MOSCOW, April 7. /TASS/. Municipal legislators of the Berezan town council in the Brovary district of the Kiev Region have voted to seize the land that the churches of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) stand on, even though their construction was fundraised by parishioners, the Reverend Alexander Klimenko said on Friday.
"Today, our lawmakers in Berezan, who have invested neither one hryvnia nor one minute of their time into any church building of the congregation, voted to seize the land of our religious communities, meaning the seizure of church buildings. Let me remind you that the St. Sophronius Church was built, save a small percentage, with my personal savings and the donations of my friends, family and relatives," the priest said, as cited by the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ) on its Telegram channel.
The Union of Orthodox Journalists pointed out that the authorities were dead set on eradicating the canonical denomination in the country, not even waiting for the Verkhovna Rada to pass a bill banning the UOC. Local meetings of pseudo-parishioners are held to vote for communities and churches to defect to the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), and local councils convene emergency meetings to seize the land the churches stand on from the UOC. These decisions were adopted in Khmelnitsky, Lutsk and Kamenets-Podolsky. In Ivano-Frankovsk, all the churches belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have been taken over by schismatics. The UOC has been robbed of all its churches in Lvov. A church belonging to the UOC was seized in the Chernovtsy Region as well as the St. Paraskeva Church in Novy Korets in the Rovno Region.
The Ukrainian authorities unleashed a campaign to wipe out the UOC after the merger of two schismatic entities into the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine, whose followers went on to forcibly seize the houses of worship belonging to the canonical Orthodox Church. Over the past year, Kiev has been on a crusade to totally ban the UOC, and a corresponding bill was drawn up by the government on instruction from Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky and submitted to parliament. Treason charges have been levied against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church clergy and sanctions have been slapped on them, while schismatics have ramped up seizures of church buildings. In March, the authorities terminated the lease of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra with the canonical Orthodox Church and demanded that the monks leave the monastery.