The Ukrainian government has defended plans to repossess the country's best-known monastery from the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), after repeated accusations that its leaders sided with Russia's invasion.
“Ukraine is a democratic state in which freedom of religion is guaranteed,” Oleg Nikolenko, a foreign minstry spokesman, said in a social media post.
“At the same time, freedom is not the same as the right to engage in activities undermining national security ... We urge the accusers to refrain from unbalanced political assessments and base their reports on facts.”
The official was responding to a weekend statement by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, which said it was concerned that “state actions against the UOC” could prove “discriminatory” and urged a “fair trial” for “all persons facing criminal charges”.
Meanwhile, the repossession was also defended by senior member of the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Metropolitan Evstratiy (Zorya), who said it was preferable for “a few dozen monks” to pray at the monastery “for Ukraine, our victory and a just peace”, than for one hundred to pray “for the victory of Putin and a Russian peace”.
The exchanges took place as Ukrainian officials completed inventories at Kyiv's 57-acre Pecherska Lavra, or Monastery of the Caves, in preparation for the eviction of its 200 monks on Wednesday.
In a last-ditch appeal on Sunday, the UOC's head, Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky) told Orthodox pilgrims the monastery's inhabitants had prayed for Ukraine's “government, army and people”, and said he was praying they would be allowed to remain.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Moscow patriarchate's synodal department for society and media relations, Vladimir Legoyda, whose country's year-long invasion has left up to 300,000 dead and millions of Ukrainians homeless, described the monks' removal as “open persecution” and said “all channels of dialogue” with the Ukrainian government were now closed.
The UOC was ordered to leave the state-owned monastic complex in early March, following multiple security service raids on sites belonging to the Church, several of whose leaders, including the Pecherska Lavra's Father Superior, Metropolitan Pavlo (Dmitrievich), have been sanctioned by Ukraine for collaborating with Russia's invasion.
In a mid-March appeal to President Volodymyr Zelensky, the UOC's governing holy synod said the eleventh-century Lavra had been “literally raised from ruins” after Communist rule by UOC monks, who were now being targeted by “baseless accusations”, provoking “a great wave of indignation” among UOC members.
It added said the UOC had “always educated its flock to love their motherland, be worthy state citizens and fulfil their civic duties with dignity”, and had also condemned Russia's “military aggression” and called on its members “to defend their native land”.
However, the monastery's repossession was backed by the head of the OCU, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), who dismissed comparisons with Communist-era religious persecution, and said he hoped a “final ban on Moscow's influence on Ukrainian Church life” would be confirmed by legislation currently passing through the Kyiv parliament.
“With the Ukrainian state and society, our Church has long sought to induce the leadership of the Moscow patriarchate in Ukraine to end its subordination to the Russian centre, which is completely controlled by the Kremlin and used as an instrument for hybrid aggression against Ukraine,” he told Pechersk-Lavra residents in a mid-March message.
“Neither Metropolitan Onufriy nor his synod reacted in any way to numerous facts of collaboration by their hierarchs and clergy with the Russian occupiers, or to their annexation of religious structures located in the temporarily occupied territories. Instead, in the spirit of Russian propaganda, they focused on accusations against Ukraine.”
The charges were exchanged as fierce fighting continued along Ukraine's eastern frontline, accompanied by fresh Russian missile and drone strikes, a week after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, his commissioner for children's rights, for “unlawfully deporting and transferring” Ukrainian children and deliberately targeting civilians.
In a national message on Sunday, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halych, said official data confirmed that over 16,000 children had been “abducted by the Russians, forcibly taken from their families and told their parents had abandoned them”.
However, he added that other sources had put the number much higher “in the tens or hundreds of thousands”.
With some returning children talking of “the horrors they experienced”, the archbishop said, Ukrainians were grateful to international institutions for “recognising the abductions as a war crime”.
Loading ...
