Peace be unto you, beloved fathers and brethren!
I am writing to you from the Lukianivka pre-trial detention centre in Kyiv, where in the 1920s–30s the brethren of our holy Lavra were imprisoned. I was required to make us leave the Lavra, to hand over you and your relatives, in future for blackmail and checks by the Security Service of Ukraine, which I did not do.
All the accusations are a complete falsehood. The false witnesses, including some from among the brethren, can bring no charge against me. The lawyers are very capable, but no one listens to them. I testify to this because in my block all the prisoners are political ones. The judge's rulings were prepared long ago. The prosecutor, the investigator, the judge are the same troikas that in their time tried Mykhailo Semenovych Lytvynenko and other confessors and martyrs of the faith. In the corridor of the detention centre I heard that I am under special watch: three locks and, evidently, the keys held by different people, and the first man of the country is in charge of it.
I earnestly ask for your holy prayers. You have no need of outside abbots, all our brethren are worthy, only do everything with a blessing, patiently and with deep faith that the Lord, the Mother of God and the venerable Fathers will abandon neither you nor me, the wretched one. They wanted to forbid me not only to enter the holy Lavra, but any church at all, evidently in the whole of long-suffering Ukraine. I am a man of the holy Church, and I believe that with God's help I shall endure everything.
I call down God's blessing upon you all. My consolation, after Jesus Christ, the Mother of God and the venerable Fathers of the Kyiv Caves, is you.
May God keep you all.
Your wretched prisoner and intercessor
+M. Pavel
I love and value you all very much, and I thank God for everything.
17.07. 2023
