Media: No 'transfers' from UOC to OCU recorded in 15 regions of Ukraine

In 15 regions of Ukraine, since August 20, 2024, there have been virtually no so-called transfers of religious communities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to the OCU. Moreover, some regional administrations establish a clear distinction between the UOC and the ROC, which indirectly affects the implementation of the provisions of anti-church law No. 3894, aimed at banning the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This is reported by Glavkom.

It is reported that the editorial office of Glavkom sent requests to all regional administrations with a request to provide information on the number of religious communities associated with the Russian Orthodox Church. In this way, the journalists tried to assess the dynamics and geography of “transitions” from the UOC to the OCU and to understand whether the idea of lawmakers to give religious communities a nine-month period to change their constituent documents works. As of the end of April, not all regions had published this data. Moreover, the information from some of the 15 regional administrations that did respond to the request recorded an almost complete absence of transitions from the UOC to the OCU. As it turned out, regional administrations do not even agree on what the ROC and the UOC are and whether there is a difference between them.

Thus, after the adoption of the law “On the Prohibition of the UOC,” no transfers to the OCU were recorded in Zaporizhzhia, Ternopil, Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and other regions. In some regions, the number of re-registered UOC communities ranges from 1 to 20 parishes. The Volyn Regional State Administration said that there were no registrations of the ROC charters in the region.