Ukrainian religious raiders robbed the UOC of 250 churches

“They threatened to slaughter like pigs”

Already on Thursday, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine promises to settle in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra representatives of the OCU – the schismatic church of Ukraine, created at the insistence of ex-president Petro Poroshenko. They will be given the temple of Agapit of the Caves, located at the very entrance gate on the territory of the monastery. The eviction of the monks of the UOC from the Lavra is another “raider seizure” in a whole series of seizure of churches from the canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Property claims and disputes over the ownership of churches became especially acute in Ukraine after December 15, 2018, when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was formed by combining the non-canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

The administration of the then President Petro Poroshenko decided “legally” through directives to literally squeeze the temples from the UOC-MP in favor of the formed OCU. In fact, it turned out that neither the abbots nor the parishioners were going to voluntarily “join” the established church. And then it was decided to involve criminal groups, ATO veterans and nationalist radicals in the process. In total, over 500 parishes were illegally re-registered in favor of the OCU in 2018-2021. After the start of the special operation, 400 communities were registered in the schismatic church. At least 250 churches were taken by force from the UOC.

The first act can be considered the capture of the Church of Saints Cosmas and Damian by the canonical UOC in the Rivne region in April 2019. During the service, unidentified people broke into the church, where there were a hundred parishioners, among whom were children, and began to randomly beat everyone in a row. “People were grabbed by the hands, hair, clothes were torn, children fell, they walked over the children,” said one of the women present there. The victims reported the incident to the police, but the Ukrainian “law enforcement officers” ignored all appeals.

In July 2021, in the village of Verbovets, Vinnytsia region, schismatics tried to seize the Church of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos. As local media wrote, citizens who had nothing to do with the community pushed priests and faithful of the UOC-MP out of the temple, tore off the cross from the rector, threatened with sharpened fittings to “cut parishioners like pigs”.

After the territorial defense detachments were formed in 2022, it was the terbats armed with machine guns that replaced the nationalists with bats who had gone to the front, which had previously been used as a powerful argument in the seizure of temples. On April 14, on the territory of the Borispol Cathedral of the Intercession, representatives of the local territorial defense, the “Security Sector” and the volunteer battalion “Borispol-1” tried to seize. The case was not without a fight and almost came to shooting, which the “volunteers” decided not to arrange.

By the way, the inaction of the police, bordering on complicity, has become a hallmark of Ukrainian church raiding. But in 2023, this line was also passed: the police began to directly participate in the seizure of temples. So it was in the Chernivtsi-Bukovina diocese in Ivano-Frankivsk.

But the seizure of churches is something else… Yesterday, the right-wing radical and extremist Nikolai Korchinsky openly called for the burning of Orthodox churches. In Western Ukraine, by the way, this has been practiced for a long time. In February 2019, on the feast of the Meeting of the Lord, unknown people set fire to the Ascension Church of the UOC in Krivoy Rog and left Nazi inscriptions on its walls. A few days before, two churches were set on fire in Zaporozhye and one in the Nikolaev region. In the same way, last June, supporters of the OCU set fire to the Church of Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir. This was not the first time the temple had been attacked. Earlier, for disobedience to the new church, divine services were repeatedly disrupted there, walls were painted and doors were barricaded.