MOSCOW, July 7. /TASS/. Under a false pretext, the Ukrainian government has started the process of de-facto eliminating the canonic Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), and this fact requires an independent international investigation, the Russian Orthodox Church has said.

"Guided by purely political considerations, the Ukrainian authorities invented a false pretext to begin a de-facto elimination of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, including by taking away its most revered relics, such as the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. The ultimate goal of the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is to rewrite the history of the Ukrainian people, to strip them of their identity which stems from Prince Vladimir’s Christianization of all peoples inhabiting Ancient Rus," the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate for Relations with Society and the Media said in a statement on Thursday.

"We are calling for an independent international inquiry into the ongoing elimination of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church," the statement says.

"The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is subjected to outrageous lawlessness and terror with the connivance of international human rights organizations, who de-facto ignore the obvious encroachment on religious freedoms of millions of believers," it says. "The Russian Orthodox Church is once again requesting the international community to pay attention to the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which must be stopped immediately."

The situation around the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery, one of Russia's first monasteries and the oldest monastery in modern-day Ukraine, has been heating up since March 30. UOC monks refused to leave the cloister as demanded by the directorate of the Ukrainian Culture Ministry’s Kiev-Pechersk Lavra Historical and Cultural Preserve, which had unilaterally terminated the UOC’s open-ended lease to the Lavra.