- Nov 26, 2019
- 11,191
- 5,710
- 49
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Generic Orthodox Christian
- Marital Status
- Celibate
Ukraine's Zelenskyy addresses Congress, invokes 9/11, Pearl Harbor, MLK as he pleads for pivotal aid
Note that Fox News has been consistently pro Ukraine, and I am citing their story because it is easy to read. Zelenskyy addressed the US congress in protest at our correct decision not to supply them with MiG-29s and provide air support, because the Pentagon and Biden have deemed these actions, correctly, to be “escalatory”, which is a euphemistic way of saying they would prompt a potential nuclear escalation that would lead to WWIII and the end of human life.
What is now causing me to oppose both the Ukrainian and Russian governments is that, in attempting to provoke members of Congress into backing things we can’t do because Russia and the US have nuclear parity and are at risk of mutually assured destruction in the event of nuclear conflict, Zelenskyy engaged in the following emotionally-charged rhetoric, which I found offensive:
More disturbing than his emotional but unreasonable appeals was this (quoting from the linked article directly):
Pointing to World War II, Zelenskyy said that "the war of the past have prompted our predecessors to create institutions that should protect us from war, but, they unfortunately don’t work."
"We see it. You see it. So we need new ones, new institutions, new alliances, and we are for them," Zelenskyy said.
He proposed "to create an association, United for Peace, a union of responsible countries that have the strength and consciousness to stop conflicts, immediately provide all the necessary assistance in 24 hours, if necessary—even weapons, if necessary, sanctions, humanitarian support, political support."
"If such an alliance would exist today…we would be able to save thousands of lives in our country, in many countries of the world who need peace, those who suffer inhumane destruction,"
This sounds to me like a dangerous idea, another potential failure of an international alliance, with undertones of one world government.
Finally, in the most dishonest part of his speech, Zelenskyy declared "I see no sense in life if I cannot stop the deaths, and this is my main issue and the leader of my people, great Ukrainians, and the leader of my nation."
This is patently false - Zelenskyy’s goal is obviously victory, or at least a scenario where Ukrainian sovereignty is protected and Russia is dealt a strategic defeat through heavy casualties, even if Russian forces secure some additional land.
These goals are not dishonorable, indeed, most people not supporting Russia would see them as laudable, however, for him to declare all he wants to do is save lives is fundamentally dishonest and manipulative when he could accomplish that objective with a single phone call to either President Biden, NATO SHAPE, or a neutral country like Switzerland, requesting their assistance or good offices in communicating with Russia to achieve an immediate ceasefire to facilitate a 24 hour period in which to work out a negotiated surrender, countersigned by representatives of Russian allies, Ukrainian allies, neutral countries and the UN.
Zelenskyy, furthermore, despite being Jewish, has, to the peril of his fellow Ukrainian Jews, made something of a deal with the devil in the form of the Azov Battalion, actual neo-Nazis, who, having been armed and unleashed, represent a major threat to the security of post-war Ukraine, in particular religious and ethnic minorities, as this article in the Guardian details: Azov fighters are Ukraine's greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat
Now, make no mistake, I am not supporting Putin, who is a KGB man who makes a pretense of Russian Orthodox piety while thus far having engaged in four conflicts that resulted in Eastern Orthodox Christians killing other Eastern Orthodox Christians (the 2008 war with Georgia, in which he permanently destroyed the Georgian Navy, resulting in the deaths of many Georgian Orthodox Christians and some Russian and Abkhazian Orthodox Christians, and the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent ongoing conflict between Ukraine and the de facto independent Peoples Republics of Donestsk and Luhansk in the Donbass, which combined with this conflict, considering that the larger of the two Eastern Orthodox churches in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is part of the Russian Orthodox Church, have consisted of Russian Orthodox fighting and in some cases killing Russian Orthodox and other Christians from the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, its sister denomination the Russian Catholic Church and their parent denomination the Roman Catholic Church, and the Ukrainian Lutheran Church, in addition to other smaller denominations.
