It is an unusually warm day for May. The birds are chirping, and the strong, sweet scent of the trees that typically blossom at this time of the year fills the spring air. Off the main road from Vasteras and towards the sparsely populated district of Hasslo, a narrow and bumpy forest path leads into a thick grove. Eventually it opens up into a peaceful, almost fairy-tale-like meadow, bathing in sunlight.
At its centre stands a structure that is as stunning as it is unexpected: a Russian Orthodox church built entirely in timber and whose tall, onion-domed spire reaches up to the tree-tops.
The Church of the Holy Mother of God of Kazan is spectacular. Red and pink tulips line the light-coloured gravel around the main church building. It is flanked by an elongated west wing, and what appear to be more private quarters to the east. The reflective and dark-tinted windows make it hard to glimpse inside.
But there is something unwelcoming about the place. The grounds are protected by a high steel fence and several security cameras peek out from under the blue church roof-covering. A “No trespassing!” sign warns the curious to keep away.
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There is no doorbell and a telephone number attached to the locked gate goes unanswered.
A passerby walking her dog says she finds the church beautiful, but that she rarely sees anyone in there, and that it doesn’t seem to host many church activities apart from the two weekly services.
“Last time I came here, I just saw a man walking around inside [the fenced grounds] with a guard dog,” she says.
“You’d think a church would be open to everyone – but there’s fencing all around it. We’re not allowed in there, are we?” she says before continuing on her walk.
Suddenly, the thrum of a helicopter starts to drown out the humming of the insects and the chorus of birdsong.
The sound is coming from the civilian Stockholm-Vasteras (VST) airport just 300 metres away.
Alarmed neighbour
VST is not just any airport. It hosts Sweden’s third-largest runway and was, until it was decommissioned in 1983, a base for the Swedish Air Force. When Sweden abandoned almost 200 years of neutrality and non-military alignment by joining NATO in 2024, VST was once again put on the map as a site of strategic military importance.
NATO exercises are now regularly held here, as Allies train their collective readiness to not only defend Sweden, but the whole Nordic-Baltic region against the biggest threat it has seen since World War II and the Cold War: Russia.
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The fact that a Russian church, run by the Kremlin-aligned Moscow Patriarchate, has shot up as VST’s closest neighbour, makes the head of the control tower, Andreas Nyqvist, nervous.
“Nothing is normal about a church that close to the airport,” he says, pointing towards the golden-domed spire that would have been visible from the tower if it hadn’t been for the thick foliage of the surrounding trees.
Ideal strategic location
But it’s not just the church’s proximity to the airport that worries security experts. It's also its closeness to the central city of Vasteras, a 1.5-hours drive east of the capital Stockholm.
“Just look at the map,” says security expert Patrik Oksanen, who recently published a book on Russia’s hybrid war on Sweden.
Oksanen points to the fact that Vasteras sits on the edge of Lake Malaren – a strategically sensitive corridor that connects the Swedish heartland with the Baltic Sea – and that several key bridges cross the important waterway here.
Oksanen also notes that Sweden’s key east-west highway, the E18, runs through the city.
The highway links Stockholm with Norway, and cuts through a number of important sites, including the Swedish Army’s Command and Control Regiment in Enkoping, which is a crucial point for military communication.
From the church, the E18 can be reached in five minutes.
‘Red flags’
The Swedish branch of the Moscow Patriarchate began to show an interest in the Hasslo grounds in 2012. For the first time since the church body established itself in Sweden in 1992, it announced it was erecting its own church in the Nordic country.
The Vasteras congregation, which only had around 100 members at the time, was the fortunate recipient. Its then-deacon Pavel Makarenko promised a lavish church built in true Russian tradition.
Bureaucracy then took its toll, but when the building permit was finally granted five years later, Mikaela Lundblad, a young journalist working at the regional newspaper Vestmanlands Lans Tidning (VLT), became intrigued.
“There were red flags,” she recalls, noting that since those first construction plans were voiced back in 2012, the world – and its view of Russia – had largely changed. “Crimea had been [illegally] annexed, and Sweden’s domestic intelligence agency [SAPO] had publicly stated that Russia now posed one of the biggest potential security threats to the country,” she says.
Considering that Vasteras, a city of around 160,000, barely housed a sizable Russian population Lundblad and Oksanen decided to investigate further.
It turns out that SAPO had tried to stop the construction already early on, pointing to the security risks. But due to a string of one-man municipal errors, and “miscommunication” on a local level, the warning was missed and the project went ahead anyway. Among the most alarming “mishaps” was the approval of the 22-metre-high spire – even though the local zoning plan clearly indicated it could not exceed 10 metres due to its proximity to sensitive infrastructure – the airport.
From then on, attention began to shift towards the now-ordained priest, Father Makarenko, and the Moscow-based forces behind him.
