He speaks about the church bluntly. According to him, the Russian Orthodox Church worked toward escalation, Patriarch Kirill denies the Ukrainian people any subjectivity, and Moscow should have been the first to offer the Ukrainian church autocephaly. Meduza’s editors put that formulation in the headline: “The Russian Orthodox Church’s position is a perversion of the idea of Christianity.”
Autocephaly means the self-governance of a local church, recognized by its mother church. In the Orthodox world, the question of the Ukrainian church’s status has long since moved beyond the bounds of canon law, because behind it stand state borders, language policy and the rivalry of two centers of influence. The Meduza interview, by an independent online publication operating under restrictions in the Russian media market, became one of the notable statements by a priest who until recently served within the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church.
A hotline
From the first day of the war, the group he assembled in St Petersburg has run a hotline for Ukrainian citizens who want to leave Russia. According to the archbishop, the volunteer chat has about four thousand people, with several hundred actively helping. The work of such a group rests on simple things: people call or write, receive information about routes and documents, and volunteers help with travel.
Hundreds of people managed to get out, including via Tikhvin and Ivangorod. Tikhvin is in Leningrad Oblast, and Ivangorod stands on the Russian-Estonian border opposite Narva, which is why those routes mattered to those seeking a way out of the country. The archbishop calls the Leningrad Oblast administration helpful — that is, it did not obstruct the group’s work.
He formulated his position this way:
“I am against politicians and for people.”
Prison ministry and excommunication
Until 24 February 2022, the archbishop conducted a prison ministry and met, among others, with Ukrainian prisoners of war. Prison ministry means regular spiritual work in places of confinement: conversations, prayer, performing the rites for those deprived of liberty. It was precisely this experience that, in essence, became the point from which he began to speak of war as a concrete human tragedy.
The barring from communion that he announced in 2014 is a church measure: a person is deprived of the right to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist. Mikhnov-Vaytenko applied it to those who voluntarily fight against Ukraine, and he did so in a sermon. Later he left the staff — that is, he ceased to be a member of the clergy of the church in which he served.
The Apostolic Orthodox Church, which he heads, is known as a structure created with the participation of Gleb Yakunin. Yakunin is a priest who in the 1990s publicly criticized the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and was defrocked for that criticism. For a publication that describes the AOC precisely through this connection, it matters that the archbishop speaks not in the name of a great tradition but in the name of a small church with its own history of conflict with Moscow.
At the time of the interview, the group continued to run the hotline for Ukrainian citizens, and the archbishop continued to speak about the Russian Orthodox Church’s position in the way that was printed in Meduza’s headline.
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