There was talk about Bartholomew's flight from Turkey to Kyiv
Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople may have to flee to Ukraine if Turkish President Recep Erdogan learns about the hierarch’s connections with the fugitive Turkish oppositionist Fethullah Gulen.
The leader of the Essence of Time movement, Sergei Kurginyan, stated this on the Rossiya-1 TV channel.
“It is becoming increasingly clear that there are problems there with Turkey. Somehow there’s a lot of confusion about Gülen. For Erdogan, this is the most terrible enemy. When it comes up that Bartholomew was friends with him, Erdogan begins to tense up. A crazy hypothesis arises. Or maybe the Patriarchate of Constantinople decided to move to Ukraine,” Kurginyan said.
Israeli military expert Yakov Kedmi objected to him.
“Only a super-naive person would think that this was possible without Erdogan’s support. Nothing happens in Turkey without the knowledge of the Sultan,” Kedmi said.
The objections of Russian political scientist Sergei Mikheev were global in nature.
“The center of Orthodoxy does not move behind Bartholomew. The Americans are trying to break the church structure and push it into the Procrustean bed of political technologies. Maybe they will partially succeed and somehow they will blindly blind this local church. But the church logic of these events will still prevail. And in the end, our Ukrainian colleagues may be left with a fictitious certificate stating that they have a local church,” Mikheev believes.
As PolitNavigator reported, Ukraine is proposing to rename Kyiv "New Constantinople" and relocate Bartholomew there.
Moreover, experts do not rule out that Bartholomew could be expelled from Turkey.
There is talk of Bartholomew's flight from Turkey to Kiev.