Secretive father
Not much is known about 68-year-old Makarenko before he moved to Sweden in 1990, where he has since led a discreet life with his wife and daughter in a Stockholm suburb.
At the very start of the church project, Makarenko had no problem speaking to the media, but after facing questions over the church’s financing, the building contractor’s links to organised crime, and his own alleged contacts with Russian intelligence services, he started to keep a low profile. In the past few years, he has only been caught on camera a handful of times, and never voluntarily.
For several years, and on the sidelines of his religious duties, Makarenko also served as the CEO of the Russian-owned import-and-export firm NC Nordic Control AB.
That tenure came to an abrupt end in 2021, when a Stockholm district court convicted him of aggravated accounting fraud for footing fake bills for companies in Russia and Belarus. Makarenko, who denied the charges – and later lost an appeal – was handed a suspended six-month jail sentence, 160 hours of community service and a three-year business ban.
But Makarenko’s strongest ties to “the Motherland” are through his spiritual connections – the Moscow Patriarchate – rather than his dubious business dealings.
All roads lead to Moscow…
The Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (ROC MP) is not a religious institution of the ordinary kind. It is the highest ecclesiastical authority within the Russian Orthodox Church and has, since the Stalin-era, been closely tied to the Russian regime, advancing its political interests both at home and abroad.
Under the leadership of Patriarch Kirill – an alleged former KGB agent and a staunch supporter of both Vladimir Putin and his war in Ukraine – the Moscow Patriarchate has edged even closer to the Kremlin. Today, the ROC MP is widely seen as one of the most important instruments in Russia’s hybrid war toolkit.
“It is an integral part of the power apparatus and the Kremlin’s exercise of power,” Vladimir Liparteliani, an expert on the ROC MP at Britain’s Durham University, explains. And the way it spreads its tentacles abroad is to “establish NGOs, and to build Russian churches”.
In Ukraine, some of the churches are suspected of being used as weapons caches and to house Russian saboteurs and spies.
In Sweden, where the Moscow Patriarchate has grown to five registered congregations, some 2,000 members and now a church, the institution’s expansion has not gone unnoticed, however.
In late 2023, barely two weeks after the Vasteras church opened, Sweden’s security police SAPO dropped a bombshell statement: Russia, it warned, was using the Moscow Patriarchate in Sweden “as a platform for intelligence-gathering and other activities threatening national security”.
It also stated that representatives of the Sweden-based chapter had been in contact with Russian intelligence services, encouraged support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and that their parish had “on several occasions, received significant funding from the Russian state”.
The warning prompted the Swedish authority that provides funding for religious groups to end its financial support of all congregations affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate, including that of Father Makarenko’s in Vasteras.
“They hadn’t told us the whole truth,” Isak Reichel, the director of the authority, says from his downtown Stockholm office, noting Makarenko denied the totality of the claims.
The money and the medal
Many of the missing pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place in connection with the church’s November 24, 2023 inauguration.
For one, the Foundation for the Support of Christian Culture and Heritage – a trust set up and run by Russia’s state-owned nuclear company Rosatom – issued a press release in which it boasted about its financial contribution to the 35 million kronor (€3.2 million) “project”.
It also listed some of the VIPs that were present, including one of the ROC MP’s absolute top names: Metropolitan Anton of Volomansk, head of the department for foreign church relations – the same post Patriarch Kirill held before ascending to the patriarchate in 2012.
Among the other guests were Dmitry Mironchik, the ambassador of Russia’s closest ally Belarus, and Vladimir Lyapin, the No. 2 of the Russian Embassy in Stockholm.
Mironchik has since been recalled to Minsk, and Lyapin has been identified by Swedish investigative programme Uppdrag Granskning as a Russian spy.
On the sidelines of the ceremony, VLT reported that Makarenko had been awarded a medal for “good service” by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
A close-up photograph of the medal can be found on the website of an NGO chaired by none other than Patriarch Kirill himself. Two independent security experts confirmed to FRANCE 24 that the medal appears to be authentic.
PHOTO OF MEDAL
“My interpretation is that Pavel Makarenko has been someone working for the purpose of the Kremlin, but not directly as an intelligence officer,” Oksanen says.
SAPO spokesman Gabriel Wernstedt, who does not want to comment on Makarenko specifically, says that: “It is not uncommon for the Russian security service to reward people who have helped the service [in some way] with this kind of medal.”
When FRANCE 24 attended a Sunday service in Vasteras to confront the priest with the accusations, the team was asked to leave when congregation members discovered a hidden camera. “Stop filming! Delete everything!” a man yelled.
For several days, FRANCE 24 then made a number of attempts to reach the priest – in person and by telephone – but without success. “To our great regret we have not received any official requests or letters from the respected channel FRANCE 24 asking for an interview,” Makarenko finally replied in a text message. The priest, who also alluded to his “busy schedule”, then ignored a formal interview request bearing FRANCE 24’s letterhead.
