A Call to Repentance

Journalist Gennady Dubovoy conducted an interview on the front lines of the war in Ukraine with “Fr. Viktor,” an Orthodox hieromonk ministering to soldiers of the Novorussia Armed Forces. Dubovoy states the conversation was recorded in May, before the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, and released only in late July. Translated by Mark Hackard.

***

“They are intentionally hastening the reign of Antichrist…” Our interlocutor is a veteran of the Afghan War and a former police officer; now he is a hieromonk. This is all that we managed to ask him, since like any monk, he considers speaking about himself unnecessary. “Why? The Lord knows everyone, and all whom He called into this world. From earth I come and into earth shall I depart. With limitless respect, the soldiers of “Motorola’s” legendary unit have glorified him as their “battle priest.” He was with the militia in Semenovka during the period of the most awful combat and fulfilled his clerical and warrior duty, standing prayer vigil. Under cover from ferocious mortar and howitzer fire, he would tell the fighters about the providential significance of what was taking place and the sacral meaning of monarchy. He explained that to utter words so habitual for the majority of combatants is to “console the demons and deprive oneself of angelic protection”

Once, when a mortar made its way onto the roof of a building where he was reading akathists dedicated to the Mother of God for the soldiers, remembering his Afghan experience, Fr. Victor slipped out through the window “like a fish” together with the commander of “Cedar’s” headquarters platoon. And he came to us in Semenovka for the soldier’s spiritual sustenance, so that they would know that “the soldier is also a monastic, but wages not an inner war with the spirits of evil, but an outer one.” This conversation occurred in the last days of May, long before the withdrawal of militia forces from Slavyansk. Fr. Victor requested that we not publish this interview “until a large plane crashes, after which everything will change, and the war will become unlike any previous one.” The plane crashed, and everything is rapidly changing…

***

The political, economic, socio-cultural reasons for this and any other war are always secondary; the main cause is the spiritual dimension. What is the central, deep, spiritual cause of this war?

The words of the Apostle Paul to the Ephesians: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” This concerns any war. The visible, material causes of war explain nothing; this is a ruse of dark forces. A true warrior always fights against demons and is the opponent of demonic powers. We fight with prayer and the Word of God. At the present time, these forces have gathered around Slavyansk, for this is the spiritual center of Novorussia, and the Svyatogorsky Monastery is one of the bulwarks of Orthodoxy. Terrible trials await all those who defend Slavyansk and other cities, all the protectors of the Orthodox faith. However, these tests will be of benefit to our Orthodox army and make it spiritually stronger. As the faithful Prince St. Aleksandr Nevsky said, “Not in power is God, but in truth.” God’s truth is with us, and victory will be ours.

Terrible ordeals are those things permitted by The Lord. We will fall back and withdraw from the cities we defend. We will withdraw to return as different men made pure in sorrow. As gold is tested in the furnace and is cleansed of alloys, so The Lord tests our purity.

Here, after all, among the militiamen there are those who are deceived, professing faith in Scandinavian gods and other such nonsense. When it will seem that all is lost, the enemy unconquerable and that there is no help from on high, the darkness of despair of those who call upon Christ the Savior in repentance will be transfigured into understanding and unshakeable faith. The rest will remain outside in the darkness of godless insanity, and this will be their choice – one with no justification, for the truth of this war will be revealed to everyone: our warriors, our enemies, and the lukewarm Philistines. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear will comprehend who is committing mass murder and why. The revelation will horrify many, and they will try and not see, not hear, and not understand, so terrible will be this calling us to senses. They will attempt as before to lie to themselves, explain events by only ideological and political causes, and reduce everything to the material, but these “explanations” will be self-incriminating, and it will be clear to all: these are lies, and we know who the father of lies is…

Is that true? What is the deeper, spiritual and eschatological meaning of namely this war?

The establishment of planetary Satanic rule. What’s occurring here is the very beginning of a global war. Not for resources or territory, that’s secondary. This is a war for the destruction of true Christianity, Orthodoxy. The worldview of the wealthiest men who own almost all the material goods in the world is Satanism. Having summoned the elements of the First and Second World Wars and a Third Information War, and having laid hundreds of millions of the slain at the altar of their father, Satan, they have initiated the Fourth World War. They are intentionally hastening the reign of Antichrist – an order offensive to God, in which man is not the image and likeness of the Creator of worlds visible and invisible, but a biomass programmed through information and directed through virtual bank digits, subject at any moment to annihilation.

The spirits of malice will fashion many wiles so that their subordinate “masters of the world” will begin a mass slaughter. Planes that no one shot down will crash, the dead will call their relatives as if still alive; there will be those armed to the teeth who are defenseless, and the unarmed will become more terrible than armies…Many consider that the punitive forces are shooting at the peaceful population from a safe distance due only to military-political reasoning. No. The lower-level executioners have been so inspired, believing that at any price – killing fellow Ukrainians – they must preserve the country’s unity. And those politicians who give the killers their orders understand what they are doing: they are bringing forth a sacrifice. Just as Hitler did. And as he was, today’s hidden rulers are racists. The roots of racism are occultism and Satanism. The possessed Fuhrer didn’t just destroy a population that was inadequate from his point of view. With full comprehension, like a pagan shaman, he made mass sacrifices to the demonic hordes, appeasing them with blood in exchange for a promise of power over the world.

The madmen who prostrate themselves before the golden calf and fancy themselves the rulers of this world are doing the same. They, the “chosen,” are cleansing the world of “excess” “sub-humans.”  And the one thing that genuinely blocks their satanic plans is the Orthodox Church, and the protector of the Orthodox faith is Russia. Our enemies strive to crush them by fracturing the greater Russian world to which Ukraine belongs, turning the latter into a Nazi platform, a launch pad for a new world war in which it is planned to “purify the planet of excess biomass” and deliver so many victims to the dark powers that there might not be any defenders of a united Ukraine physically remaining.

‘History,” noted one writer, ‘is the fulfillment of the people’s secret desires suspended in time. Are these really the secret desires of the majority of the people, and not only the Ukrainian people – ridding ourselves of life with Christ for the sake of all-permissibility in sin, that bestial state that today is imposed in the form of European, liberal “values?”

God allows war for the sake of calling us to our senses. Now such a time has arrived that many high priests have fallen from truth into apostasy, in the words of John of Kronstadt, “even the elect will be deceived.” And so they are planning to call a new Ecumenical Council – an Eighth. Adversaries of the Orthodox Church and Russia have long been preparing such a council and dream of imposing ecumenism on us, this heresy of heresies which today is shooting at us from artillery, killing women, children and the elderly. But the holy fathers testified that there will be no Eighth Council. And war reminds us: think things over. “There are no atheists in a foxhole.” People should realize what they are actually desiring, realize how much darkness and evil is in their souls – and repent. Return to the Heavenly Father as the prodigal son – who was dead and came to life, who once was lost and then was found.