MOSCOW, April 5. /TASS/. Adherents of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) have forcibly taken control of a place of worship of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in the village of Zadubrovka in the Chernovtsy Region in southwestern Ukraine, the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ) reported on Wednesday.

"They are sawing through the church’s doors. <...> They stormed the church. They are beating up Orthodox believers. The police did not come to the scene at all, which, most likely, was prearranged," the commentary to video footage posted on the UOJ’s Telegram channel reads.

The situation surrounding the UOC in Ukraine has become even more exacerbated with each passing day. Earlier on Wednesday, supporters of the OCU took over a church in the Rovno Region and held a vote to reaffiliate a UOC cathedral in Lvov with the schismatics; on Tuesday, OCU followers attempted to take over two UOC churches in the Khmelnitsky Region. On the same day, the municipal councils of Kamenets-Podolsky and Khmelnitsky resolved to strip the UOC of the right to use the land plots on which its places of worship are sited.

The situation around the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery 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. On April 1, Metropolitan Pavel, the UOC vicar of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra monastery, was charged with inciting religious hatred and justifying Russia’s actions and sentenced to two months of round-the-clock house arrest.

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.