“Your war with God will end with the destruction of Ukraine”

The monk answered the provocateurs in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra

In the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, the prayer standing continues for the eighth day. This is how the monks of the Lavra and believers of the UOC call what is now happening around the monastery in the center of Kyiv. Hundreds of parishioners who arrived at the Lavra at the end of last week remain there day and night, protecting the monastery. This morning, according to tradition, began with a general prayer. The pouring rain did not affect the steadfastness of the believers: only the umbrellas closed more tightly. But provocateurs have decreased …

On the eve of the National Reserve “Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra”, subordinate to the Ministry of Culture of the country, signed an agreement with the Department of Police Protection in the city of Kyiv. They say that the agreement with the UOC on the lease of the premises of the Lavra has been terminated, now they need to be protected. On this occasion, the UOC stated that they regard the actions of the Reserve as “additional pressure on the brethren of the monastery” in order to impede the performance of worship and the use of buildings and temples of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, under the pretext of “protection”.

The police, however, do not annoy the monks and the faithful so far. The same cannot be said about provocateurs who daily try to unbalance the parishioners of the Lavra. Now, a video has spread across many Ukrainian social networks, where a shaven-headed radical “digs” to an 11-year-old parishioner. He inspires a teenage girl that at her age there can be no faith and it is not clear why she is standing here at all. The child goes on a cry, convincing that she stands for her faith and that she wants to be in the UOC, “and not with the devils from the OCU.”

Today, the same stubborn “journalists” acting on tracing paper – one with a microphone gets into his face, the other from the side shoots it on the phone – they tried to provoke the monk of the Lavra to an aggressive response, asking him who is to blame for everything. The monk answered that the war with God unleashed by the Ukrainian authorities was to blame for everything. “Your war will end with the destruction of Ukraine,” the monk told the provocateurs.

So far, the authorities in Kyiv are not resorting to active actions, apparently waiting for everything to resolve itself, and the defenders of the Lavra to leave its borders. And then the police get involved.

But in Western Ukraine, the words of the adviser to the office of the President Podolyak about the physical destruction of the UOC are taken literally. Not a day goes by without religious battles. Yesterday in Lvov, the Church of St. George was seized from the UOC, which they intend to turn into a “garrison temple” of the OCU. And today, in the morning, an excavator began to demolish the church of the Baptist of Rus’ – Equal-to-the-Apostles Prince Vladimir in a residential microdistrict of Lvov. “The last outpost of the Moscow church in Lvov. Dismantling in Sykhiv,” the head of the Lviv regional administration Maxim Kozitsky said on his social network page. Who also promised that an OCU temple would appear on these lands. However, as experience shows, the OCU does not know how to build temples. In the five years of its existence, the so-called autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine has not erected a single church, but has captured almost a thousand as raiders.