Mosaic depicting Putin in the temple of the Ministry of Defense was dismantled

It is reported by Kommersant.

Earlier it was said that in the interiors of the Patriarchal Cathedral in honor of the Resurrection of Christ in Kubinka appeared a mosaic depicting the president, as well as Russian politicians and officials, including the head of the Ministry of Defense Sergey Shoigu, the speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko, the chairman of the State Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, the director of the FSB Alexander Bortnikov.

At the same time, as the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Expert Council on Church Art, Architecture and Restoration, Archpriest Leonid Kalinin, head of the art council for the construction of the church, noted, there was no agreement with these people.

“The Art Council considers these images to be absolutely appropriate, reflecting the historical truth, from which pages cannot be torn out involuntarily,” said the archpriest.

On April 26, presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the head of state knows about the mosaic with his image, but believes that it is too early to give an assessment of his work in this way.

- When he was told about it, he smiled and said: "One day the grateful descendants will appreciate our achievements, but now it is too early to do it", - Peskov forwarded the words of the president.

After this statement, it was reported that they would not be redoing the mosaic anyway - Archpriest Kalinin specified that only the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church could decide to dismantle the mosaic. And the chairman of the Synodal Department for Cooperation with the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Agencies of the Moscow Patriarchate, Bishop Stefan Klinsky said that the art council for the construction of the main church of the Ministry of Defense would decide to dismantle the image “taking into account the opinion of the head of state”.

The architect, the author of the temple project Dmitry Smirnov, in turn, admitted that the mosaic, in fact, was not finally approved.

- Artists laid it out, but it has not yet gone to implementation. That is, it was in the form of a sketch, and that’s all”, - Smirnov told REN TV.

He noted that the mosaic should have appeared where the parishioners did not get.

- This is a separate, almost a museum, room where artists proposed this idea, but it has not yet found physical realization. They started to realize it a little bit sketchy, after that it got into the news, but in the final form it is not implemented yet, - the architect explained.