Baumeister: Mobilization of priests is Ukraine's know-how

Andriy Baumeister. Photo: a screenshot of the YouTube channel Politeka Online

The forced mobilization of Orthodox clergy to the front is an egregious fact, with no parallel in the history of 20th-century warfare, said philosopher and publicist Andriy Baumeister on the air of the YouTube channel Politeka Online.

"We have our own know-how. Here is one of them: mobilizing Orthodox priests to the front to fight. This is Ukraine’s know-how. No one did this – not in the First World War, nor in the Second, regardless of which side the forces were on,” the philosopher said.

According to him, he regularly sees evidence of this on social media.

"I constantly see requests for help or descriptions of these incidents. They began to place the UOC virtually outside the law, and then, despite the fact that these are priests who, by the very nature of their calling, should not be holding assault rifles, they are being mobilized to the front," Baumeister said.

He stressed that this was “just one of the egregious facts,” adding: "I think we can look for precedents in history, but we won’t find any."

Against this backdrop, the philosopher believes, discussions about the state of Ukrainian democracy lose their meaning.

“Democracy is definitely not something we should be talking about. Civil society is not something we should be talking about. Public opinion leaders have effectively turned – I’m talking about those inside the country – into propaganda resources for the authorities,” he said.

Earlier, the UOJ reported that men in balaclavas abducted a UOC priest in Lutsk.

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