“This is an expected scenario,” said Fr Georgy Roy, who has lived in Lithuania with his family since March 2023 and learned of the ruling through opposition media.
Speaking to The Tablet on 27 December, he said a criminal case had opened against him a few months earlier. “My name is in the criminal search database in Russia and Belarus,” he said.
Fr Roy said the recent establishment of an exarchate in Lithuania of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople was significant because it offered Orthodox Belarusians a canonical alternative to the Russian Orthodoxy, prompting the authorities to pursue him.
“The very fact that there is a Belarusian community of the Ecumenical Patriarchate is an important message for the Belarusian society,” he said, noting the community’s strong support of social media.
“Of course, this extremely irritated and still irritates Belarusian ideologues. Meanwhile, the Belarusian Orthodox Church is a special case, because we are cursed during the sermons in their churches,” Fr Roy said. Before it was designated an “extremist source”, his Facebook page had 4,200 “friends” and several hundred more subscribers.
This fell to 3,600 after the ruling. “A lot of friends I deleted on my own,” Roy said. “This is really dangerous – 80 per cent of my Facebook friends are Belarusians. After 2020, many of them live outside Belarus and can read my page safely, but many remain in the country. They are very vulnerable.”
He added that the “extremist” designation extends beyond social media in Belarusian law. “My photos, videos of my authorship or participation, books and magazines that mention my name are banned and provide grounds for fines and prosecution for extremism … I have become He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” he said, noting a parallel with the J.K. Rowling villain.