Bartholomew's visit on Independence Day will put an end to the spiritual confrontation between Kyiv and Moscow, - political expert
"Today, few world leaders are ready to come to the celebration of the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence. And the reason is not only in the coronavirus. The impotence of international policy pursued by the Office of the President has a much greater impact. And after the film investigation into Wagner's case is released on Netflix at the end of March, Ukraine risks finding itself in a kind of isolation. Therefore, against this background, the visit of the leader of world Orthodoxy risks being almost the biggest diplomatic success of Zelensky's team," the political expert comments on the upcoming visit. It was reported by Gazeta.ua.
According to him, with this visit, the Ecumenical Patriarch will fulfill another important mission – he will put a bold end to the spiritual confrontation that has been taking place in recent centuries between Kyiv and Moscow, demonstrating that Kyiv is the center of North-Eastern Orthodoxy.
"This will be public recognition of the revived Kyiv Metropolia and will send a signal to other Orthodox churches that it is necessary to speed up the legitimization of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. This event will fulfill another geopolitical task. The visit will send a powerful signal for the recognition of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine to Poles, Georgians, Czechs, Bulgarians and other churches. The joint Festive Liturgy of Epiphanius and Bartholomew will put a bold end to the issue of Ukrainian spiritual identity, that Ukraine is not Russia, and Moscow's attempts to become the center of Orthodoxy have failed. In this case, it will be another blow to the ideology of the 'Russian world'," the expert writes.
According to Viktor Taran, Zelensky and the "Servants of the People" play a microscopic role against the background of the centuries-old spiritual confrontation in the Constantinople-Ukraine-Moscow triangle. Not only do they have nothing to do with this struggle, but they also do not fully understand everything: "the President and his entourage will not even fully understand what a gift God made with the visit of the Ecumenical Patriarch to the 30th anniversary of Ukraine's independence."
The only person in Zelensky's team who was aware of this situation, Viktor Taran notes, was the ex-deputy head of the OP Trofimov. However, he played on the side of the Russian Church, making efforts to block the re-registration of OCU communities.