Hostile takeover bids
Vasteras is not the only location where the Moscow Patriarchate has tried to put down roots in Sweden in recent years.
Father Angel, the head of Sweden’s oldest Russian Orthodox church, recounts one of the darkest chapters of his establishment’s more than 400-year-long history: the moment it was targeted in a hostile takeover bid led by the very same patriarchate.
In 2019, representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate moved in on the central Stockholm church, and the priest describes how he had to fight tooth and nail to protect his multinational parish – with members from Albania to Russia and Ukraine – from falling victim to “the pro-Moscow nationalism and the politicisation orchestrated by Patriarch Kirill”.
Father Angel recalls how he, literally overnight, was bombarded with dozens of membership requests. The plan was to call a general assembly in which the new members would overwhelmingly vote to serve under Patriarch Kirill’s jurisdiction.
“There were Russian agents. Not everyone was an agent, of course, but there were agents who led and guided this effort to take over our parish and bring it under Moscow.”
The priest stopped them by refusing to process their applications.
“They tried to stage a coup, but I realised what they were doing in time,” he says.
Today, Father Angel’s parish is affiliated with the Bulgarian Patriarchate – a move that keeps it far from both Putin and Patriarch Kirill. A small sign sticky-taped to the church’s noticeboard states its independence: “This church has nothing to do with Russian politics or church politics.”
But not everyone has been as lucky. The guardians of the small wooden chapel of St Sigfrids, nestled atop the idyllic south-western Stockholm suburb of Aspudden, did not see the attack coming until it was almost too late.
Built in 1900 and for decades run by the friendship association Friends of St Sigfrids, the church became a takeover target in 2020 after its temporary Moscow Patriarchate tenant, St Sergij – the same group that had zoomed in on Father Angel’s establishment – refused to move out after its two-month lease ran out.
With the help of another tenant, a hyper conservative Christian group, they then flooded the association with new membership applications and called an assembly in a bid to oust the board.
When that failed – owing to a technical mistake – the hostile congregations formed a shadow board, changed the locks on the church, and even managed to freeze the original friendship association’s bank accounts.
“They stole this church. They stole it with open eyes. They forgot the seventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt not steal’,” Kare Strindberg, who has volunteered as the church’s pastor since the mid-1990s, says, visibly shaken by the events.
"I couldn’t even get into my own church. I couldn’t access my own priest’s robes that were hanging here, because they’d changed the locks."
At one point, Strindberg’s son, Johan, found a CCTV camera in the back-room of the church, and as soon as he dismantled it, he was approached by a man wearing military fatigues.
“He spoke Russian and appeared as if from nowhere. It was surreal,” he remembers.
Four years later, the original friendship association finally won its church back – but only after taking the perpetrators to court.
Both Kare and Johan Strindberg are convinced their “family church” was targeted because of its location.
Just like the church in Vasteras, St Sigfrids is strategically placed, and its church spire offers a breathtaking, and full-range, view of Stockholm. Some say the Russian embassy can be seen from there.
But perhaps more importantly, it is just a stone’s throw away from a large bridge carrying Essingeleden, Stockholm’s main traffic artery and one of the country’s most critical transport corridors. Some 150,000 cars, trucks and buses pass through here every day.
“If this would blow up, we’d be in big trouble,” remarks Strindberg the elder, nodding towards the bridge as he shows FRANCE 24 around the church grounds, which are also near the Swedish capital’s biggest water reservoir.
According to Wernstedt, at SAPO, it is very much a part of the Moscow Patriarchate’s playbook to sweep up assets near sensitive areas and infrastructure.
Evgeny Lyubimov, the chairman of St Sergij, laughs when FRANCE 24 reaches him by telephone and asks him about the spy accusations directed at the Moscow Patriarchate in Sweden. “These stories are very funny,” he says.
The ‘projects’ map
Sweden is not the only country on guard against the Kremlin-affiliated Russian Orthodox Church. In 2023, Bulgaria expelled the national head of the Moscow Patriarchate on suspicion of espionage. The same year, the FBI also warned Russian and Greek Orthodox churches on American soil against Russian agents potentially using their churches to recruit new spies.
“The threat of the Russian Orthodox Church is underappreciated by a lot of countries in Europe,” Oksanen says. “It is the only [Russian] structure not affected by sanctions, and we tend to make the mistake of looking at it as if it was a church – because it looks like a church – when in reality, it’s something else.”
At the end of this investigation, the city of Vasteras approved a proposal to investigate how it could potentially expropriate the church. “The property is being used, or could be used, for espionage activities linked to a foreign power,” the city’s executive office wrote in a statement.
In the meantime, the Moscow Patriarchate’s list of projects only seems to be growing. Their project map shows at least a dozen locations in Europe where the Russian state is currently helping it get a foothold.
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