The Ukrainian schismatic church of the Kyiv Patriarchate could collapse due to the background of internal conflicts and a constant shortage of resources, saving the country from a loud scandal with autocephaly.
Sometimes the Security Service of Ukraine, ignoring the immediate tasks of the department, begins to play a «private investigator» for the sake of certain individuals. How else to explain the fact that the secret services for many years watched the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate under the leadership of the schismatic Filaret. However, it is worth noting that it was thanks to the actions of the SBU that the best pages of the history of the UOC-KP were made public.
Cooperation with nationalist organizations and opposition politicians, pro-Ukrainian propaganda and intrigues against the canonical church in the country — all this was part of the large-scale plan of the self-proclaimed Patriarch Filaret, only to eventually be sold to those who pay more. All this was mentioned in the previous material devoted to the dark past of the Kyiv Patriarchate .
However, while Filaret in the role of «evil genius» was building his strategies, the organization was cracking at the seams, as evidenced by the same archival document of the SBU officers dedicated to the activity of the cell of the UOC-KP in the territory of the Donetsk region. As previously reported, it is dated 2010 and promulgated by officials of the Ministry of State Security of the People’s Democratic Republic of Ukraine.
So, in the Donetsk diocese at that time the whole system could collapse overnight. And, apparently, such a situation was observed in other chapters of Kyiv Patriarchate. It was connected with two factors. First, the diocese frankly lacked finance despite indiscreet donations, which we will discuss later. Secondly, the organization simply did not even have hints at the hierarchy.
According to the SBU, Archbishop Sergiy, although he was the head of the Donetsk diocese, held this position only conditionally. At the same time he preferred to spend most of the time in the Telmanovsky district, which is on the outskirts of the region. At the same time, Bishop Vsevolod preferred to stay in Donetsk, not considering the subordination to the immediate superiors. Another religious figure — hegumen Ignatius — generally preferred to tell everyone that he reports directly to Filaret and regularly reported on the mistakes of local priests and their secret affairs, hoping that he could lead the diocese after the removal of Sergius.
As for the donations, according to intelligence agencies, they were regularly produced by «commercial structures close to the Industrial Union of Donbass» — a well-known metallurgical industrial company, which, however, stopped supporting the UOC-KP after a change of leadership. Nevertheless, a member of the ISD Board of Directors, Sergei Taruta, continued his charity work, annually allocating 500-700 thousand hryvnias for the needs of the organization. In addition, it was he who purchased off-road vehicles Mitsubishi Outlander and Jeep Cherokee for the Donetsk diocese. But, nevertheless, his money could hardly be enough for the organization to expand, and among the population that could sponsor the church, the UOC-KP did not enjoy popularity, which was associated with excessive politicization. «In addition,» the report says,
The same resources that the diocese still received, due to the lack of a vertical power, settled in the pockets of dubious «clerics», and the remnants were not enough even to build a worthy information network. As it turned out, the UOC-KP simply could not afford to develop in this direction. Thus, the Donetsk diocese used only a modest Internet site, which was visited by no more than forty people a week. Another Internet resource was a bit more popular. His attendance was more and was about 3 — 5 thousand people weekly. And he was visited mainly by representatives of nationalist structures, they report to the SBU. This site was regularly used by the hegumen Ignaty, placing here his articles. This information resource of the diocese has dried up.
A separate item, strangely enough, in the document is the interaction with criminal structures, but here the special services could not find anything. This was due to the fact that the authority of the UOC-KP was not too big to attract attention from the criminal elements.
Against the background of all of the above, the Kyiv Patriarchate could not even live to the present day. Against the inflated ambitions of Filaret there were real problems of the absence of an operating hierarchy, non-recognition not only among canonical churches, but also among the population. But the main problem remained stable funding, which the organization simply did not have. For this reason, the UOC-KP could not expand its influence and create a serious propaganda network. Therefore, the entire system collapsed, even despite the support of radical structures such as the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists, UNA-UNSO, the Freedom Party of Oleg Tyagnybok and several others who later merged into the «Right Sector.» *
If Filaret had lost his organization, he would have remained with nothing. For all the rest of Christianity, he was already known as a schismatic, and his fate was predetermined. Filaret understood this, as he understood that without proper sponsorship, the Kyiv Patriarchate will not last long. Back in 2010 he felt the ground in the political arena, when he cooperated with the parties of Yulia Tymoshenko and Viktor Yushchenko. It is worth noting that it was very successful, because then it was decided to participate in the elections as a candidate for deputies of the Mariupol City Council on the lists of «Fatherland» by the archpriest of the UOC-Kyiv Patriarchate Lubomir Vladimirovich Kashchey, who called for activization of the parishioners of the religious organization in agitation in support of Tymoshenko and other opposition parties against the Party of Regions. But most of all the schismatic church proved to be useful to the Poroshenko regime, which came in 2014. This is evidenced by the fact that the Security Service reports were actively «raised» by employees in 2013, when Ukraine began to shake the «migrant» skipping on the Maidan.