What Intimidation of the Orthodox looks like in Ukraine?

Two curious videos have gone viral in Ukraine, showing nationalists protesting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the omophorion of the Moscow Patriarchate…

It needs to be understood that the main aspect of the Ukrainian nationalist ideology is the severance of any link with Russia. Ukrainians are a rather new nation, created out of a regional branch of the Russian people, and this fact compels the Ukrainian nationalists to embark on a programme of forced derussification in order to assert their place under the Sun. One such area concerns the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is perhaps the least Russian of what could be termed “the Russian element”, that is the target of Ukrainian nationalism. In practice, the Church only has a spiritual link to Russia, and it services many rural communities which tend to be culturally and linguistically Ukrainian rather than Russian. What irks the nationalists is the link to Russia because it causes the Church to be above the nation. They want a nationalist Church, which would serve to promote Ukrainian nationalism.

Since the nineties, several organisations without international recognition have formed out of this nationalist urge, and they were recently been unified into with the help of the Ukrainian state, the Ecumenical Patriarch, and likely the United States in the background, into a new structure called “the Orthodox Church in Ukraine“. This gave a new impetus to Ukrainian nationalist orcs to protest and intimidate the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

The first video I was able to give English subtitles. It features father Vyacheslav Yakovenko being protested by what looks like the Civic Corpus of the neo-nazi Azov battalion. This wasn’t father Vyacheslav’s first brush with the nationalists. The Svoboda party protested the building of his church.

The second video is slightly older but features a group of nationalist orcs trying to enter a church in Vinnytsia. The nationalists from the Right Sector are blocked by parishioners which urge the former to recite the Symbol of the Faith, and the Lord’s Prayer, which the nationalists appear unable to do.

I wasn’t able to give the above video subtitles because it is the property of News Front, and youtube wouldn’t allow me to do a repost. It nevertheless shows clearly that the nationalist orcs are more interested in control than faith.