The interviewee described his trajectory against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine as unusual: in 2014, he moved from Ukraine to Russia after facing pressure for wearing the St. George ribbon and holding what he regarded as pro-Russian views. Eight years later, he ended up in a Russian prison over a video saying that the aggressors who attacked Ukraine would “go to hell,” while their victims would “go to heaven.”
Asked whether those years in Russia had radically changed his position, he said that in 2014 he did not see himself as belonging to either side. He said he considered Russia’s actions unlawful, but at the same time believed the Ukrainian authorities had made many mistakes. In particular, he called the ATO a civil war and viewed it as the main mistake, hoping the situation could still be brought back into the political sphere and resolved through dialogue.
He said another mistake was the lack of resistance in Crimea. According to him, Ukrainian troops simply formed into columns and left the peninsula, which struck him as strange. He also said he paid little attention to the events of Maidan 2014, describing himself at the time as apolitical.
A turning point for him, he said, came with reports about the seizure of churches belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. He then printed leaflets explaining why he considered the Kyiv Patriarchate to be schismatic, and his acquaintances put them up around Vinnytsia. He added that a public organization called “For the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” was later registered, after which a media scandal followed.
“Everything could have been resolved peacefully: isolate Strelkov in Sloviansk, close the border, avoid sending troops into Donbas, and start talking to people — give them a second language, Russian schools, calm them down,” he said, describing the position he presented during a conversation with an officer from the SBU.
He claims the SBU officer treated him politely and even agreed with those arguments. At the same time, he said the sharpest criticism came not from the security service but from within his own church environment: in the Vinnytsia diocese of the UOC MP, he was called a provocateur.
He also recalled a conversation with Metropolitan Ionafan (Yeletskikh), whom the editors note was handed over to Russia in June 2024 as part of a prisoner-of-war exchange. According to the interviewee, the metropolitan told him he should not act because Metropolitan Onufriy, head of the UOC MP, had blessed believers only to pray in churches. He replied that he considered such a position contrary to the Gospel. After that, he said, the conversation ended.