Despite the blockade of roads by nationalists, numerous threats from participants in the hostilities, the placement of grenades and explosive devices along roads and the persistent attempts of the MIA of Ukraine to interrupt the all-Ukrainian procession for peace and "pack" its participants in buses, the columns of believers coming from the east and the west united in the center of Kiev. The number of believers gathered in the prayer service at St. Vladimir's Hill, taking into account the residents of the Ukrainian capital and those who arrived from other cities in the country by transport, is estimated by witnesses as unprecedented for many decades.
The participants of the processions which had started in the Svyatogorsk (on July 3) and Pochayev (on July 9) Lavras entered Kiev late on Tuesday. The number of each of them reached thousands of people (on the road, passing through large cities, they grew up to 10 thousand each, as it happened, for example, in Kharkov).
On Wednesday, around noon, prayer processions coming from the east and the west united on the European Square of the "Mother of Russian cities».
Then the participants of columns, as well as the Orthodox Kiev residents and pilgrims from other cities, went to St. Vladimir’s Hill. The access there was blocked by the Interior Ministry forces, with the number of metal detectors ridiculously insufficient for the thousands of believers.
However, as acknowledged even the mass media negative to the participants of prayer, ‘In the city center, there have never gathered so many parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of the Moscow Patriarchate’.
The assessment of witnesses was similar, they were speaking about columns of 2.5-3 kilometer length, in which tens and tens of thousands of people were walking. Last year, the UOC had already gathered about 25-30 thousand people in a procession in Kiev, but this time there turned out to be much more participants.
There were already voiced quite specific figures - at least, 80 thousand participants.
‘According to conservative estimates, from 80 to 100 thousand people took part in the events dedicated to the Day of the Baptism of Russia,’ the official website of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church reported on the results of the event.
‘De facto, we can say that the procession could be a harbinger of global events. Not so long ago, the "party of war" was presented everywhere... And those who wanted peace did not have some kind of the rod around which to unite and achieve the results they wanted… The Orthodox Church, which is going in a procession with a prayer for Ukraine, makes it possible to create a foundation on which the "party of peace» could appear,’ said the Ukrainian journalist Maksim Kostenko.
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