Earlier, the spokesman for the OCU, Yevstratiy Zoria, who participated in the Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, said that the ban on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is justified because the existence of the canonical Church in Ukraine threatens “freedom of conscience.”
“The U.S. State Department was involved in the creation of the OCU,” Bob Amsterdam in an interview with Tucker Carlson
The head of the international human rights company Amsterdam & Partners LLP, Robert Amsterdam, who represents the legal interests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, gave a lengthy interview to the famous American journalist Tucker Carlson, in which he spoke about the role of the US State Department in the creation of the OCU and the destruction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the Ukrainian government. Amsterdam claims that the US State Department and the CIA took part in the creation of the OCU, and the persecution of the UOC was financed, in particular, by USAID funds. The interview was published on Tucker Carlson’s YouTube channel.
“5 years ago, a new church was created in Ukraine by the Poroshenko administration with the active assistance of the US government. The US State Department was involved in the creation of the church. I believe that either USAID or some other organizations financed this state church, called the OCU. This is essentially a kind of CIA operation, if you will, to create a church that would be completely free of what they saw as Putin’s dangerous influence. We looked into this, we met with people who were at high levels of the US government who confirmed to me that this was a US government operation. And we did everything we could, and we ran into a wall of Ukrainian propaganda inside Washington,” — Amsterdam said.
The lawyer added that in parallel with the creation and development of the OCU, Ukraine has launched a colossal campaign against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam pointed out that the country adopted an anti-church law banning the UOC, seized more than 1500 churches of the canonical Church, and the clergy of the UOC were beaten or arrested for any dissent.
“The OCU stole 1500 of our churches. Worse, it beat our priests, beat our parishioners, and I have all this on video. If you go to save-uoc.com, you will see a video of our parishioners being beaten. These are elderly people whose children are fighting for the liberation and defense of Ukraine at the front, and they are often beaten by SBU officers wearing masks with Nazi symbols on their sleeves,” — said Amsterdam.
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