And Putin failed to lift a finger to stop Azerbaijan from conquering and ethnically cleansing most of the Ngorno-Karabakh Armenian Republic, territories it had held for years (Azeris had already occupied and ethnically cleansed other Armenian territories amidst the downfall of the Soviet Union), these being Oriental Orthodox Christian lands, and Azerbaijan being a nominally secular Islamic regime that is fanatically anti-Armenian, and like Turkey, a genocide denier, and also closely allied with brutal Islamist dictatorship in Iran, which is Putin’s ally. Armenia is also supposedly an ally of Russia, but when in need, they did not receive any meaningful assistance. Indeed the only thing Russia has done that helped Christians were their actions in Syria and Iraq, but they withdrew ground forces prematurely, allowing ISIS to destroy the archaeological wonders, including the ancient house church and Jewish synagogue in Dura-Europos. And if Zelenskyy did a deal with the devil in availing himself of assistance from the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Putin has done the same thing, by employing Islamist militias from Chechnya in Ukraine for various special operations.* This is also a huge risk to postwar Russian internal security, because these “elite Chechen units” appear to be at the very least related to the Chechen Islamist terrorists who committed various attrocities in Moscow and elsewhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
So my policy as of now is to oppose the continued military conflict and to not support either Zelenskyy or Putin, because both have shown themselves to be deeply flawed leaders. I believe Zelenskyy, for his part, could have precluded this conflict through a peace treaty with Russia wherein they agreed to recognize and normalize relations with Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, create an autonomous buffer zone in the Donbass region, and recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea based on the referendum (it should be noted that Crimea’s population obviously did largely support Russia, with some exceptions, probably not to the extent indicated by the referendum, however, the absence of civil unrest indicates a lack of opposition, and Ukraine furthermore under President Poroshenko, who like his pro-Russian predecessor, was corrupt, but anti-Russian, could have averted that conflict by not threatening to seize the Russian naval base in Sebastopol, an action which would have been illegal under international law due to the treaty between the two countries, which is analogous to the treaty between the US and Cuba under which the US leased Guantanamo Bay (which is valid for a few more decades, although the Cuban communist dictatorship stopped recognizing it years ago, and stopped cashing the checks the US treasury has continued sending them even after the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Conversely, Russia should obviously not have invaded, and their prosecution of the war has resulted in unacceptably high levels of civilian casualties, even though the overall level is quite low by contemporary standards. Especially distressing for me, in addition to the deaths of American journalists and Ukrainian civilians in general, was the desperately sad news of the bombing of a childrens’ facility. Less distressing, but deeply unfortunate, was the destruction of the Antonov An-225, the worlds largest cargo aircraft, which has been invaluable in responding to various natural disasters. This irreplaceable, one of a kind aircraft was originally built by the Ukrainian aircraft manufacturer Antonov to transport the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran (itself destroyed some years back when the hangar in which it was stored collapsed, but which did successfully complete an orbit under automatic control, and had a higher payload than our space shuttles, and whose Energia rocket engine has since been purchased by the US for cargo flights; indeed, I wish we had purchased the entire Buran system as a Mark II space shuttle as its design was theoretically safer, as the Soviets had time to evaluate and improve on the American design, and it would have been in many respects superior to the insanely overbudget Space Launch System NASA is currently wasting money (and expensive reusable Space Shuttle Main Engines) on.
To me, the Buran orbiter and Antonov An-225 to me symbolize what Ukraine and Russia could accomplish when they were united, and can still accomplish in the future if peace is restored, not just for each other, but as the humanitarian uses of the An-225 demonstrated, for the world.
Lastly, I have to criticize the Western response. In my view, constant criticism of Russia and predictions of an invasion before one happened helped make it a reality; if the US wanted to preclude an invasion, we should have avoided discussions of NATO membership for Ukraine and offered a treaty to Russia that would guarantee non-membership for Ukraine in return for a Russian guarantee of non-intervention, and also in addition to threatening economic sanctions on Russia, used the threat of sanctions on Ukraine, which would have ensured their immediate collapse, if they did not agree to a peace treaty with Russia whereby in return for Russia withdrawing its forces and agreeing not to concentrate forces near the Ukrainian border, and vice versa, Ukraine would recognize the sovereignity of Donestsk and Luhansk and formally cede Crimea to Russia, and Russia would normalize relations with Ukraine, and the West would lift all sanctions against Russia. Such a deal should have been done years ago, given the chances of Russia giving back Crimea were nil.
For that matter, Russia never would invaded if Ukraine had retained and developed nuclear capabilities had we not offered Ukraine money to surrender their strategic bomber aircraft and the Soviet nuclear weapons that remained in their territory in the early 90s, they could perhaps have remanufactured them (since these weapons had permissive action links connected to the former Soviet nuclear chain of command, which fell under Russian control, and as such were not usable, but the weapons grade radioisotopes in these weapons could have been used to make new weapons, since most of the challenge of nuclear weapons development is in obtaining the very highly enriched isotopes needed for a supercritical nuclear explosion). And Yeltsin-era Russia was in such an economic and military state of collapse that it is unlikely it could have stopped Ukraine from remanufacturing those nuclear weapons. But that is water under the bridge, to put it mildly.
