The war began with the denial of our right to exist, - the head of the UGCC on the phenomenon of Putinism

The first hierarch told about this in an interview with Ivano-Frankivsk regional television.

"I realized that very dangerous processes were beginning long before the guns began to roar and we heard the whistle of Russian missiles over our heads," says His Beatitude Sviatoslav. "Once at a large interchurch forum, one of the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church uttered the following words to me: "You are not supposed to exist." This means that the war began with the denial of the right to exist, which initially took place at the ideological and propaganda level," the head of the UGCC said.

According to him, even then, all the bodies of the Russian state, including the church ones, were infected with lies, and they began to spread this lie to the whole world.

"They talked about our state and our people as "something", taking away our identity, saying that Ukraine and its people do not exist, but only territory, claiming that Ukrainians are not a nation, but adherents of some ideology. We were dehumanized, and it was a very clever manipulation," he said.

As His Beatitude Sviatoslav noted, our enemies wanted to talk about Ukraine without Ukraine. They pretended that there was no Ukrainian state, that this was a temporary phenomenon, a mistake of history. They claimed that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, that Ukrainians are such somewhat "heretical" Russians who need to be re-educated or destroyed.

"We ask about the reasons: where could such a denial of the rights to the existence of an entire nation, an entire culture, come from? Perhaps one day, sociologists and researchers of modern societies will study this, but we already see that Russian society and the Russian state are sick of old Soviet diseases (some would like to call them post-Soviet), which today have turned into a revanchist ideology, deeply genocidal in its essence.

I believe that the society that could give rise to the phenomenon of Putinism is mentally sick. And Ukraine is a great irritant for him because it is an example that it is possible to cure the diseases of post-Soviet society, to be free and to build a democratic state with an open type of society," the head of the UGCC emphasized.