KYIV – On March 3, Archbishop Klyment (Kushch) who heads the Crimean eparchy of the newly formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), went to the bus station in Symferopol to embark on a trip to visit a Ukrainian political prisoner in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don.
Instead, the high-ranking clergyman, who also heads the OCU’s mission to assist victims of human rights abuses and detainees, had his journey truncated at 11:45 a.m. in the peninsula’s capital, according to the OCU press service. It was 15 minutes before the bus’s scheduled departure for a destination where 20-year-old Ukrainian Pavlo Hryb is being held in a pre-trial detention center on what human rights groups say are trumped up charges of “terrorism.”
Russian-occupying authorities took the archbishop into custody. Ostensibly, it was because Archbishop Klyment had stolen religious items from the church – OCU’s only house of worship in Symferopol, where he serves – said his lawyer Mykola Polozov. He was released after several hours without charges pressed and didn’t provide a statement to the occupying police force.
“The Great Fast [Lent] begins, and today we read the Gospel of mercy and compassion,” he said after his release through the OCU press service. “Now you have clearly seen who is merciful, and who boldly abhors all Christian norms. Therefore, we pray, keep the law of God and do our best to alleviate the suffering of our boys.”
This is only the beginning of Archbishop Klyment’s apparent persecution, his lawyer warned in a televised interview with Ukrainian Channel 4. “This is only the start,” Mr. Polozov said. “I don’t think this is the last onslaught on him. And he, of course, can’t feel safe anymore.”
“Although the Russian occupation regime stopped short of imprisoning the archbishop… this is a very dangerous new move in Russia’s persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and of Klyment himself,” the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group said in a March 4 statement. “It comes only weeks after Klyment was forced to appeal to the international community to prevent the effective destruction of [his] Church, which first came under attack soon after Russia’s invasion and annexation.”
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Pavlo Hryb, 20, who is being held by Russian authorities for alleged terrorism – charges that rights groups say are trumped-up.
There were 44 registered parishes affiliated with the Kyiv Patriarchate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on the peninsula when Moscow invaded in February 2014, OCU spokesperson Archbishop Yevstratiy (Zoria) told The Ukrainian Weekly. Only nine OCU communities remain as of March 6 of this year.
The European Union and the U.S. have continuously extended sanctions on Russian entities and individuals for the takeover of the peninsula; this past week, the U.S. extended them for another year.
The EU is also mulling new restrictive measures over Russia’s attack on three Ukrainian navy vessels and subsequent capture of 24 seamen in the Black Sea last November.
According to a March 6 tweet by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reporter Rikard Jozwiak, the sanctions will be “formalized next week” on “eight people from Russia for detaining” the servicemen.
In addition, he said that sanctions against 163 Russian people and 44 entities “will also be prolonged by six months next week.”
Russian-occupying authorities have conducted a campaign of persecution against Crimean Tatars as well as ethnic Ukrainians on Ukraine’s territory of Crimea since the annexation.
It includes “discriminatory practices and human-rights violations and abuses, including torture, ill treatment, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detention,” a 2018 U.N report on Crimea stated while urging Russia to end the practices.
Ukraine says there are over 70 Ukrainian political prisoners incarcerated in Russian-run prisons.
Archbishop Klyment still intends to visit Mr. Hryb, his father Ihor Hryb told the UNIAN news agency. His son was only 19 when Russia’s KGB-successor agency, the FSB, abducted him on August 24, 2017, after he travelled to Belarus to meet a woman he thought he met online.
The younger Hryb is blind in one eye and “has only 15-20 percent vision in the other,” his father told Hromadske television channel on December 21. Because of “portal hypertension” that requires daily intake of medication and a special diet, his condition could become fatal, Ukrainian human rights ombudsman Liudmyla Denisova said on January 29, as cited by UNIAN.
Russian authorities had previously detained Archbishop Klyment on October 19, 2016, for one hour when he tried entering the Crimean peninsula from mainland Ukraine. The detention occurred “without an explanation or reason,” he told the Holos Krymu (Voice of Crimea) news agency.