MOSCOW (AP) – Russian riot police stormed a monastery on Tuesday to arrest a rebel monk who has punished the Kremlin and the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church and denied the existence of the coronavirus.
In the nightly confrontation, police clashed with the priest’s supporters at the Sredneuralsk monastery on the outskirts of Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountains.
The monk, Father Sergiy, was quickly transferred to Moscow, where a court approved his arrest. Authorities accused him of inciting suicide actions through sermons urging believers to “die for Russia.” He denied the allegations.
Russia’s main investigative committee, the Investigative Committee, said Father Sergiy also faces other criminal charges related to his alleged arbitrary action to take control of the monastery.
When the virus arrived in Russia earlier this year, the 65-year-old monk denied its existence and denounced the government’s efforts to curb the pandemic as “Satan’s electronic camp.” He described the vaccines being developed against COVID-19 as part of a global plot to control the masses using chips.
The monk, who has urged supporters to disobey government closure measures, had entered the monastery near Ekaterinburg which he founded years ago. Dozens of burly volunteers, including veterans of the separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, helped enforce its rules as the prioress and several nuns left.
The monk punished Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “traitor to the fatherland” who served a satanic “world government.” He also denounced the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, and other first-rate clerics as “heirs” who should be “expelled.”
The Russian Orthodox Church removed the sergeant’s father from the rank of abbot for violating monastic rules in July, but rejected the sentence and ignored the summons by police investigators. Faced with harsh resistance from hundreds of his supporters, church officials and local authorities seemed reluctant to evict him for months.
Hundreds of his followers continued to gather at the monastery hours after they took him away. Some cried.
Father Sergiy, who was born Nikolai Romanov, was a police officer during the Soviet era. After leaving the ranks of law enforcement, he was convicted of murder, robbery and assault and sentenced to 13 years in prison. He joined a church school after his release and became a monk.
The charismatic priest quickly became known for his efforts to open new churches and monasteries in the Urals. In his fiery sermons, he denounced alleged conspiracies by the “world government” and glorified Russia’s last tsar, Nicholas II, who was assassinated by the Bolsheviks along with his entire family in Yekaterinburg in 1918.
Father Sergiy has been the most visible and outspoken of the few ultra-conservative clergy who have challenged the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church. Observers have said the monk’s rebellious actions and his arrest now undermine the authority of Patriarch Kirill.
In another sign of internal tensions within the church, an ecclesiastical group on Tuesday ruled in the wear of a liberal-leaning theologian, Archdeacon Andrei Kurayev, who has been actively involved in his online expression. Kurayev lamented the verdict as a punishment for sharing opinions that were sometimes different from the official stance of the Moscow patriarchate.