The visit of Patriarch Bartholomew to Kiev is a PR move of the Ukrainian president, who is thinking how to please the right-centric patriotic voter and prove that he is not an “agent of Moscow”, as this voter believes, a religious scholar, a researcher at the Center for Eastern European Studies, University of Bremen Nikolay Mitrokhin told BBC.

Even the BBC is forced to admit this point of view: “In conversations with the BBC, skeptics predict that Vladimir Zelensky will still not be able to resist using Bartholomew’s visit for PR purposes. They say that for the president of Ukraine, who is far from religious issues, the patriarch serves only as an element of the picture of foreign policy triumph, the main part of which will be the summit of the “Crimean Platform” – the largest international event in the history of Ukraine, which will take place in Kiev on August 23, precisely during the visit of Bartholomew ”, – written by the authors of the article.