Kyiv’s move to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church “constitutes a clear violation of the freedom of religion guaranteed by both international law and the Ukrainian constitution”, a lawyer acting for the Church has said.
In a letter to President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, Robert Amsterdam of Amsterdam & Partners LLP urged them to make President Volodymyr Zelenskiy “suspend efforts to ban this historic institution”, which has traditionally been loyal to the Moscow patriarchate.
The status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) has been contested since 2014, when its then-leader demanded autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul – recognition of its independence from Moscow. When this was granted in 2019, the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) broke away from the UOC, still tied to Moscow.
The government has placed heavy restrictions on the UOC since the Russian invasion in February 2022, including the confiscation of its chief monastery, the Pechersk Lavra in Kyiv. A number of its bishops and priests have been accused of collaboration with the invasion or complicity in the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for the war.
Legislation effectively to outlaw the UOC is expected to come before the Ukrainian parliament in mid-January.
“There is no conceivable way the prohibition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is a necessary or proportionate act,” said Amsterdam’s letter. “Instead, it is an overly punitive attack that will cause serious harm to Orthodox Ukrainians.”
He said that a ban would compromise Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership, and that its prosecutions of UOC clerics “call into question Ukraine’s commitment to the rule of law”.
A paper circulated with the letter claimed that “the alleged ‘crimes’ and farcical evidence [in these prosecutions] would not even reach a court of law in a country with an independent judiciary and a strong tradition [of] the rule of law”.
While it is uncertain which Church most Orthodox Ukrainians adhere to, an Amsterdam & Partners statement said that “many worshippers have chosen to stick with the ancient Julian calendar” maintained by the UOC, celebrating Christmas on 7 January while the OCU and the Ukrainian state celebrated according to the Gregorian calendar on 25 December.
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church which has also adopted the Gregorian calendar, said that “the new always wins” as he marked the Epiphany on 7 January.
“The enslaving Russian ideology proposes nothing more than a return to the old,” he said. “They attempt to force upon us, re-adoption of the old imperial and Soviet ways of thinking and living.”
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