The Tragedy of Filaret Denysenko

On March 20, 2026, “Patriarch” Filaret Denysenko died. He was ninety-seven years old.

Born in 1929 in the Donbas village of Blahodatne to a miner’s family, Mykhailo Denysenko entered the Odessa Theological Seminary and was ordained deacon in 1950 and priest in 1951. A gifted administrator, he rose rapidly through the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church. By the late Soviet period he had become Exarch of Ukraine.

In 1990, as the USSR crumbled, he was elected Metropolitan of Kyiv and granted broad self-governance by Moscow. Many hoped he would guide Ukrainian Orthodoxy toward greater local autonomy while preserving canonical unity. Instead, in 1992, after Ukraine’s declaration of independence, Denysenko demanded full autocephaly.

When the Russian Church refused his demands, the Ukrainian episcopate removed him in Kharkiv. Still, he refused to submit. He stole church property, allied with the schismatic Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and proclaimed the so-called Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP). For this act of schism he was defrocked and, in 1997, anathematized by the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the Exarchate’s legitimate successor. For thirty years he presided over a body unrecognized by any canonical Orthodox Church.

In 2018, Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew engineered the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). They did so by merging the UOC-KP, the UAOC, and a handful of defectors from the canonical UOC. Denysenko, then 89, believed he would naturally become its primate—the reward for decades of agitation. He was tapped for the role and expected to lead.

Yet at the Unification Council on December 15, 2018, the Ukrainian government and its ecclesiastical allies passed him over. His longtime secretary, the young and pliant “Metropolitan” Epiphany Dumenko, was elected instead. Denysenko received only an empty title of Honorary Patriarch and a seat on the Synod. The message was clear: the new structure required a figurehead who would not challenge Kyiv’s political masters or Constantinople’s oversight. The government had chosen a more controllable successor.

Publicly humiliated, Denysenko turned against the OCU he had helped birth. In June 2019, he convened his own council, which revived the UOC-KP and denounced the Tomos of autocephaly as a sham.

He spent his remaining years issuing blistering critiques claiming (not unreasonably) that OCU was not truly independent but a tool of the state and a foreign patriarchate. In October 2025 he recorded a spiritual testament that left no doubt. “I bequeath that the funeral service and burial be performed in St. Volodymyr’s Patriarchal Cathedral of Kyiv by the clergy and hierarchs of the UOC-KP, not the OCU,” he declared. He also explicitly rejected any connection to the OCU or its “Honorary Patriarch” title.

Denysenko’s final wish was to die and be buried within the structure he still considered his own. Yet even that small mercy was denied him.

In his last years Denysenko lived in virtual isolation, essentially imprisoned within the walls of his residence. Access was tightly controlled. When death came on March 20, 2026, the OCU—working in concert with Ukrainian authorities—moved swiftly.

According to UOC-KP hierarchs, OCU representatives, aided by law enforcement, conducted a “raider seizure” of Denysenko’s corpse. Police and security services guarded the residence, blocking UOC-KP bishops from entering. Denysenko’s body was removed against the explicit terms of the testament and delivered to the OCU.

The funeral took place at St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery under Epiphany’s jurisdiction—not in the cathedral Denysenko had named. State officials attended the OCU rite while Denysenko’s comrades at the Kyiv Patriarchate were kept at bay by threats and barriers.

The American people should realize that our tax dollars went to support this macabre spectacle, in the form of “aid” to Ukraine. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, meanwhile, should not be allowed to forget that Dumenko—the man they handpicked to serve as the spiritual father of all Orthodox Ukrainians—ritually desecrated the corpse of his own mentor, in order to please his SBU handlers.

It’s difficult to imagine a more shameful display from the Zelensky regime or the OCU. Give it a few weeks, though. They always manage to outdo themselves.