Dozens of believers lit candles and joined in a prayer service in a small Russian Orthodox church in Moscow on Friday to mark World AIDS Day, the Associated Press news agency reports.

Women lit thin yellow candles tied with the red ribbons that symbolize the fight against HIV and AIDS while priests led the chanting of prayers at the St. Catherine the Great Martyr Church, administered by the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia.

Russia’s mainstream church, the Orthodox Patriarchate, was not planning any commemoration of its own, the church’s press service said. The U.S.-based church broke away from the Patriarchate three years after the Bolshevik Revolution and cut all ties in 1927, after Patriarch Sergiy declared the church’s loyalty to the Soviet Union’s communist government.

The Patriarchate has recently disavowed the declaration, and the two churches are now moving toward reconciling — maintaining separate administrations but bonding spiritually and allow their followers to worship in each other’s churches.

Russian Health Minister Mikhail Zurabov said in a statement issued Friday that Russia had allocated 3.1 billion rubles (US$118 million; €89 million) of the state budget this year to the fight against HIV and Hepatitis B and C, and that Russia aspired to provide equal access by all HIV sufferers to anti-retroviral drug therapies.

Chief epidemiologist Gennady Onishchenko said Thursday that the number of officially registered cases of HIV had reached 362,000. Among them are 2,300 are children, more than half infected in the womb, he said, according to the RIA-Novosti news agency.

International agencies and some Russian experts have said the true number of HIV-infected people in Russia is closer to 1 million. Activists allege that Russia is dragging its feet in battling the disease and that the nation faces a devastating epidemic and demographic crisis within the next decade if more is not done.

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