Speaking of sanctions, I also feel the most recent sanctions have resulted in unreasonable economic hardship for the Russian people, who have not had an objectively free and fair sanctions election for Putin probably since 2012, if not 2004, if not 2000, if ever. And equally troubling is Facebook allowing support for the aformentioned neo-Nazi Azov Batallion, which it had previously banned for being neo-Nazis.
Thus, rather than supporting either the Ukrainian or Russian leadership, my new position is to oppose both in equal measure. I believe that US policy should be refocused on encouraging Ukraine to surrender certain territories in the Donbass with Russian ethnic majorities to Russia and agreeing to a joint demilitarized zone 100 miles from the border in both directions, except in the immediate vicinity of Kiev, and the cessation of Crimea, in return for a peace treaty, which would be accompanied by the immediate lifting of all sanctions. Such a treaty would involve measures to dissuade Russian reinvasion. And furthermore, certain sanctions creating hardships for ordinary Russian civilians should be lifted immediately, for example, perhaps by allowing SWIFT transfers up to say US $500 per recipient per week or encouraging Visa and Mastercard to allow their services to be used in conjunction with money order services, in order to mitigate food insecurity for Russians, particularly elderly Russians who struggle to make ends meet on ridiculously small state pensions, that our actions have led to. Peace must be our only objective, not Russian victory or Ukrainian victory. Peace even if it required conditional Ukrainian surrender, as embarrassing as that would be, would be preferable to prolonging this nightmare. But the path for Russia to have all sanctions lifted must be a peace that preserves and protects Ukrainian sovereignty over Ukrainian areas which do not have a population that desires unity with Russia.
Also, we must see an end to the false accusations of support for the war by various Russian Orthodox churches such as the Moscow Patriarchare, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, ethnically Russian parishes of the Orthodox Church in America, which was formerly a part of the Russian Orthodox Church but became completely independent in 1970, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also known as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which was a stridently anti communist grouping of Russian Orthodox parishes outside the Iron Curtain which became independent of the Moscow Patriarchate based on their interpretation of the final message from St. Tikhon, the Moscow Patriarch who died of mistreatment and respiratory illness in a Soviet prison in 1924, and which reconciled with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007 and is now an autonomous church loosely affiliated with the MP, and finally the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which was controversially formed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2018 from the merger of the Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which were hitherto not regarded as canonical, but the OCU has been recognized as canonical by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which controls the Greek Orthodox churches in those parts of Greece like Thessaloniki, Crete and Lesbos which were not captured from the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, but rather liberated from Turkocratia at later dates, as well as the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, and the Greek Orthodox churches outside Greece everywhere except Cyprus Africa, Sinai, the Middle East and the Holy Land, which are under the Church of Cyprus Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Church of Sinai, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, as well as, in the United States, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of North America, the American Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Diocese, and a few other ethnic churches here and elsewhere in the world, such as the Finnish Orthodox Church. None of these churches want war, nor for that matter do any of the Catholic churches in Ukraine or Russia.
*I have heard, and believe, that the use of both the Azov Battalion by Ukraine and the Chechnyan Islamist militants by Russia are due to a natural reluctance on the parts of many Ukrainian and Russian soldiers to engage in particularly severe combat with each other, given that we are talking about the Slavic equivalent of Americans and Canadians, or Flemish and Dutch, or Hawaiians and Samoans, or Greeks and Cypriots, which is not to say war has not occurred between these ethnic siblings, but that it is rare and mostly historical.
Note that Fox News has been consistently pro Ukraine, and I am citing their story because it is easy to read. Zelenskyy addressed the US congress in protest at our correct decision not to supply them with MiG-29s and provide air support, because the Pentagon and Biden have deemed these actions, correctly, to be “escalatory”, which is a euphemistic way of saying they would prompt a potential nuclear escalation that would lead to WWIII and the end of human life.
