Lining a road leading to a Russian Orthodox church in Slovyansk, Ukraine, are the graves of pro-Russian fighters who died fighting Ukrainian government troops.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times
SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — On an overcast day in April, staff members at the municipal museum in this eastern Ukrainian town noticed strange goings-on next door at a cultural center run by the Ukrainian arm of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Groups of burly men nobody recognized entered the building, known as Villa Maria, carrying big canvas bags and wooden boxes. “We didn’t know who they were or what they were doing,” recalled Valery Stupko, a museum employee.
The next morning, he said, heavily armed masked men emerged from the same church cultural center and made their way on foot through back alleys to Slovyansk’s main police station. Within minutes, they had seized the police station and helped ignite what became a brush fire of assaults by pro-Russian rebels on Ukrainian security and government buildings across the east of the country.
The Russian Orthodox Church, like the Kremlin, has strenuously denied any role in stirring up or aiding separatist turmoil in Ukraine. But as Slovyansk and other towns seized by pro-Russian rebels have fallen over the summer to a since-stalled Ukrainian government offensive in the east, evidence has begun to accumulate of close ties between the church, or at least individual Orthodox priests, and the pro-Russian cause.
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Archimandrite Savva, a Ukrainian Orthodox priest, fled after separatists wanted him dead.CreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times
“They were working hand in hand,” said Victor Butko, the pro-Ukrainian editor of a small newspaper here shut down by the rebels during their nearly three-month occupation of the town. He said priests at an Orthodox church in the center of town often blessed the rebel fighters and let them store ammunition on church grounds.
Since they began their drive to grab chunks of territory back in April, pro-Russian insurgents have repeatedly shifted their political agenda, undecided over whether they want eastern Ukraine to become part of Russia, an independent country or an autonomous region of Ukraine in a loose federal state.
Throughout, however, leaders have declared themselves bearers of the banner of “Holy Rus,” both a theological concept akin to the Kingdom of Heaven and a reference to a state in the Middle Ages that comprised the territory of modern Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia.
