Ukraine’s latest legislation, which aims to grant the government the right to ban any church or religious community with suspected ties to Russia, is akin to Soviet-style repression, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) said in a statement on Thursday.
Earlier this week, Ukrainian MPs approved the bill, which is seen by the ROC as directly targeted against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). Despite the UOC officially declaring full autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2022, Kiev has nevertheless repeatedly accused the church and its clergy of maintaining ties to Moscow. The legislation also outright bans the ROC and all affiliated religious institutions from operating in Ukraine.
“The purpose of this law is to liquidate [the UOC] and all its communities and to forcibly transfer them to other religious organizations,” the ROC surmised, noting that “hundreds of monasteries, thousands of communities, millions of Orthodox believers in Ukraine will find themselves outlawed and will lose their property and place of prayer.”
The Holy Synod noted that the scale and centralized nature of this new law that the church in Russia says targets the UOC is comparable to “sad historical precedents such as the persecutions in the Roman Empire during the time of Nero and Diocletian, the so-called de-Christianization of France during the French Revolution of the 18th century, the atheistic repressions in the Soviet Union, and the destruction of the Albanian Orthodox Church in the 1960s.”
In its statement, the ROC also pointed out that Kiev’s latest move comes against the backdrop of a “long-term, slanderous anti-church campaign of the Ukrainian media” which has sought to defame canonical Orthodoxy and to provoke and justify the mass seizure of churches, which have been organized by the radical nationalists, local authorities, special services and law enforcement agencies.
These seizures, the Synod noted, are often accompanied by violence and mass beatings of clergy and churchgoers. Additionally, UOC clerics have continued to receive threats and blackmail from Ukrainian special services, who have fabricated dozens of criminal cases against the pastors, in some cases handing them sentences that are unjust, the ROC alleges.
The Holy Synod concluded its response by stating that it would appeal to international human-rights organizations to immediately and objectively respond to the “flagrant persecution of believers in Ukraine.”