What is now causing me to oppose both the Ukrainian and Russian governments is that, in attempting to provoke members of Congress into backing things we can’t do because Russia and the US have nuclear parity and are at risk of mutually assured destruction in the event of nuclear conflict, Zelenskyy engaged in the following emotionally-charged rhetoric, which I found offensive:
- He referenced Pearl Harbor and WWII, in which the US was the victim of a sneak attack by an Axis Power and had war declared on it by Mussolini and Aldolf Hitler, whose atrocities exceed anything that has happened thus far in Ukraine, and we need to pray it never reaches that point.
- He also referenced the September 11 Terror Attacks, in which, 2,807 civillians and 189 military and civillian workers at the Pentagon were killed in a surprise terrorist action; in contrast, in the course of a war which was anticipated for months, and in which there were mass evacuations from Kiev and other cities before the main Russian offensive, as of two days ago, UN human rights observers reported 636 civilian fatalities - still a tragedy, and unacceptable, but less than 25% of the casualties on 9/11 in a war comprised of vastly different circumstances.
- He invoked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who I venerate as a saint and hieromartyr, because he, a staunch pacifist clergyman who insisted on non-violent struggle for civil rights for African Americans, famously rebuked the movements associated with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, who threatened violence, by exclaiming “Non-violence, non-violence, non-violence!” Zelenskyy quoted “I have a dream!” while requesting the violent act of imposing through military force a no-fly zone, and weapons, both actions being capable of leading to nuclear confrontation according to the US Department of Defense and President Biden. I am invincibly confident that St. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream did not extend to global thermonuclear war.
More disturbing than his emotional but unreasonable appeals was this (quoting from the linked article directly):
Pointing to World War II, Zelenskyy said that "the war of the past have prompted our predecessors to create institutions that should protect us from war, but, they unfortunately don’t work."
"We see it. You see it. So we need new ones, new institutions, new alliances, and we are for them," Zelenskyy said.
He proposed "to create an association, United for Peace, a union of responsible countries that have the strength and consciousness to stop conflicts, immediately provide all the necessary assistance in 24 hours, if necessary—even weapons, if necessary, sanctions, humanitarian support, political support."
"If such an alliance would exist today…we would be able to save thousands of lives in our country, in many countries of the world who need peace, those who suffer inhumane destruction,"
This sounds to me like a dangerous idea, another potential failure of an international alliance, with undertones of one world government.
Finally, in the most dishonest part of his speech, Zelenskyy declared "I see no sense in life if I cannot stop the deaths, and this is my main issue and the leader of my people, great Ukrainians, and the leader of my nation."
This is patently false - Zelenskyy’s goal is obviously victory, or at least a scenario where Ukrainian sovereignty is protected and Russia is dealt a strategic defeat through heavy casualties, even if Russian forces secure some additional land.
These goals are not dishonorable, indeed, most people not supporting Russia would see them as laudable, however, for him to declare all he wants to do is save lives is fundamentally dishonest and manipulative when he could accomplish that objective with a single phone call to either President Biden, NATO SHAPE, or a neutral country like Switzerland, requesting their assistance or good offices in communicating with Russia to achieve an immediate ceasefire to facilitate a 24 hour period in which to work out a negotiated surrender, countersigned by representatives of Russian allies, Ukrainian allies, neutral countries and the UN.
Zelenskyy, furthermore, despite being Jewish, has, to the peril of his fellow Ukrainian Jews, made something of a deal with the devil in the form of the Azov Battalion, actual neo-Nazis, who, having been armed and unleashed, represent a major threat to the security of post-war Ukraine, in particular religious and ethnic minorities, as this article in the Guardian details: Azov fighters are Ukraine's greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat
Now, make no mistake, I am not supporting Putin, who is a KGB man who makes a pretense of Russian Orthodox piety while thus far having engaged in four conflicts that resulted in Eastern Orthodox Christians killing other Eastern Orthodox Christians (the 2008 war with Georgia, in which he permanently destroyed the Georgian Navy, resulting in the deaths of many Georgian Orthodox Christians and some Russian and Abkhazian Orthodox Christians, and the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent ongoing conflict between Ukraine and the de facto independent Peoples Republics of Donestsk and Luhansk in the Donbass, which combined with this conflict, considering that the larger of the two Eastern Orthodox churches in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, is part of the Russian Orthodox Church, have consisted of Russian Orthodox fighting and in some cases killing Russian Orthodox and other Christians from the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, its sister denomination the Russian Catholic Church and their parent denomination the Roman Catholic Church, and the Ukrainian Lutheran Church, in addition to other smaller denominations.
