The first time I was invited to lunch by Archpriest Andrey Kordochkin, we feasted on his wife Alexandra’s homemade chicken pie. We enjoyed an equally delicious fish pie next time, but we were sitting around a table more than 1,700 kilometers away. The only hint of the cleric’s former home was a little side plate of Serrano ham.
When we first met, Kordochkin was the dean of the gold domed Orthodox cathedral of St. Mary Magdalene in Madrid. The second time, he picked me up at a rainswept train station in North Rhine-Westphalia in western Germany. In Spain, he wore a black cassock. In the small German town where he now lives, he was dressed in an emerald, green hoodie which stood out against the gray sky.
Forced out of his job because of his opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine, he serves today in a church across the border in the Netherlands. He made no secret of his antipathy to his former bosses in the Moscow Patriarchate, once comparing Patriarch Kirill’s approach to his clergy and his flock to that of a governor running a maximum-security prison. The Russian Orthodox Church mirrors President Vladimir Putin’s own power vertical, he says. “It’s a structure based on subservience and the idea that I’m the boss and you are an idiot.”
A Canonical Refugee
Days after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kordochkin co-authored a letter to the Russian authorities calling for an end to the war. It was signed by nearly 300 of his fellow priests and scholars both inside and outside Russia. “We would hope that our brothers and sisters in Ukraine will understand this as an expression of our solidarity,” he wrote, “because, as the Apostle Paul said, when one part of the body feels pain, the whole body of the church suffers.” He has repeatedly denounced the war in Russia’s exiled opposition media. One of his articles was illustrated with a picture of Stalin’s smoking pipe dangling from a chain in the place of an incense burner.
Initially suspended, Kordochkin had to leave the Madrid parish that he had carefully nurtured over two decades. He decided to step down before he was pushed, after he was denounced by people attending the Divine Liturgy in his church. They were not among his regular parishioners, and he suspects that those who informed on him could have ties to Russia’s security forces.
Kordochkin moved to Germany and was awarded a fellowship at the University of Göttingen where he is currently researching theological justifications for Putin’s land grab in Ukraine. At the same time, he was appointed a part-time priest in the Dutch city of Tilburg, under the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. He admits it felt strange at first to move to another Orthodox jurisdiction, but this war has produced canonical refugees as well as political ones.
Supporting Priests Inside Russia
Together with a fellow Russian cleric based in Germany, a musician, and a journalist, Kordochkin founded a group called Mir Vsem (“Peace Unto All”). It supports priests inside Russia who have lost their livelihoods for criticizing the war, signing anti-war appeals, or refusing to collect money for the army. Many are horrified by the direction their Church has taken but they can’t afford to lose their jobs, especially if they lack transferable skills, and have large families to support. Some are reluctant to abandon their parishioners. All of them know they could be defrocked at the stroke of a pen, and a few have even been jailed for dissent.
This November, Father Iona Sigida from the Krasnodar region of southern Russia, was dragged out of his church by armed men, beaten, shocked with a stun gun, and forcibly shaved. The hieromonk (a priest who is also a monk) is charged with the “rehabilitation of Nazism” and with disrespecting the “military glory” of the Fatherland. If convicted, he faces five years behind bars.
A protestant pastor, Nikolay Romanyuk from the Moscow region, has just started a four-year sentence at a penal colony for an anti-war sermon he gave in September 2022. He told his flock that they were forbidden from fighting in wars. “Whether you are offered—drugs or alcohol or handed call-up papers, it is the same sin and … the same Satan,” he said. Such talk went down badly with the authorities at a time when Russian generals were running out of cannon fodder. The patriarch’s spokesman, Vladimir Legoyda, told a Russian news agency that discipline in the Church is essential. “Perhaps not everyone knows this but a priest, just like a soldier, takes an oath. And if he deviates from it, prohibition is inevitable,” he said.
Archpriest Vadim Perminov served his congregation in Western Siberia for nearly three decades. But in early July, he was banned from celebrating the liturgy and stripped of the right to wear a cross. He had been punished for refusing to read the patriarch’s “Victory of Holy Russia” prayer which, he said, went against his conscience. Somebody tipped off the authorities.
