Ultranationalist Russian church leader assembles military priests and war veterans on Norway border

The Murmansk church leader, known for his extreme nationalist and pro-war views, held his annual service in the Church of Boris and Gleb on 6 August.

Mitrofan has made it a tradition to visit the church in early August in connection with the annual celebration of the 11th-century Orthodox saints Boris and Gleb.

The church is located on a 3.6-square-kilometre penexclave, physically separated from the rest of Russia by the Pasvik River. It can only be reached by crossing a dam bridge from the Russian side.

As in previous years, Mitrofan travelled to the church with a group of his most trusted prelates, including Bishop Tarasii of Severomorsk. This year, the delegation also included several military priests who had served on occupied Ukrainian land. Among them were Sergei Sherfetdinov and Leonid Suloev.

The latter formerly served in a church in Olenya Bay, a base for Russia’s secretive Main Directorate for Deep Sea Research (GUGI). He has a background in Russian special forces and fought with a Cossack battalion in Ukraine in 2025. Leonid Suloev is also an avid motorcyclist and a member of the nationalist Night Wolves biker club. He has travelled to the Nordic countries on several occasions.

The Church of Boris and Gleb is formally part of the Diocese of Severomorsk, the city that hosts the Northern Fleet.

This year’s delegation of Metropolitan Mitrofan also included war veterans, among them Roman Oleshkin.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Oleshkin served as Deputy Commander of the 200th Motorised Rifle Brigade (now called the 71st Motorised Rifle Division), with responsibility for so-called military-political operations. At that time, he cooperated closely with the Orthodox Church.

Major Oleshkin was sent to Ukraine to fight and returned to the Kola Peninsula alive, unlike many of his fellow warriors from Pechenga, including Colonel Denis Kurilo and General Aleksandr Zavadsky.

In 2025, Oleshkin became part of a Murmansk government trainee programme for war veterans. In August 2026, he was appointed Deputy Mayor of Pechenga, a municipality located along the border with Norway and Finland.

For Metropolitan Mitrofan, the annual service in the Church of Boris and Gleb has become an opportunity to lash out against the "unfriendly" West, including nearby Norway, and to express support for the war in Ukraine.

In 2025, he called Russia’s border with the neighbouring Nordic countries "a spiritual border that stands against the evil that is rolling over us."

In this year’s address, he reiterated many of the same points.

According to Mitrofan, Russia exclusively represents love and kindness, and the country "has never attacked anyone."

"We never attacked anyone. We all know this. It was always all the others who attacked us [...] We have always represented the Light, and our Rus’ cannot live in any other way. In contrast to other countries, which regularly represent the opposite position, which forces us to bring reason to them."

Mitrofan repeated his strong and unfaltering support for Russian soldiers waging war in Ukraine and emphasised that they "do no nasty things."

"They do not do nasty things, do not bully others, do not attack civilian buses with children. No, this is not possible for us because of our order, our system of principles that roots back to Boris and Gleb."

The so-called love expressed by the Murmansk metropolitan stands in stark contrast to his previous calls for extreme actions against what he refers to as "Ukrainian Nazis."

"We now see how hard it will be to heal the country, how hard it will be to de-Nazify the country, remove the infection, the fascism that now holds everyone in fear as hostages," he said shortly after the start of the full-scale war in 2022.

Before the start of the full-scale war, Mitrofan regularly travelled to the Norwegian border town of Kirkenes, where a local Orthodox congregation is served by priests from Murmansk.