MOSCOW, April 12. /TASS/. The Russian State Duma (lower parliament house) on Wednesday adopted the statement on the Kiev regime’s repressive policy against the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
The document was prepared by the Duma international committee. The deputies stress that they "share the indignation and utter resentment millions of Christians in the entire world are feeling amid to the numerous reports revealing the Ukrainian post-Maidan authorities’ policy aimed at the complete extermination of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church."
The lawmakers express their support for the "Ukrainian brothers and sisters who are witnessing an attempt to destroy the canonical Orthodox Church in Ukraine and admire the resilience and courage of people confronting the ideological successors of the Nazi blasphemers." The Russian deputies call on the international community, lawmakers, politicians, diplomats and human rights organizations to "give a principled legal assessment to the criminal actions of the [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky regime and demand the Kiev authorities immediately stop arbitrariness in respect of Orthodox holy sites in Ukraine, release the detained and arrested UOC clerics and parishioners, and strictly comply with their international legal commitments," the statement said.
Course towards eradicating UOC
In Ukraine, tensions over the UOC soar every day. Supporters of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine have been seizing buildings of the canonical Church. Local authorities are depriving the UOC of the right to lease land its buildings stand on. Such decisions were made last week by authorities in Khmelnitsky, Lutsk, and Kamenets-Podolsky. In Ivano-Frankovsk, schismatics seized all UOC churches. The canonical Church has lost all church buildings in Lvov. On April 10, the Rovno regional authorities banned the UOC in the region.
In 2018, after a Unification Council in Kiev, the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was created from two schismatic organizations, which later obtained autocephaly from Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. The Russian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) do not recognize the canonical status of this religious organization. After the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, its adherents began a campaign to seize the UOC’s church buildings by force. The Kiev regime supports the policy of driving the UOC out. On the instructions of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, the government drafted and submitted to the Verkhovna Rada (parliament) a bill permitting the wholesale banning of the UOC in the country should the Ukrainian authorities determine that it has ties to Russia. Over the past year, UOC priests have been accused of high treason or sanctioned while the takeover of churches by the schismatics has intensified.