Perminov was summoned to a meeting in which his bishop bombarded him with questions about why his parents were not churchgoers, why he had not served in the army, and why a box containing sacred relics on the altar of his church was facing north-south instead of east-west. Finally, the bishop asked why Perminov did not read the victory prayer. He concluded it was because his subordinate backed same-sex marriages. “It was strange, to put it mildly,” said the archpriest. “I just held my tongue.”
Battling “the Corrupt West”
Interrogations such as these have become routine. The Kremlin and the Church have framed the war as an existential battle against sexual deviance and a corrupt West. On the first Forgiveness Sunday of the war, the patriarch blamed Europe’s obsession with gay pride parades for provoking the conflict. Perminov is now working as a taxi driver in the Novosibirsk region. Some banned priests have resorted to online ministry.
Earlier this year, I spoke to an anti-war priest in a town far from Moscow who has officiated dozens of funerals for Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine. He often finds it difficult talking to bereaved relatives and restricts himself to praying and singing. If a parishioner, a friend, or a relative has died, he told me, he would try to say something heartfelt and meaningful. But in 95 percent of soldiers’ burials, the priest has never met the deceased nor those mourning him.
“You know the saying about the dead,” he said. “You should either say good things or nothing but the truth. Well, I can’t often say anything good. And I can’t tell the truth either because it would offend the dead man’s family to say he died in an unprovoked and unjust war.” He is uncomfortably aware that some of the fallen soldiers may have committed atrocities in Ukraine, and some have hinted as much in confession.
In early December, 90 representatives met in Helsinki for the Conference of European Churches where they declared that Patriarch Kirill’s concept of a “Holy War” and the Kremlin’s Russkiy Mir (“Russian World”) ideology were heresy. It was the first time an international church gathering formally condemned the doctrine, which fuels Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Orthodox canon law has always underlined the spiritual gravity of taking life on the battlefield. Basil the Great, one of the Church’s most revered saints and the father of Eastern monasticism, recommended that those who kill in war should abstain from taking communion for three years.
But the anti-war priest I spoke to on an anonymous basis for a radio documentary told me of an acquaintance who is currently serving on the frontline as a military chaplain. “When I hear him say that there’s nothing more beautiful than a bomber plane dropping weapons, it really amazes me to the core that he as a Christian, let alone a priest, can find beauty in death,” he said. “For me, this is absolutely absurd.”
War Is Peace
Kordochkin agrees and has been trying to understand why so many Russians—including devout churchgoers—support the war. In an interview with a German democracy blog, he cited The Church in the Third Reich by Russian researcher Lyudmila Brovko, who argued that patriotic fervor in the 1930s weakened resistance to Nazism. “I see something similar in Russia today,” Kordochkin said. “Even educated people argue that if your country is at war, you must support it—anything else is treason.”
He finds inspiration in the Protestant Confessing Church, which rejected the Third Reich’s appropriation of Christianity. Though a minority, he noted, its stance was not in vain: It helped shape how German churches later spoke about guilt and responsibility. “The contexts aren’t the same,” Kordochkin said, “but in some ways the Russian Church—despite its limits—faces a similar situation, where voices of truth and faith are few and heavily suppressed.”
Kordochkin wants to amplify those voices, but in May 2025, Yana Lantratova, chair of the Duma’s Public and Religious Associations Committee, warned her fellow parliamentarians that European intelligence agencies were using exiled priests to corrupt the nation’s holy order. “Religion and faith have become integral to the special military operation—a pillar of morale, a source of strength, a shield against despair and evil.” When Ukrainian civilians are being murdered by drone attacks on an almost nightly basis, her words recall the doublespeak of the world’s best known dystopian novel, George Orwell’s 1984.
A few months later, Russia’s justice ministry began exerting heavy pressure on the group that supports anti-war clergy. Under Russian law, citizens can face up to five years in prison for cooperating with or donating to so-called “undesirable” organizations. “What could be ‘undesirable’ about making peace?” asked Father Valerian Dunin-Barkovsky, co-founder of Mir Vsem. It is hard to imagine anything more Orwellian.
Lucy Ash is IPQ’s On the Ground columnist. She is an award-winning presenter of radio and television documentaries and author of the book The Baton and the Cross about the Russian Orthodox Church.
