Written by Nikolaus von Twickel<\/p>\n
Summary<\/strong><\/p>\n Despite dramatic warnings by the separatist leaders, no religious war has broken out anywhere in Ukraine during this year\u2019s anniversary of the \u201cBaptism of Rus\u201d. However, the Church dispute remains unsolved. Meanwhile, the promised economic recovery inside the \u201cPeople\u2019s Republics\u201d remains elusive as industrial production seems possible only on with masked Russian imports.<\/p>\n No escalation on the Baptism of Rus anniversary<\/strong><\/p>\n On July 28, Orthodox believers in both \u201cPeople\u2019s Republics\u201d and in the rest of Ukraine marked the Baptism of Rus anniversary. Despite earlier warnings by the separatist leaders, there were no signs of religious strife and peaceful processions were held in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kiev and many other cities. The \u201cBaptism of Rus\u201d, marks the day on which the Kievan Rus accepted Christianity 1030 years ago.<\/p>\n A week earlier, \u201cDNR\u201d leader Alexander Zakharchenko and \u201cLNR\u201d leader Leonid Pasechnik had said that Kiev\u2019s attempt to form a new Ukrainian Orthodox Church independent of the Russian Orthodox Church risks a religious war of unheard proportions.<\/p>\n But when the feast day came, Zakharchenko mentioned the dispute only in a statement<\/a>, in which he lambasted \u201ccriminal Ukrainian politicians for betraying their faith and their people\u201d. When the \u201cDNR\u201d leader appeared <\/a>at a religious ceremony in Donetsk later the same day, he wore his trademark battle dress, but made no mention of the Church dispute.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the official separatist news site \u201cDAN\u201d did not mention Zakharchenko\u2019s statement in its report<\/a> about the ceremony, nor did it publish it anywhere else.<\/p>\n Even more surprisingly, Zakharchenko\u2019s Luhansk colleague Pasechnik seems to have decided to completely ignore the issue. He made no mention of the church dispute in his official congratulatory statement<\/a> on the Baptism of Rus anniversary. Furthermore, Pasechnik did not show<\/a> up at a church ceremony to mark the feast, which was held in Luhansk on July 27.<\/p>\n A career intelligence officer, Pasechnik has shown little religious convictions since coming to power through a putsch in November, and also Zakharchenko does not have a reputation of being very religious. Both their July 23 statements seemed improvised, inviting suspicion of being ordered from Moscow – which has reasons to fear losing significant part of its influence over Ukraine (see Newsletter 38<\/a>).<\/p>\n Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had expressed hope that Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul would by July 28 grant independence (autocephaly) to an amalgamated church, after both the Kiev Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church filed an official request.<\/p>\n However, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople has expressed sympathy with Kiev but has not made a decision so far. His Patriarchate, which holds primacy of honour inside Orthodoxy, does not even recognize the Kiev Patriarchate nor the (very small) Autocephalous Church as lawful (synodal) and holds that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is the only legal Church in Ukraine. To this day, the Russian Church\u2019s branch in Ukraine controls most of the country\u2019s Orthodox parishes, especially in the Russian-speaking east.<\/p>\n In his address<\/a> during the Kiev Patriarchate procession in the Ukrainian capital on July 28 (the Moscow Patriarchate Church held its procession one day earlier), Poroshenko said that the Russian Orthodox Church poses a national security risk to Ukraine because it “unconditionally supports the Kremlin’s revanchist imperial policy.”<\/p>\n The Autocephaly project has been linked<\/a> with the political future of Poroshenko himself, who wants to stand for re-election next year, despite trailing in opinion polls at well below ten per cent.<\/p>\n \u201cDNR\u201d tram revealed to be copy of a Russian model<\/strong><\/p>\n The \u201cPeople\u2019s Republics\u2019\u201d economy continue to struggle, despite claims by separatist leaders and the media controlled by them that industrial production is returning to the region.<\/p>\n In a typical example, Ukrainian media showed evidence that the tram, which the Donetsk separatists presented earlier this year as having been developed and built in the \u201cDNR\u201d is really just a copy of a tram developed in the Russian city of Izhevsk \u2013 which in turn is based on an old Czechoslovak model.<\/p>\n Photos of both the Russian and the \u201cDNR\u201d trams published<\/a> by the Ukrainian ostro.org news site on August 1 show that there is practically no difference between the two. While the Russian plant in Izhevsk openly admits that it is restyling old trams from Czechoslovakia by using locally produced equipment, separatist Industry \u201cminister\u201d Alexei Granovsky claims that the \u201cDNR\u201d managed to build a new tram from scratch, importing only electrical components.<\/p>\n This is not the first time that the separatists claim to have started homegrown industrial production while really remodelling Russian-made goods. Previous success stories about the first Donetsk-assembled passenger buses and revamped refrigerators from the city\u2019s \u201cNord\u201d plant are also thought to be based on imported goods from Russia (see Newsletter 27<\/a>).<\/p>\n Granovsky also highlighted another serious problem for the separatists\u2019 hopes to mend the damage done by war and separation – the continuing brain drain. At a July 31 roundtable meeting<\/a> in his \u201cministry\u201d, he said that the \u201cStirol\u201d chemical plant in Horlivka suffers from the fact that all the main specialists had left the \u201cRepublic\u201d since 2014. \u201cWhen preparing the plant\u2019s re-start of production, we were facing a serious deficit of cadres,\u201d Granovsky said.<\/p>\n The Stirol plant belongs to the Ostchem<\/a> holding controlled by Ukrainian Oligarch Dmytro Firtash, who is currently in Austria fighting an extradition request by the US. The plant has not been operating since 2014 and in 2017 came under the separatists\u2019 \u201cexternal management\u201d, meaning that assets and staff were put under their control. The \u201cDNR\u201d said on July 16<\/a> that it had begun preparations to restart production.<\/p>\n The plant\u2019s current director Maxim Chepak told the same meeting that in order to address the deficit, Stirol is hosting work experience sessions for students from both Horlivka and Donetsk.<\/p>\n With a prewar population of more than 250,000, Horlivka is the second biggest city controlled by the Donetsk separatists.<\/p>\n A similar staffing deficit hampers the work of the Horlivka meat processing plant. The plant management and the city\u2019s food technology institute discussed setting up new training facilities for junior staff, Granovsky\u2019s \u201cministry\u201d said in an August 1 statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Granovsky also made a surprising confession in an interview for the \u201cDNR\u201d Information Ministry\u2019s YouTube channel<\/a>, where he said<\/a> that 50 per cent of the Donetsk \u201cPeople\u2019s Republic\u2019s\u201d imports where counterfeit. He did not say where the counterfeit goods came from, but according to \u201cDNR\u201d statistics recorded by the ostro.org website, 73 per cent of imports are from Russia, 10 per cent from the \u201cLNR\u201d and 2.8 per cent from Belarus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Written by Nikolaus von Twickel Summary Despite dramatic warnings by the separatist leaders, no religious war has broken out anywhere in Ukraine during this year\u2019s anniversary of the \u201cBaptism of Rus\u201d. However, the Church dispute remains unsolved. Meanwhile, the promised...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[291,244,245],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1540,"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civicmonitoring.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}