As the Sevastopol “channels” reported, on Monday, September 23, the “church coup” in the occupied city will end, which began with the “arrival” of the “new Crimean Metropolitan” Tikhon (Shevkunov) to the occupied peninsula.
The essence of this protracted “behind-the-altar drama” comes down to the fact, that the odious collaborator Sergei Khalyuta, “the confessor of the governors” and “the church dean of the city”, will retain control only over the churches of the Sevastopol center, because “three more archpriests” will become “equal to Khalyuta” in the city.
As the “Sevastopol media” ironically say on this matter, “territorial division – like with officials – priests become heads of districts”.
Such a “lowering of the afedron” for Khalyuta is far from accidental, and neither the traditional anti-Ukrainian rhetoric, nor the previous PR scams with the “miraculously surviving icon of Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, commander of the fleet” from the “bombed headquarters”, nor with the chronic “humanitarian mission” of “voluntary-forced” collection of “donations” from believers for the soldiers of the aggressor helped him.
Tikhon’s “cooled revenge”, which has been gossiped about in the “Sevastopol corridors of power” for a year now, arose against the background of a long-standing feud between churchmen for control over Chersonesos; back in 2015, the current “rebellious metropolitan”, and then “the talking head of the patriarch” refuted Khalyuta’s statements supported by gauleiter Sergei Menyailo regarding his “directorship in “Chersonesos Taurica”.
Then, a hack of Tikhon’s email from 2018 “accidentally” surfaced on the Internet, with complaints to Kremlin curators about Khalyuta, who allegedly “interfered with the implementation of a federal project” in the same Chersonesos, with the characteristic question “what to do with Father Sergius’ souvenir shop? how to build a dialogue with him on moving the shop?”
It is noteworthy that, as the “Sevastopol officials” gossip, Tikhon achieved the current “descent to the temple” of Khalyuta in the Kremlin, using the latter’s “rather rash” statement from almost a year ago that “the church, if politicians have the will, can become one of the effective, informal negotiators” in the current war.
Naturally, there was no more sincerity in this statement than there was real piety in the hidden neo-pagan Tikhon, but it was used by the “Byzantine Metropolitan of Chersonesos” to the maximum, as a basis for discrediting the “unreliable” Khalyuta in the Kremlin, who has now become toxic even for gauleiter Razvozhaev.
