Re the first pic of Zelensky next to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, there is great historical significance to this. In the late 1500s Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople Jeremiah on his way to Moscow visited Lviv in western Ukraine and privately suggested to his faithful living under the Catholic Polish/Lithuanian Commonwealth to consider a union with the Catholic Pope of Rome to get better treatment from their Catholic rulers. Thereafter Jeremiah continued on to Moscow where he was held hostage for a year, and, to obtain his release agreed under protest to elevate the head of the Russian Orthodox Church from Metropolitan to Patriarch AND to transfer canonical jurisdiction over all Ukraine from Constantinople to Moscow. Upon return to Constantinople the Ecumenical Patriarch repudiated those extorted acts, but that's the ways stayed until after Putin seized Crimea and occupied eastern Ukraine in 2014. Between the late 1500s and 2014, western Ukraine was ruled by Catholic rulers until 1946 with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church the majority there, but eastern and central Ukraine were ruled by czarist and Soviet Russia, so Russian orthodoxy prevailed with the Ukrainian Catholics suppressed. After 2014, a movement amongst the majority Orthodox of eastern and central Ukraine arose to form a united Ukrainian Orthodox Church and to repudiate rule from Moscow and return to the historic oversight of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. A few years later, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople formally accepted the leaving of the Ukrainian Orthodox from Moscow and its return to the canonical jurisdiction of Constantinople, which had always been Constantinople's position. Infuriated, the Moscow Russian Orthodox Church entered into schism and left the worldwide Orthodox Church, and this became one of Putin's reasons for invading Ukraine. So with this historical background, one can see the great significance of President Zelensky being photographed next to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. The other uplifting thing about this photo is that Presdident Zelensky is Jewish. At the time of his election to the Presidency of Ukraine, only two countries in the world had both a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime Minister, and the two countries were Israel and Ukraine! So there is a lot of historical significance to think about ih this historic photo!
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