Russian Orthodox Church is Funding, recruiting and training for Private Military Company like Wagner

Reality is stranger than fiction! Phony crusades in the name of God!

"In its 2020 report, “Moscow’s Mercenary Wars: The Expansion of Russian Private Military Companies” (PMCs), the US think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies detailed the growth in the use of PMCs to fight the Kremlin’s wars and highlighted the links between these companies and Russia’s military and intelligence apparatus. ...

Earlier this year MOLFAR published a catalog of Russian PMCs, which identified 37 separate mercenary groups operating in as many as 34 different countries with more than two thirds of their funding coming from the state with the rest from oligarchs and other unspecified sources.

Buried in this report was reference to a PMC called Andreyevsky Krest (St Andrew’s Cross) which it said was funded by donations collected by the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) from its congregations throughout the federation. ...

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) that the Andreyevsky Krest was a full-blown PMC operating from its base located at the Kronstadt Naval Cathedral in St Petersburg. ... 

Representatives of the cathedral were said to be actively recruiting parishioners, particularly those with previous military experience, for service in Ukraine. ...
... The SBU asserted that “to disguise combat training, their organizers train their ‘recruits’ exclusively within the walls of the cathedral and at special training grounds in Russia.” ...

The SBU said that this was yet another criminal activity undertaken by the ROC that would be investigated. Ukraine has initiated proceedings against 68 representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, Russia’s subordinate church on Ukrainian territory, for crimes including high treason, collaboration and providing aid and comfort to agents of the aggressor country. ..."

Russian Orthodox Church Funding Private Military Company

Vladimir Putin orders 36-hour weekend cease-fire in Ukraine for the Russian Orthodox Christmas holiday

Should the Ukraine honor this if it is a sincere order? I am not so sure! It is an opportunity for the Ukrainian defense forces!

E.g. there seem to be tensions between the orthodox church of Ukraine and the Russian orthodox church.

Why did the head of the Russian Orthodox Church not call for an end to this war of aggression many months ago?

"... The head of the Russian Orthodox Church called Thursday for a 36-hour Christmas cease-fire in Ukraine at the end of this week, but his appeal looked unlikely to bring any breakthrough in halting the war that began nearly 11 months ago with Moscow’s invasion. ...

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak dismissed Kirill’s call as “a cynical trap and an element of propaganda.” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had proposed a Russian troop withdrawal earlier, before Dec. 25, but Russia rejected it. ..."

Vladimir Putin orders 36-hour weekend cease-fire in Ukraine – Boston Herald

Saint Olga of Kyiv: Ukraine's patron saint of defiance and vengeance

Very recommendable! Lessons of history!

How does the Russian Orthodox Church respond to Putin the Terrible's horrible invasion on the Ukraine?

"... Ukrainians are used to adversity and they have a special medieval role model who personifies their bravery in the face of hardship. The Mongol horde destroyed her tomb in Kyiv in 1240 but a Ukrainian Orthodox cathedral dedicated to her was consecrated there as recently as 2010. ...

Olga of Kyiv, consort of Igor, second ruler of the Rurikid dynasty, is today recognized as one of Eastern Orthodoxy’s greatest saints. A fierce and proud woman who protected her young son and avenged her husband’s death, she was a crucial figure in the consolidation of the medieval kingdom of Kyivan Rus’ as a political entity and in its peoples’ conversion to Christianity.

Olga was born to Viking parents in Pskov, northern Russia, around the turn of the 10th century. She married Prince Igor young and may have been only 20 when the Drevlians, a neighbouring tribe, rose up against his rule and murdered him.

The Byzantine chronicler Leo the Deacon gives gruesome details of Igor’s killing: he was tied to two tree trunks which were then released so his body was split in two. ...

Olga’s legend was born of her actions in the weeks and months that followed. The Drevlians sent her emissaries to suggest she marry their leader Prince Mal. The Primary Chronicle, an 11th-century manuscript which is our main source for what follows, records Olga as greeting them deceptively, apparently to bide for time.

The account may be part-fictitious or at least exaggerated. Yet that is not the point: in medieval hagiography it is the morality of the tale that matters most.

“Your proposal is pleasing to me”, Olga told her interlocutors. “Indeed, my husband cannot rise again from the dead. But I desire to honour you tomorrow in the presence of my people. Return now to your boat, and remain there […] I shall send for you on the morrow […]

The hubristic Drevlian delegation took her at her word gleefully. But what they did not know was that she had arranged for a trench to be dug into which they and their boat were flung.

They were buried alive.

Olga summoned a second Drevlian embassy before the rest of the tribe had had time to learn of the first one’s fate. When they arrived she commanded her people to draw a bath for them.

The Drevlians then entered the bathhouse but Olga ordered the doors to be bolted and the building set ablaze.

For a third reprisal, Olga went to the place where the Drevlians had killed her husband, telling those present she wished to hold a funeral feast to commemorate him. Once the Drevlians were drunk and incapacitated she had her men massacre them.

Finally, she laid siege to the Drevlians’ base at Iskorosten (the modern-day Ukraine city of Korosten). She tricked those inside the city with an offer of peace: all they had to give up were three pigeons and three sparrows from each house.

But when Olga had the birds in her possession she had her men tie a sulphurous cloth to one of each one’s legs. The birds flew back to their nests for the night and the sulphur set every building on fire simultaneously.

Olga ordered her soldiers to catch everyone who fled the burning city so they could be extirpated or taken into slavery. ..."

Saint Olga of Kyiv: Ukraine's patron saint of defiance and vengeance - The Jerusalem Post

The Rebirth of Orthodox Russia!!!

Very recommendable! Incredible, how the orthodox church survived the 70 years of communist terror against the church!