Under the guise of pilgrimage trips to the Holy Land, Russian spies arrive in the Bulgarian capital to assign tasks to local agents. The route between the capitals of Bulgaria and Israel last year turned into a veritable highway for Russian espionage and subversive operations carried out under the cover of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).

This was reported by the Bulgarian outlet Faktor.
According to the publication, the main actors are two well known clergymen, Archimandrite Vassian Zmeyev, head of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, and Archpriest Vladimir Tyshchuk, rector of the Russian compound of the Moscow Patriarchate in Sofia. Both are direct executors of the will of Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev, who has turned the Russian Church into a branch of the Main Intelligence Directorate and the Federal Security Service.

Until September 2023, Vassian Zmeyev headed the Russian compound in the Bulgarian capital, but was exposed as a spy and expelled from the country.
As a reward “for service”, Vassian received a promotion from the Moscow Patriarch, an appointment to Jerusalem.

Recently Israel’s most authoritative newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published an investigation presenting well founded assumptions that Vassian is a Russian agent, and that his most important mission is to secure ownership for the Russian state of the Alexander Compound in Jerusalem.

Vladimir Tyshchuk took Vassian’s place in Sofia. His ecclesiastical career passed through the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, which in practice functions as a subdivision of the Russian special services. Under the cover of pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the spy Vassian passes on specific assignments to Tyshchuk for execution.

Since the communist era, the Kremlin has guarded its church agents with particular care. Russian Orthodoxy, in alliance with the Serbian Orthodox Church, works against the common European home and a strong Europe. Another vector of the hybrid war is directed against the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, seeking to distance Orthodox churches from it and to block recognition of the new Ukrainian Church independent of Moscow.