"Before the creation of the OCU, Ukraine had no Orthodox Church of its own" – statement by the SSEFC to the UN

On April 24, 2025, during a session of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, a statement was made regarding the creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2018, which, according to experts, led to tensions with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which broke ties with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in May 2022. In particular, Committee expert Chinsung Chung expressed concern over possible violations of the rights to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in Ukraine in connection with the adoption of a law that effectively bans the activities of the UOC. This was reported on the SSEFC website.

In response to this concern, Ihor Lossovskyi, Deputy Head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, stated that Ukraine does not consider the situation a conflict, but rather calls it a “bloody, existential, colonial war with Russia.” According to Lossovskyi, in 2018 the Ukrainian Church received autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which was a “revolutionary decision,” since before that Ukraine “had no independent Orthodox Church of its own.”

“Now there is an independent Church of Ukraine, as in other Orthodox Christian countries. No other church activities have been banned in Ukraine,” the SSEFC representative stated.

Lossovskyi also added that the restrictions only concern the ROC, which, in his opinion, “accompanied the Russian aggression, which devastated the country and led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”

It should be noted that the Head of the SSEFC, Viktor Yelenskyi, recently met with cadets and faculty members at the National Academy of the Security Service of Ukraine. He paid special attention to the situation in Ukraine, emphasizing that despite the war, the country demonstrates a high level of religious freedom, as confirmed by data from the Pew Research Center.