MOSCOW, April 8. /TASS/. The future of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra has not yet been determined and would be decided after the monks of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) are evicted, Ukrainian Culture and Information Policy Minister Alexander Tkachenko said on Saturday.
"This is state property, museum items which should be accessible to all citizens," he said during a news marathon aired on Ukraine’s major TV channels. He explained that after all the Lavra’s facilities are returned to the state, various proposals and projects will be considered.
The Kiev-Pechersk Lavra is one of Russia's first monasteries and is the oldest monastery in modern-day Ukraine. The situation around the 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.