Those who refuse to cooperate—those who insist that the Gospel cannot be conscripted—are discovering that the Russian state has no patience for religious dissent.
It prosecutes it, fines it, beats it, shaves it, and, when necessary, invents new legal theories to crush it.
The cases documented by “Forum 18” (on which recent report this article is based) form a chilling pattern: priests, monks, pastors, and religious journalists punished for the simple act of applying their faith to the war.
The most brutal example is Hieromonk Iona Sigida, a 34-year-old independent Orthodox priest from Krasnodar Region. His “crime” appears to be a series of articles on his parish website reflecting on Soviet holidays—including Victory Day—through a theological lens. For this, he now faces four administrative cases and two criminal investigations.
The state has not specified which passages it found offensive. It rarely does. Instead, it relies on elastic accusations such as “overt disrespect for society” and “discreditation” of the Armed Forces—charges so vague they can be stretched to fit any inconvenient thought.
When National Guard troops arrested Hieromonk Iona in November, he later reported that officers forcibly shaved his hair and beard, beat him, and shocked him with a stun gun. He is now under house arrest, barred from leading worship—a punishment that strikes at the heart of his vocation.
Hieromonk Iona is not an anomaly. Since the invasion of Ukraine, other religious leaders have been imprisoned or fined on criminal charges for opposing the war on religious grounds. Others have fled Russia only to find themselves placed on the Federal Wanted List.
Among them is Buddhist leader Ilya Vasilyev, whose retrial began in December after his earlier conviction for “false information” about the military was overturned on technical grounds. His case, too, hinges on the idea that religiously motivated criticism of the war constitutes “hatred” toward a social group.
Then there is Protestant pastor Nikolay Romanyuk, sentenced to four years in a prison colony for a 2022 sermon livestreamed on YouTube. His offence was calling believers to “resist evil.” The state reinterpreted this as “public calls to obstruct” government security functions.
And in exile, Orthodox journalist Kseniya Luchenko now faces charges of spreading “knowingly false information” about the army “for reasons of ideological or religious hatred.” Her real offence was refusing to repeat the state’s theology of war.
Saint Petersburg has become a laboratory for the criminalisation of religious dissent. In 2025, a court fined Father Grigory Okhanov for interviews in which he condemned the invasion and the Moscow Patriarchate’s complicity. Once, he told TV2, he was “a convinced Putinist.” But after witnessing the violence in Ukraine, he concluded that “everything is based on lies,” and that as an Orthodox Christian, he could not accept it.
His theological critique—that a “defensive war” cannot be waged on foreign soil, that blessing soldiers to kill is “disgusting,” that the rhetoric of “Satanism” is morally inverted—was enough for Judge Anna Volgina to declare that he had “undermined trust” in the Armed Forces.
Prosecutors even revived statements he made years earlier, circumventing the 90-day statute of limitations by claiming the “offence” only occurred when a layperson watched the interview in the prosecutor’s office. As the Orthodox initiative “Peace to All” observed, the state now “produces” violations simply by deciding to notice them.
Another Saint Petersburg cleric, Archbishop Grigory Mikhnov‑Vaytenko, was fined for calling the invasion “unmotivated, aggressive armed actions” and warning that Russia faced a “moral defeat.” His case has bounced between courts on technicalities. Still, the substance remains: a priest who refuses to bless the war is treated as a threat to national security.
The Archbishop leads the Apostolic Orthodox Church, founded by the dissident priest Gleb Yakunin—a lineage of conscience the state has long sought to suppress. In 2024, the Justice Ministry labelled him a “foreign agent,” a modern echo of Soviet-era tactics.
What unites these cases is not political activism but religious integrity. These clergy are not calling for revolution. They are not organising protests. They are doing what clergy have always done: interpreting events through the lens of faith, warning against moral corruption, and refusing to bless violence.
This is precisely what the Kremlin cannot tolerate. The state has fused its legitimacy with a militarised, pseudo-Orthodox narrative in which the war is holy, the army is sacred, and dissent is heresy. Any priest who breaks that spell—even gently, even pastorally—becomes dangerous.
As “Peace to All” put it, “even open and peaceful statements made by a clergyman within the scope of his ministry and pastoral responsibility can become the target of prosecution.”
Russia’s war in Ukraine has produced countless tragedies. Among them is this quieter, slower violence: the persecution of clergy whose only weapon is conscience. These priests refuse to bless the war. And for that, the state has declared war on them.