Putin fires cleric, scientist for anti-war views
Vladimir Putin has fired the deputy head of the Russian Orthodox Church and arrested a missile scientist in a crackdown on anti-war sentiment.
The Russian Synod said that Metropolitan Hilarion had been sent to Budapest, an outlying diocese, and “shall be... relieved of his duties as chairman of the Department for External Church Relations, a permanent member of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church.”
Meanwhile, police in Moscow this week arrested Col. Andrey Grudzinsky, who works at the Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences, and charged him with fraud.
It is the latest in a purge of anti-war Russian officials and academics who have expressed negative views over the war in Ukraine.
In May, the 55-year-old Metropolitan Hilarion led a delegation to a meeting of global orthodox churches in Cyprus.
There, instead of pushing the pro-war views of his boss Patriarch Kirill, he signed a declaration condemning the war.
The Russian Orthodox Church is considered a pliant tool of the Russian state and an important ally of Putin, who is close to Patriarch Kirill and makes a show of his own piousness.
Elisabeth Braw, a resident fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said that the dismissal of the “noted theologian and accomplished composer” was important.
“His dismissal signals that Putin can no longer tolerate even the slightest independent thinking in his vicinity,” she wrote in an article for the Center for European Policy Analysis, a U.S. thinktank.
“When authoritarian regimes reach this stage of decay, they usually can't survive — although the period between visible rot and collapse can be messy and painful.”
It also appears to be part of a wider crackdown on public officials for treason and corruption that critics of the Kremlin have said is driven by paranoia.
One of the arrested academics was 54-year-old Dmitry Kolker, head of the Novosibirsk State University's quantum optical technologies laboratory.
Last week, police took him from a hospital in the Siberian city, where he had been receiving cancer treatment, to Moscow, where he died a few days later.