Busfication of the Clergy: An Ordinary Genocide of the Orthodox
The video showing masked individuals throwing a priest into a bus by his arms and legs shocked many: we witnessed such treatment of a clergyman for the first time. And although the count of mobilized pastors has long been in the hundreds, few people stopped to think that their "mobilization" often takes place in exactly this way. Other mobilized individuals write about the same thing on social media — about priests bearing signs of beatings whom they saw at military recruitment offices. But until you see it with your own eyes, it is hard to believe that clergy can be treated in such a manner.
The head of the State Service for Ethnational Policy and Freedom of Conscience (GESS) Viktor Yelensky recently acknowledged that the authorities are aware that canon law forbids a priest from taking up arms. His agency grants deferments to virtually anyone: Catholics, Jews, Muslims, even pagans. But not to clergy of the UOC. The reason is that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church ignores the law on forced renaming to "the ROC in Ukraine" and refuses to call itself the Russian Church.
In other words, after being "busficated," a UOC priest faces two paths: take up arms and be defrocked — or refuse and, in all likelihood, lose his life.
At the same time, the authorities are saying in plain terms that everything can be changed at any moment: simply transfer to the OCU, and everything will be fine — deferment, public respect, and state loyalty.
What else can this be called, if not discrimination on religious grounds? Nothing else — it is precisely discrimination, and discrimination of the purest kind.
Yet Yelensky, together with the court clergymen from the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations (AUCCRO), regularly lie to Western partners that Ukraine enjoys an unprecedented freedom of faith.
It appears that the authorities are carrying out a busfication of the clergy within the UOC, and a busfication of conscience within the AUCCRO. Meanwhile, the number of priests abducted by manhunters keeps growing, as does the number of orphaned parishes.
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