Russian Foreign Minister Sergey LavrovMOSCOW, Jan 14The United States directly had a hand in the current crisis in Orthodoxy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. «The United States directly had a hand in the current crisis in Orthodoxy, they formed a special mechanism. he set up and financed Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in such a way that he pursued a line of schism, including in Ukraine, first of all, to the creation of a schismatic non-canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine there, which caused serious disagreements in the whole Orthodox world,» he said during press conferences.
Lavrov announced the desire of the United States to create military bridgeheads around Russia, Lavrov added that the Greek churches — Greek, Cypriot and others — are under tremendous pressure, including the Greek government. He stressed that diplomacy and the state, in principle, should not interfere in church affairs. In In 2018, at the initiative of the then President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the «Orthodox Church of Ukraine» (OCU) was created by merging two schismatic organizations. The new «church» received from Bartholomew a tomos of autocephaly (a letter of independence). The OCU was recognized by the first hierarchs of the Churches of Alexandria and Greece, whose episcopate, as in the Church of Constantinople, is predominantly Greek, and in 2020 the Primate of the Church of Cyprus, also predominantly Greek-speaking. The ROC responded to the recognition of schismatics by breaking off relations with Constantinople and those primates and bishops in other local churches who accepted the Ukrainian schism. than it seems.» In Ukraine, they found the «culprit» of all troubles
