Ex-UOC cleric who defected to OCU ends up in Ethiopian Church
A religious scholar tells of fate of Volodymyr Mahlena, a former UOC priest in Donbas who left for the OCU.
Religious scholar Nikolai Mitrokhin said on Facebook that former UOC priest Volodymyr Mahlena, who joined the OCU, is now in Novi Sad, Serbia, where he has become a cleric of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
According to Mitrokhin, he saw Mahlena's comment on someone else's blog and looked at his page. It is written in Russian. On it, as the religious scholar writes, there are many texts with warm memories of the UOC and the Ukrainian Exarchate of the ROC. Mitrokhin found no mentions of the OCU on the page. "I don't know what happened there," he wrote.
Earlier, the UOJ reported that Mahlena joined the OCU against the decision of his parish. On January 21, 2019, at a parish meeting, the church community of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God in the village of Vesele, Starobilsk district, supported the UOC. The faithful refused to follow their rector. After defecting to the OCU, he was left without a parish and then served online.
Later, former UOC Metropolitan Oleksandr (Drabinko) assigned Mahlena a new parish. It was the Church of the Protection of the Most Holy Theotokos in Starobilsk. Soon, the OCU cleric canceled services at two parishes, stating that he and the community had decided to suspend services in Starobilsk and the village of Vesele "indefinitely".
Mitrokhin said that, not finding a sufficient flock in the Luhansk region, Mahlena moved to Kyiv. There, before the war, he gave interviews and took part in initiatives for the "unification of churches". Mahlena never obtained a parish of his own, and with the start of the full-scale war, as Mitrokhin writes, he disappeared from the public sphere.
