Ukraine war: Meet Father Grigory, Russia's most prominent anti-war priest

When the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church supports Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and calling the conflict "war" can land you in jail, it takes courage to speak out.

But that is what Father Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko has been doing ever since the Kremlin first set its sights on its western neighbour.

Father Grigory, who was once a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, has set out to prove that not everyone in the country stands behind President Vladimir Putin's act of aggression. Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the church, is among the war's most vocal supporters.

Helping the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees who found themselves stuck across Russia since February is Grigory's number one priority.

His religious organisation, the Russian Apostolic Church, has assisted some 7,000 refugees over the past eight months.

“By the time April came around, our religious organisation and the St Petersburg parish, we opened a centre for helping [Ukrainian] refugees because many of them need different types of help," Father Grigory told Euronews.

"Some need tickets (to leave Russia), some need clothes or different kinds of medicine.

“So we do what we can do, all we can do to help, we try to do that. 

"If we talk about medicine, there are a lot of documents for every person. And this is just the last couple of weeks,” he said, waving hefty stacks of pale blue papers bearing official Russian government inscriptions.

When the war started, Grigory reached out to his Ukrainian peers and, together with other international clergies, wrote a letter demanding the invasion be stopped.

Calling the aggression against Ukraine a “war” has been criminalised in Russia ever since the very beginning. Yet Grigory is defiant. “We are united in these