Former deacon of the UGCC in Moscow
Born in 1959 in Moscow. A citizen of Russia, he consciously embraced Holy Baptism in 1993 in a suburban Moscow church of the Russian Orthodox Church. For 10 years, he was a church activist at the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian in Shubin (Moscow), and his spiritual father was the late Priest Georgy Chistyakov.
In 2005, he reunited with the Catholic Church while remaining within the Byzantine Rite, attending Greek Catholic services in Moscow. From 2008 to 2012, with the blessing of his parish priest, he obtained a second higher education degree (Bachelor of Theology) from the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. In 2015, on behalf of the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), he worked on the registration of Crimean Greek Catholic parishes with the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. On the Feast of the Ascension in 2017, he was ordained a deacon of the UGCC by Bishop Mykhaylo Bubniy, Exarch of Odesa and Crimea. Until May 2018, he carried out his church ministry in Crimea, with personal authorization from the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine. Subsequently, he served as a deacon at a Ukrainian Catholic parish in Moscow.
From the very beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war, he actively denounced the Russian aggressors in his sermons during divine services and online through his social media accounts. In 2023, Father Alexander became the target of a harassment campaign online by Russian pro-war "Z-activists," who called for his arrest and physical violence against him. Consequently, in August 2023, he was forced to flee to Armenia. Russian police operatives raided his home address with the intent to arrest him only after his departure.