The head of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, personally consecrated Igor Pashentsev as bishop of Skadovsk and Oleshky after occupation authorities appointed him to lead the Skadovsk diocese, the Ukrainian outlet IPC-South reported, citing Russian sources.

The appointment advances the Russian church’s incorporation of occupied Ukrainian parishes into a Moscow-controlled structure created after Russia seized the area. Pashentsev will oversee churches across five occupied Kherson districts through a diocese IPC-South describes as operating illegally on Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine banned the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church from operating in the country in 2024 and established a court process for suspending Ukrainian religious groups that fail to sever Russian control. The measure targets Russian control, not Orthodox Christianity.

IPC-South says Pashentsev graduated from a Soviet military command school of chemical defense and served in the Soviet Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate from 1981 to 1992. The Federation of American Scientists says the directorate stored, maintained, transported, and secured the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal, but public records do not identify his duties there.

Ordained in 1993, Pashentsev completed the Moscow Theological Seminary in 1998, later led a Tambov diocesan office for relations with the armed forces and detention facilities, and served in the Barysh diocese. Known in the church as Joseph, he held the rank of archimandrite—a senior Orthodox monk—before his consecration.

During a Dormition liturgy—a major Orthodox feast honoring the Virgin Mary—Kirill gave Pashentsev an episcopal staff symbolizing a bishop’s authority and delivered instructions before his ministry began, Russian church accounts relayed by IPC-South said.

The Russian Orthodox Church created the Skadovsk diocese—a regional church administration—on 27 December 2023 after the occupation made it impossible for the existing Kherson diocese to oversee parishes on the Dnipro’s left bank. The new body incorporated parishes across the occupied Oleshky, Hola Prystan, Kalanchak, Skadovsk, and Chaplynka districts. IPC-South describes it as operating illegally on Ukrainian territory.

Russia weaponizes church control while suppressing other faiths

Pashentsev’s appointment is part of the Moscow Patriarchate’s wider effort to control religious life in occupied Ukraine. Religious communities that reject Kremlin authority face interrogations, threats, closures, and confiscation.

Ukraine’s Security Service has accused church structures of recruiting and training mercenaries for Russia’s military. The Institute for the Study of War, a US-based think tank, says occupation authorities also arbitrarily detain clergy and destroy places of worship while suppressing independent Ukrainian religious identity.

An Orthodox archbishop has publicly broken with the Moscow Patriarchate over its blessing of nuclear weapons. The head of the Finnish Orthodox Church, Archbishop Elia, said he is shocked that Russian Patriarch Kirill uses Christian rhetoric to bless nuclear weapons and justify their use, the Finnish broadcaster Yle reported.

The rebuke comes from within Orthodoxy against a patriarch who has sacralized Russia's war. Kirill is considered a close ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, and the Russian Orthodox Church under his leadership openly supports Russia's aggression against Ukraine, calling it a "holy war," per the Institute for the Study of War.

On Saturday, Kirill called Russian nuclear weapons a manifestation of "God's grace" and linked the creation of the Soviet atomic bomb to the prayers of Saint Serafim of Sarov, saying during the divine liturgy that the bomb was created "by God's grace and mercy."

The archbishop says there is no "Orthodox nuclear weapon"

Elia rejected the theology outright. In Orthodox liturgy, the church always prays for peace in the whole world, not for the victory of one country's weapons, he said, and there is no such thing as an "Orthodox nuclear weapon."

The archbishop drew a clear line about the church's role.

"The task of the church is not to bless weapons of mass destruction," Elia said in a statement published on the Finnish Orthodox Church's website.

Invoking a saint of love and humility angers him most

What most disturbed Elia was the act of tying a beloved saint to a nuclear blessing. He was especially angered that the name of Serafim of Sarov was linked to blessing nuclear weapons, calling the association a profound distortion.

Elia contrasted the saint with the patriarch. Serafim "was a man of love, forgiveness, and humility, and essentially embodied everything diametrically opposed to the current patriarch," he said. Serafim of Sarov is one of the most revered saints among Orthodox believers in Russia and beyond, including in Finland.

Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), said during a sermon at the Holy Trinity Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent on 1 August that the Soviet Union's creation of the nuclear bomb was the result of divine intervention.

The Russian Church under Kirill operates in close alignment with the Russian state, and critics describe it as a de facto arm of Kremlin influence abroad. Ukraine's security service, which has investigated him, counts him among Putin's inner circle. Kirill's own ties to the Russian state reach back decades: Swiss media reported in February 2023 that he worked for Soviet intelligence in 1970s Geneva under the code name "Mikhailov" while officially representing the Moscow Patriarchate at the World Council of Churches.

The patriarch delivered the sermon after the Divine Liturgy on the feast marking the uncovering of the relics of the Orthodox saint Seraphim of Sarov. The Russian Orthodox Church and its nuclear-weapons complex have long cast Seraphim as the patron saint of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Kirill credited the bomb's creation to God's mercy and, in particular, to the prayers of the saint, saying it saved the country from "terrible destruction, as a result of which neither the country nor its people could have remained."

The Soviet nuclear weapons center was built in 1946 in the closed city of Sarov, also known as Arzamas-16, on the grounds of the Dormition Monastery that the Bolsheviks shut in 1927. The Sarov-based design bureau (KB-11, later VNIIEF) developed the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb (RDS-1), its first thermonuclear bomb (RDS-6S), its first two-stage thermonuclear bomb (RDS-37), and later the AN602, better known as the Tsar Bomba. The design of the RDS-1 was largely similar to the American Fat Man bomb, which the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.

Sarov is the town where Saint Seraphim lived and prayed, the connection Kirill drew on to cast the weapon's creation as providential:

"I would like to say once again that the Lord truly works miracles. He is the Lord of history, and the life of the entire human race depends on Him. That by His mercy, through Elder Seraphim, the miracle of His presence appeared here, and that it was in this very place that the shield protecting our Motherland was created: all this is not accidental but parts of one whole," Kirill said.

Patriarch supporting aggression

As the church's leader, Kirill has been among the most consistent religious backers of Russia's full-scale invasion — a stance that led Ukraine to sanction him and seven other church figures in August 2022. That November, he justified the possible use of nuclear weapons over a threat to Russia's existence, citing the country's nuclear doctrine, and in November 2023, Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) opened a formal investigation into him over his support for the war.

The EU has been slower to act. Although Ukraine sanctioned Kirill in 2022, some member states still resist doing so: in July 2026, Italy joined Bulgaria in opposing a proposed EU visa ban on him.