Russian Orthodox Church supports Biden’s decision to recognize the Armenian Genocide

The head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokolamsk, positively assesses confession by US President Joe Biden of the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire. He stated this in the program “Church and Peace” on the TV channel “Russia 24”…

“I think it’s better late than never, because realities of this kind, no matter how sad they are, need to be recognized, and things need to be called by their proper names.

And I do not think that today anyone in Turkey will suffer from the fact that the obvious fact of the tragedy that took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when more than a million Armenians became victims of the genocide in the Ottoman Empire, will be recognized. Just as events such as the Asia Minor catastrophe, which occurred after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when several hundred thousand representatives of the Greek diaspora were forced to move from Turkey to Greece, “said Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk (Alfeev ).

President of the United States Joe Biden officially on April 24 admitted genocide, the massacres of Armenians, organized and committed at the beginning of the 20th century in the Ottoman Empire. In response, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said that he was deeply saddened by these “unfair words, not based on history.”

The White House website posted a statement from the President of the United States:

“Every year on this day, we remember the lives of all who died during the Armenian genocide during the Ottoman Empire, and we again pledge to prevent a repetition of such atrocities. Since April 24, 1915, when the Ottoman authorities arrested representatives of the Armenian intelligentsia and community leaders in Constantinople, one and a half million Armenians have been deported, killed or sent to their death as part of a campaign of extermination. We honor the memory of the victims of Meds Yeghern (the great atrocity) so that the horrors of what happened will never be forgotten by history.

With strength and resilience, the Armenian people survived and rebuilt their community. Over the past decades, Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history that brought so many of their ancestors to our shores. We honor their history. We see this pain. We confirm history. “

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