RUSSIA-UKRAINE Ionafan, the Russian metropolitan exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners

Arrested in August 2023, the 75-year-old leader of the Tulčin eparchy is a symbolic figure of the religious face of the ongoing conflict. For him, Patriarch Kirill would intervene directly by involving the Vatican in the negotiations. Many Russian propagandists now claim that he will become the new head of the Ukrainian Patriarchal Church, replacing the subservient Onufrykh.

kyiv () – The exchange of Metropolitan Ionafan (Eletskikh) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Upz, imprisoned for supporting Moscow’s war, with a group of Ukrainian prisoners returned by Moscow to Kiev has caused a sensation in recent days. The clerical hierarch was considered one of the main “traitors and Russian agents” in Ukraine, and his arrest was presented as a victory with the “internal enemy”, while on the Russian side it was a demonstration of the “anti-religious persecution of the Nazi regime” in kyiv, and his release now points to victory. Thus, many Russian propagandists now claim that Ionafan will become the new head of the Ukrainian Patriarchal Church, replacing the subservient Metropolitan Onufrykh (Berezovsky).

For Moscow, the person of the freed metropolitan represents the religious motivation of the entire conflict, “loyalty to canonical Orthodoxy” rather than to separatist and autocephalous Orthodoxy, and redeems all Orthodox priests and bishops in Ukraine who “resist the evil one,” as repeated by Russian newspapers. Ionafan is said to have actually refused to be included in the prisoner exchange group, but was released by a direct intervention of Moscow Patriarch Kirill, supported by a similar request from Pope Francis to the Ukrainian authorities. The Ukrainian version instead claims that the Metropolitan himself spontaneously asked to be exchanged, without confirming Kirill’s great “political influence” with the support of the Vatican.

Independent sources confirm that Pope Francis mentioned Ionafan’s name during his recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his adviser Andrej Ermak on the occasion of the Italian G7 in Borgo Egnazia. There is no official confirmation of this, but such mediation cannot be ruled out, which could only have taken place at the request of Patriarch Kirill, who would have thus demonstrated an effective capacity to influence religious-military events.

The Metropolitan’s lawyer recalls that Ionafan, arrested in August 2023 with a five-year sentence, had suffered a heart attack in prison last March, and the extension of his detention “would have been a de facto death sentence.” The accusation against him concerned pro-Russian leaflets distributed from the Tulčin eparchy in the Vinnitsa region in central Ukraine, and his persistent preaching in support of the dependence of the Upz Church on the Moscow Patriarchate.

Ionafan, 75, had been the head of the eparchy since 2006 and is a prominent figure in Ukrainian Orthodoxy. A composer of liturgical music and translator of liturgical and spiritual texts, he entered the Leningrad seminary in 1970, in the midst of the Soviet era, and became one of the leading experts on Orthodox singing, also coming into contact with avant-garde lay musicians. He made his monastic profession before Metropolitan Nikodim (Rotov), ​​the spiritual (and other) teacher of the current Patriarch Kirill, who later ordained him as a young bishop. In 1986 he was interrogated by the KGB about the dissemination of Aleksandr Solženitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago among seminarians, and for this he was expelled from Leningrad.

He was able to resume his ministry in kyiv, even participating in the restoration of some parts of the Lavra of the Caves in Kiev on the occasion of the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus’ in 1988, becoming a bishop the following year. He has thus travelled through all the passages of recent Russian and Ukrainian history and the religious revival of Orthodoxy, and one of the accusations against him was the composition, as late as 2015, of the Hymn of “Supplication for Russia”, in which he says: “Almighty and just God, protect Mother Russia, and unite us all in love for the native Fatherland! Be always invincible, Motherland, Holy Rus'”. Now Ionafan is in Russia as a “victorious martyr”, ready to lead the faithful in the ultimate test of the holy war.