Some days ago, occupiers-controlled “Crimean media” announced the end of the “third shift” of the so-called “School of Young Humanitarians “FOROS-2024” in Foros; the occupiers held the previous “shifts” in Sevastopol.
It was stated that this “project” for the propaganda of the ideas of the “Russian world”, and, accordingly, the alleged “racial-religious exclusivity” of its bearers among “students, graduate students, young scientists and teachers” of all the occupied territories of Ukraine “is being implemented under the auspices of the Crimean Metropolitanate with the support of the leading universities of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol, the Sretensky Theological Academy and the Tauride Theological Seminary.”
At this propaganda vanity fair, where the organizers allegedly brought anonymous “guests from Moldova”, in addition to Crimean collaborators, priests of the Moscow Patriarchate from Berdyansk, Henichesk and Donetsk were noticed.
The main “talking head” at “FOROS-2024” was such a functionary of Russian intelligence as Hieromonk Raphael, namely Andrei Popov from Astrakhan. This “monk in uniform” had previously made a career at the same Sretensky Theological Academy and in the Russian Church and Public Council for Protection from the Alcohol Threat.
At the end of 2023, Raphael was the head of the chancery of the Sretensky Monastery and a member of the Russia’s Patriarchal Council for Culture. As you might guess, the real field of activity of this spy in a cassock became the “external relations and contacts” of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the work of the “Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society” as the old “umbrella” of Russian foreign intelligence.
Raphael was transferred to occupied Crimea, namely to the “clergy of the St. Vladimir Chersonesos Monastery” by the “new Crimean Metropolitan” Tikhon in mid-July 2024, on the obvious advice of “interested persons” from Moscow’s Bachurino.
Obviously, it is Raphael who will now be the main executor of the criminal instructions of Russian intelligence “along the external line” based in Crimea, both in “ecclesiastical” and purely “secular” acts.
