2013, when the protest was at its height, he stopped the crowd at the Kyiv City Council building. In April 2015, the Synod of the Kyiv Metropolia received him in his existing rank as Archbishop of Kyiv and Bohuslav. In 2019, the council renamed the church the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and Stefan himself remained its head in Ukraine.
Icons on the Maidan
Archpriest Sergiy Vutyanov, rector of the Kyiv community, later Bishop of Boryspil, brought the icons of his community to the Maidan in 2014. The tent-church where they were kept burned down on 19 February 2014, but the icons were saved. Eight years later, on the day the appeal was signed, the same date again appeared in the church’s history—a date the community remembers as the day of the fire. In February 2021, Sergiy Vutyanov spoke on behalf of the Apostolic Church and the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations at the results of the Week of Interfaith Harmony, where he received the third prize of Jordan.
Another detail is important for understanding the context: in November 2021, Oleg Vedmedenko, one of the founders of the united church, died. His text on the structure of the Apostolic Church was reprinted on the website at the end of that same month, and it became one of the last public documents associated with his name.
The appeal itself contains not a word about military preparations and not a single accusation against anyone. The call is addressed to those on whom the situation depends, and it is delivered in a spirit that many religious communities in Ukraine and Russia share. On the church’s website, the text gathered 464 views, and four days after it was signed, on 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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