And Putin failed to lift a finger to stop Azerbaijan from conquering and ethnically cleansing most of the Ngorno-Karabakh Armenian Republic, territories it had held for years (Azeris had already occupied and ethnically cleansed other Armenian territories amidst the downfall of the Soviet Union), these being Oriental Orthodox Christian lands, and Azerbaijan being a nominally secular Islamic regime that is fanatically anti-Armenian, and like Turkey, a genocide denier, and also closely allied with brutal Islamist dictatorship in Iran, which is Putin’s ally. Armenia is also supposedly an ally of Russia, but when in need, they did not receive any meaningful assistance. Indeed the only thing Russia has done that helped Christians were their actions in Syria and Iraq, but they withdrew ground forces prematurely, allowing ISIS to destroy the archaeological wonders, including the ancient house church and Jewish synagogue in Dura-Europos. And if Zelenskyy did a deal with the devil in availing himself of assistance from the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, Putin has done the same thing, by employing Islamist militias from Chechnya in Ukraine for various special operations.* This is also a huge risk to postwar Russian internal security, because these “elite Chechen units” appear to be at the very least related to the Chechen Islamist terrorists who committed various attrocities in Moscow and elsewhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
So my policy as of now is to oppose the continued military conflict and to not support either Zelenskyy or Putin, because both have shown themselves to be deeply flawed leaders. I believe Zelenskyy, for his part, could have precluded this conflict through a peace treaty with Russia wherein they agreed to recognize and normalize relations with Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, create an autonomous buffer zone in the Donbass region, and recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea based on the referendum (it should be noted that Crimea’s population obviously did largely support Russia, with some exceptions, probably not to the extent indicated by the referendum, however, the absence of civil unrest indicates a lack of opposition, and Ukraine furthermore under President Poroshenko, who like his pro-Russian predecessor, was corrupt, but anti-Russian, could have averted that conflict by not threatening to seize the Russian naval base in Sebastopol, an action which would have been illegal under international law due to the treaty between the two countries, which is analogous to the treaty between the US and Cuba under which the US leased Guantanamo Bay (which is valid for a few more decades, although the Cuban communist dictatorship stopped recognizing it years ago, and stopped cashing the checks the US treasury has continued sending them even after the Cuban Missile Crisis).
Conversely, Russia should obviously not have invaded, and their prosecution of the war has resulted in unacceptably high levels of civilian casualties, even though the overall level is quite low by contemporary standards. Especially distressing for me, in addition to the deaths of American journalists and Ukrainian civilians in general, was the desperately sad news of the bombing of a childrens’ facility. Less distressing, but deeply unfortunate, was the destruction of the Antonov An-225, the worlds largest cargo aircraft, which has been invaluable in responding to various natural disasters. This irreplaceable, one of a kind aircraft was originally built by the Ukrainian aircraft manufacturer Antonov to transport the Soviet Space Shuttle Buran (itself destroyed some years back when the hangar in which it was stored collapsed, but which did successfully complete an orbit under automatic control, and had a higher payload than our space shuttles, and whose Energia rocket engine has since been purchased by the US for cargo flights; indeed, I wish we had purchased the entire Buran system as a Mark II space shuttle as its design was theoretically safer, as the Soviets had time to evaluate and improve on the American design, and it would have been in many respects superior to the insanely overbudget Space Launch System NASA is currently wasting money (and expensive reusable Space Shuttle Main Engines) on.
To me, the Buran orbiter and Antonov An-225 to me symbolize what Ukraine and Russia could accomplish when they were united, and can still accomplish in the future if peace is restored, not just for each other, but as the humanitarian uses of the An-225 demonstrated, for the world.
Lastly, I have to criticize the Western response. In my view, constant criticism of Russia and predictions of an invasion before one happened helped make it a reality; if the US wanted to preclude an invasion, we should have avoided discussions of NATO membership for Ukraine and offered a treaty to Russia that would guarantee non-membership for Ukraine in return for a Russian guarantee of non-intervention, and also in addition to threatening economic sanctions on Russia, used the threat of sanctions on Ukraine, which would have ensured their immediate collapse, if they did not agree to a peace treaty with Russia whereby in return for Russia withdrawing its forces and agreeing not to concentrate forces near the Ukrainian border, and vice versa, Ukraine would recognize the sovereignity of Donestsk and Luhansk and formally cede Crimea to Russia, and Russia would normalize relations with Ukraine, and the West would lift all sanctions against Russia. Such a deal should have been done years ago, given the chances of Russia giving back Crimea were nil.
