The Jelensky Pyramid

The head of the State Service for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience ( SSEFC), Viktor Yelensky, continues to give contradictory comments on how the anti-church law No. 3894, aimed at banning the UOC, will work. According to the official, the law sometimes bans the UOC, sometimes not. Sometimes it only refers to ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, sometimes it restricts the activities of the UOC. However, from all this information noise made by the head of the State Emergency Service, it is noteworthy that the mechanism by which the state will ban the UOC is already ripe and extremely simple.

The first point that Yelensky himself drew attention to is that they will start with the Kyiv Metropolis. Why exactly? Everything is simple. In order not to drown in lawsuits from all legal entities associated with the UOC, the SSEFC will “prove” the ties with Moscow of the Kyiv Metropolis, as, so to speak, the head office. As is well known, the Kyiv Metropolis is personally headed by the Primate of the UOC, and it includes a significant number of other legal entities for which it is a (co)founder. These include theological educational institutions, synodal departments, monasteries, and, in particular, diocesan administrations.

Next, the UOC will begin to build up like a house of cards, because it is absolutely pointless to deny that the dioceses of the UOC, as legal entities, are directly related to the Kyiv Metropolis. Next, it will come down to the foundation of the Church – ordinary parishes, which, in turn, are connected to diocesan administrations, which is quite unambiguously stated in their statutory documents.

Thus, it is enough for the SSEFC to “prove” the connection of the Kyiv Metropolis with Moscow, and all others will then receive orders requiring them to amend their charters within a certain period of time or cease to exist with the subsequent loss of real estate, i.e. religious buildings.

By and large, all the judicial burdens in this case will fall on the shoulders of the Kyiv Metropolis of the UOC. And it will be really difficult to justify oneself, since, apparently, some blind, deaf, and dumb people work in the SSEFC. Yelensky, for example, said that the UOC should officially withdraw from all institutions of the Russian Orthodox Church: Synodal, conciliar, and interconciliar. The fact is that the UOC officially declared this after the Council in Feofaniya, and the Primate sent a letter to the then head of the SSEFC Olena Bohdan. That is, following Yelensky’s statements, the SSEFC either did not believe all this, or, in fact, all this fuss has completely different goals.

We stick to the second point on this issue. Law No. 3894 is not aimed at “depriving the ROC of its influence on the UOC,” but specifically at forcing the UOC to move to the OCU or disappear from the religious map of Ukraine.