After months of government pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which has been accused of everything from supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine to spying for Russian forces, the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has taken its first steps toward outlawing the denomination entirely.
A bill to outlaw the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was presented this week, winning the support of 267 Ukrainian MPs and passing its first reading. The bill, according to the Guardian, will require a second reading and approval from President Volodymyr Zelensky to come into law.
The bill will allow the Zelensky government to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church if it is decided that the church has institutional links to the Russian Orthodox Church, something the UOC denies.
Iryna Herashchenko, an MP for the European Solidarity party, commented on the vote on Telegram, saying:
The parliament took the first step towards the liquidation of the FSB sect. To be honest, the voted government bill is weak, [and] the procedure for conducting an examination prescribed there makes it impossible to quickly ban the [Russian Orthodox Church].
But we will correct it before the second reading. Otherwise, the law will be ritualistic, not working. With obscenities, shouts, and emotions, the deputies voted in the first reading to ban the church of the aggressor country in Ukraine.
She later claimed that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church owns 2,876 buildings and 3,800 plots of land within Ukraine and questioned why the church is not subject to the same sanctions as Russian businesses, stating:
And if sanctions have been imposed on Russian businesses in Ukraine, then why does the Moscow church continue to earn money and spend parishioners’ money to promote the Kremlin’s ideology without any problems?
That is why the bills to ban the Russian Orthodox Church are not about religion but about protecting Ukraine’s national security.
The UOC has been in the sights of the Ukrainian government for years, with the government favouring the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which was created in 2018 and is independent of the Russian Orthodox Church and its Patriarch Kirill.
Many priests and other members of the clergy within the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have been accused of spying for Russia, preaching pro-Russian propaganda, or actively trying to undermine the Ukrainian war effort.
As a result, according to Russian state-owned broadcaster TASS, as many as 65 priests of the UOC have been charged with crimes, 19 hierarchs have been stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship, and many churches and monasteries have been forcibly taken from the UOC, including the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery, where monks were accused of having links to the Kremlin in March of this year.
As many as five to six million Ukrainians still belong to the UOC despite the pressure imposed on the church by the Zelensky government.
All of the Zelensky government’s steps toward banning the UOC came after the church declared it was not beholden to Moscow shortly after the start of the Russian invasion of the country last year.
The UOC commented on the proposed ban this week, saying that such a law would violate the European Convention on Human Rights and the guarantee of freedom of religion.
“Undoubtedly, the adoption of this draft law will indicate that human rights and freedoms, for which our state is also fighting, are losing their meaning,” the church said.
Ukrainian animosity toward the UOC has also been criticised internationally, with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) publishing a report earlier this month that commented on the issue of religious freedom.
The OHCHR wrote:
Moreover, OHCHR documented 10 cases of physical violence and 6 cases of threats resulting from conflicts between parishioners of different Orthodox Christian communities during the reporting period. Tensions were particularly high in March and April 2023, with 50 per cent of documented cases occurring within those two months. For instance, on 28 March in Ivano-Frankivsk, perpetrators sprayed tear gas into the premises of a church of the UOC, where clergymen and parishioners were gathered. Several people were injured, and at least one clergyman was hospitalised. Although the police were within five meters of the incident, they did not separate participants or prevent violence. In one incident, a woman suffered a miscarriage after a tear gas attack.
American law professor William W. Burke-White has also slammed the Zelensky government, saying, “These attacks on the UOC are a grave violation of human rights. The Ukrainian Parliament is well aware of the path it is on. In fact, parliamentarians have amended the pending legislation by removing a critical passage that would have ensured compliance with human rights law. “
