The United Nations has sounded an alarm against the Volodymyr Zelensky government for targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) with unjustified discrimination, and Orthodox prelates around the world have strongly concurred.
The UOC which was, until May of last year, subordinate to the Patriarchate of Moscow, is not to be confused with the newer, nationalist Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) which was formally constituted in December 2018 and January 2019.
Upon the initiation of Russia’s “special military operation” into Ukraine on February 24 of last year, despite their spiritual association with the invaders, Primate of the UOC, Metropolitan Onufriy, voiced “special love and support” for the Ukrainian armed forces, and called on Russian President Putin “to immediately stop the fratricidal war” (all translations from Google).
Later in May, in a protest against Russia’s invasion, a council of the UOC formally declared its “full independence” from the Patriarchate of Moscow, while in those same months, hundreds of UOC priests signed an open letter calling for Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill to face a religious tribunal over his support for the invasion.
Yet, as LifeSiteNews covered in December, due to its former links to the Patriarchate of Moscow, churches, monasteries, and convents of the UOC have been subject to military raids by the Security Service of Ukraine, also known as the SBU. Reports indicated that by December 5, the SBU had searched 350 buildings of the UOC and investigated the loyalties of 850 individuals.
Now, a March 24 report from the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has confirmed the “SBU conducted searches (some of which it referred to as ‘security measures’) in several monasteries, offices, education facilities and other property of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in Kyiv, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Dnipropetrovsk, Khmelnytskyi, Cherkasy, Volyn, Kherson, Ternopil, Poltava and Zakarpattia regions.”
“SBU officers questioned several [UOC] clergymen with the use of a polygraph” resulting in “three notices of suspicion” issued to UOC clergy including two which violate “the equality of citizens based on race, nationality, religious belief, disability or other grounds,” and the third with multiple charges including “denial of the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.”
In addition, the SBU’s “security measures” have relegated at least two suspects to “round-the-clock house arrest.”
“OHCHR is concerned that the State’s activities targeting the UOC could be discriminatory. OHCHR also recalls the need to ensure that all those facing criminal charges enjoy the full spectrum of applicable fair trial rights,” the report reads.
The OHCHR also addresses draft laws registered in Ukraine’s parliament which ban “the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the operations of religious organizations that are organizationally or canonically linked to it and prohibits them from renting state or private property in Ukraine.” These proposals also seek to ban “the use of the term ‘Orthodox’ in names of religious organizations not related to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”
Protesting the “vague legal terminology and the absence of sufficient justification” for such legal measures, the OHCHR judges they unnecessarily infringe upon “the freedom to manifest one’s religion” violating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
In response to the report, Oleh Nikolenko, spokesman of Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated, “Ukraine is a democratic state, in which freedom of religion is guaranteed. At the same time, freedom is not the same as the right to be engaged in activities that undermine national security.”
“We call on OHCHR to refrain from unbalanced political assessments and base its reports on facts,” he said.
Understanding the historical difference between the UOC and OCU
The bitter schism between the UOC and OCU have their origins in the ethnic and political divisions between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.
Since 1686, the Patriarch of Moscow had recognized authority to ordain the metropolitan archbishop of Kiev. However, two nationalistic Orthodox Churches in Ukraine came into existence in the twentieth century in response to the 1917 dissolution of the Russian Empire, and the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union. Both of these churches were unrecognized by other Eastern Orthodox Churches and considered “schismatic” while simultaneously competing with the Russian Orthodox UOC.
According to reports, in 2014 the OCU churches provided support for the U.S.-facilitated color revolution and coup d’état of the democratically elected President in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, who was perceived as an ally of Russia. In response, the Russian Federation accepted the rejoining of Crimea to its centuries-old motherland, when the peninsula held a lopsided referendum and celebrated the historical event.
As tensions and violence between the government in Kiev and Russian-speaking regions in the east of the country were ongoing in 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople issued a type of recognition to the previously unrecognized churches in Ukraine, causing a broader schism between itself and the Patriarchate of Moscow who went on to forbid the participation of UOC clergy and laity in the worship and sacraments of OCU churches.
In a March 28, 2023 statement denouncing the Zelensky regime’s “pressures, violence and persecutions” of the UOC, Primate of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Porphyry, stated that the UOC is “the only canonical and legal Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” being “recognized by all Orthodox Churches in the world” while the OCU, “recognized by only four,” is a mere “non-canonical schismatic structure” which “can become a Church only through repentance and canonical procedure, never by the stroke of someone’s pen.”
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