MOSCOW, April 10. /TASS/. Two places of worship of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in the city of Neteshin, Khmelnitsky Region, have been handed over to the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), the city council’s executive committee said on Monday.
"Neteshin residents voted for the Cathedral of the Icon of the Virgin of the Burning Bush and the Church of St. Paraskeva to switch over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine," the executive council’s page on Facebook (resource banned in Russia due to its ownership by Meta, which has been deemed extremist in Russia) said. It was also reported that amendments to the charters of both religious congregations had been approved at a meeting and that chairpersons and members of their respective parish councils were elected.
According to Ukraine’s Opendatabot service, which provides public and corporate access to government data from public registries, since the beginning of the year, ten UOC parishes in the Khmelnitsky Region have switched over to the OCU. Under Ukrainian law, any change in the jurisdictional affiliation of a place of worship must receive the support of at least two-thirds of the members of the given religious congregation to be deemed valid. The UOC has repeatedly asserted that the results of such votes are often falsified because those participating in them have nothing to do with the given congregation and are being deliberately brought in to churches ahead of time to vote in favor of the OCU.
On April 2, the schismatics took over the UOC cathedral in the city of Khmelnitsky. On April 8, the Union of Orthodox Journalists reported that about 200 OCU schismatics had signed a petition to seize the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Kamenets-Podolsky from the UOC. On April 3, 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.
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.