Translated by Leo.

Source: https://cont.ws/@Handusenko/1499952

November 10, 2019 – Everyone knows about the feat of Yevgeny Rodionov. In May 1996, a Russian soldier from the Penza region near the Chechen village of Bamut was captured by militants of the field commander Ruslan Khaikhoroyev. Despite fear of punishment, he refused to betray the Orthodox faith, to remove the Christian cross from his chest. Something for which he paid the price with his life…

For many compatriots, 19 year old Yevgeny Rodionov became a symbol of honor and faithfulness. Posthumously he was awarded the Order of Courage. In his native Penza region, a monument of Yevgeny was placed.

The question of the canonization of Yevgeny Rodionov was considered. But the Commission of the Russian Orthodox Church decided that evidence of the guy’s martyrdom and the fact that he led a church life was not enough. However for many countrymen, Yevgeny, as well as residents of Serbia, revere him as a saint.

The head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Akhmatovich Kadyrov once spoke about the soldier’s feat.

– My opinion of the soldier Yevgeny Rodionov – it was a heroic act of one person. And the vile abomination of others – those who killed him,” Kadyrov said in an interview with the Islam in the Russian Federation web portal in 2007.

According to the head of the Chechen Republic, “these so-called self-proclaimed fighters for supposedly true faith, for some reason did not know or did not want to know that the Muslim religion forbids people from becoming part of Islam by threatening their life. To become a Muslim should only be voluntary, true and a deep conscious step.”

“I do not agree, and I don’t think, that veneration of Yevgeny Rodionov as a saint among Orthodox people is allegedly anti-Chechen and or anti-Muslim,” Ramzan Kadyrov noted in a conversation with journalists.
According to the head of the republic, “to create the cult of a new saint is, of course, the right and work of the Christian Orthodox Church itself, and no one has the right to meddle in their internal affairs.”