THE senior Russian Orthodox bishop who allegedly the target of a murder plot by two ethnic Ukrainian laymen has asked to meet the men who currently await trial (News, 14 March).
The request by Metropolitan Tikhon (Shevkunov) of Simferopol-Crimea, who is said to be a close associate of President Putin, was reported last week by a presenter on Russia’s Rossiya-1 television channel, who said that the detainees, Nikita Ivankovich and Denis Popovich, had “promised to consider it”.
A Russian Orthodox priest ministering in Spain, Archpriest Andrei Kordochkin, urged caution, however. He said that the report could be intended to boost the image of the Metropolitan, while also “dehumanising Ukrainians” as Russia’s “collective enemy”.
“It’s being said that Ukraine is a terrorist state, preparing an assassination attempt on Putin’s spiritual mentor,” Archpriest Kordochkin, who ministers in Spain for the Ecumenical Patriarchate, told the Russian-language Radio Liberty.
“If the Metropolitan looks like the potential victim of a terrorist attack, this will contribute to his glorification. . . Considering that the detainees confessed quite rapidly, and that Russian courts have virtually no capacity to issue acquittals, there’s no reason to expect a good outcome.”
News of the arrest of Mr Popovich and Mr Ivankovich was released on 28 February, as the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, met the US President, Donald Trump.
Russia’s RSB security police had circulated a video of both men confessing to having planned to kill Metropolitan Tikhon at the behest of Ukrainian Intelligence, with a home-made explosive device, during a visit to the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow.
The arrests were announced a day after Metropolitan Tikhon, a former filmmaker and award-winning author, was elected to Russia’s Union of Writers in a ceremony, addressed by Putin, who had bestowed him state honours upon him in 2022 and 2024.
No mention of the conspiracy has been made on the website of the Russian Orthodox Simferopol-Crimea diocese, to which the Metropolitan was reassigned from the northern Pskov diocese in October 2023, nine years after the Ukrainian peninsula’s annexation by Moscow.
Metropolitan Tikhon’s latest book, Death of an Empire, outlines the case for Russia’s imperial resurgence and is widely thought to have enhanced his position as a possible successor to Patriarch Kirill.
A previous book, Unholy Saints, published in 2012, sold 2.5 million copies, making it Russia’s bestselling work since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Reports of the Metropolitan’s possible meeting with Mr Ivankovich and Mr Popovich, both in their twenties, came as another Russian Orthodox priest now serving with the Ecumenical Patriarchate told a German newspaper that his Church’s leaders had joined state prosecutors in pursuing critics of the Ukraine war.
“The Church has merged into one with the State — Christians who disagree with Patriarch Kirill and the Russian World ideology now propagated instead of the gospel are persecuted,” the priest, the Revd Alexei Uminsky, told the Catholic weekly newspaper Die Tagespost last week. He was unfrocked and dismissed from his Moscow parish in January 2024 for refusing to recite an official prayer for Russia’s victory (News, 19 January 2024).
“Many Christians are also in Russian prisons, and the Church has forgotten them all, dissociating itself because they were convicted for their anti-war stance,” he said.
