“As for the Serbians, who knows? However, I suspect that both the Serbsc and the Bulgarians have been put up to this by Moscow which doesn’t really want the Council to go ahead and this is its way of flipping the bird to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople.”
That’s very likely with the Slavs but highly unlikely with the Antiochians. Their complaint about the Pat. of Jerusalem is sound and in the Orthodox world generally seen as very important. Jurisdiction and jurisdictional boundaries are ancient canonical matters with consequences far beyond any conception the Latin Church might have. The Bulgarian complaints, like the Church of Bulgaria, are nonsense. In the meantime, Black Bart of Istanbul seems to be way over playing his hand. As we learned years ago during the “Spyridon Wars”, the best way to rein him in is cut off the money. That darn near lead to his removal by the other crowned heads in the Synod. He removed Spyridon and the money tap opened.
If this Council goes through and anything even remotely controversial comes out of it, we’ll reject it and him too.
I see this very much in terms of a power-play between Moscow and Constantinople.