For that matter, Russia never would invaded if Ukraine had retained and developed nuclear capabilities had we not offered Ukraine money to surrender their strategic bomber aircraft and the Soviet nuclear weapons that remained in their territory in the early 90s, they could perhaps have remanufactured them (since these weapons had permissive action links connected to the former Soviet nuclear chain of command, which fell under Russian control, and as such were not usable, but the weapons grade radioisotopes in these weapons could have been used to make new weapons, since most of the challenge of nuclear weapons development is in obtaining the very highly enriched isotopes needed for a supercritical nuclear explosion). And Yeltsin-era Russia was in such an economic and military state of collapse that it is unlikely it could have stopped Ukraine from remanufacturing those nuclear weapons. But that is water under the bridge, to put it mildly.
Speaking of sanctions, I also feel the most recent sanctions have resulted in unreasonable economic hardship for the Russian people, who have not had an objectively free and fair sanctions election for Putin probably since 2012, if not 2004, if not 2000, if ever. And equally troubling is Facebook allowing support for the aformentioned neo-Nazi Azov Batallion, which it had previously banned for being neo-Nazis.
Thus, rather than supporting either the Ukrainian or Russian leadership, my new position is to oppose both in equal measure. I believe that US policy should be refocused on encouraging Ukraine to surrender certain territories in the Donbass with Russian ethnic majorities to Russia and agreeing to a joint demilitarized zone 100 miles from the border in both directions, except in the immediate vicinity of Kiev, and the cessation of Crimea, in return for a peace treaty, which would be accompanied by the immediate lifting of all sanctions. Such a treaty would involve measures to dissuade Russian reinvasion. And furthermore, certain sanctions creating hardships for ordinary Russian civilians should be lifted immediately, for example, perhaps by allowing SWIFT transfers up to say US $500 per recipient per week or encouraging Visa and Mastercard to allow their services to be used in conjunction with money order services, in order to mitigate food insecurity for Russians, particularly elderly Russians who struggle to make ends meet on ridiculously small state pensions, that our actions have led to. Peace must be our only objective, not Russian victory or Ukrainian victory. Peace even if it required conditional Ukrainian surrender, as embarrassing as that would be, would be preferable to prolonging this nightmare. But the path for Russia to have all sanctions lifted must be a peace that preserves and protects Ukrainian sovereignty over Ukrainian areas which do not have a population that desires unity with Russia.
Also, we must see an end to the false accusations of support for the war by various Russian Orthodox churches such as the Moscow Patriarchare, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, ethnically Russian parishes of the Orthodox Church in America, which was formerly a part of the Russian Orthodox Church but became completely independent in 1970, the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, also known as the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, which was a stridently anti communist grouping of Russian Orthodox parishes outside the Iron Curtain which became independent of the Moscow Patriarchate based on their interpretation of the final message from St. Tikhon, the Moscow Patriarch who died of mistreatment and respiratory illness in a Soviet prison in 1924, and which reconciled with the Moscow Patriarchate in 2007 and is now an autonomous church loosely affiliated with the MP, and finally the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, which was controversially formed by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 2018 from the merger of the Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which were hitherto not regarded as canonical, but the OCU has been recognized as canonical by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which controls the Greek Orthodox churches in those parts of Greece like Thessaloniki, Crete and Lesbos which were not captured from the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, but rather liberated from Turkocratia at later dates, as well as the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North America, and the Greek Orthodox churches outside Greece everywhere except Cyprus Africa, Sinai, the Middle East and the Holy Land, which are under the Church of Cyprus Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Church of Sinai, the Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Antiochian Orthodox Church, as well as, in the United States, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of North America, the American Carpatho-Rusyn Orthodox Diocese, and a few other ethnic churches here and elsewhere in the world, such as the Finnish Orthodox Church. None of these churches want war, nor for that matter do any of the Catholic churches in Ukraine or Russia.
*I have heard, and believe, that the use of both the Azov Battalion by Ukraine and the Chechnyan Islamist militants by Russia are due to a natural reluctance on the parts of many Ukrainian and Russian soldiers to engage in particularly severe combat with each other, given that we are talking about the Slavic equivalent of Americans and Canadians, or Flemish and Dutch, or Hawaiians and Samoans, or Greeks and Cypriots, which is not to say war has not occurred between these ethnic siblings, but that it is rare and mostly historical.
