The Kremlin Uses the UOC Issue to Blackmail Ukraine – Shumylo

Director of the International Institute of Athonite Heritage, Serhii Shumylo, stated that the Russian Federation is attempting to use the issue of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as one of the conditions for ending the war, placing it alongside territorial demands regarding Crimea and the eastern regions. The expert wrote about this in his blog on RISU.

According to him, the point concerning the protection of the UOC was included in the memorandum voiced by the Russian delegation during negotiations in Turkey. There, it stood alongside demands for Ukraine to renounce the Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk regions and Crimea, to reduce the size of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, to introduce limitations in the field of armaments, and other conditions which, in Shumylo’s opinion, threaten Ukraine’s national sovereignty.

“At the same time, the Russian Federation destroys UOC churches more than any others, and completely eliminates UOC structures in the occupied territories — the very structures it supposedly tries to ‘protect’,” the historian notes.

“This is classic blackmail,” he declared. In Shumylo’s view, the Synod of the UOC must publicly condemn such manipulations and express its disagreement with the use of the Church as an instrument in the Kremlin’s political games. “If, of course, this Synod is truly Ukrainian, independent, and has no ties with the aggressor state,” the expert explains.

“It’s curious — who in the UOC is asking the Russian authorities to protect it? If the UOC has indeed severed ties with Moscow, then what business does Moscow have concerning a church organization that is independent from it? Why is the Kremlin not interested in the fate of Ukrainian Protestants, Catholics, the OCU, Old Believers, or the so-called ‘True Orthodox’? Or, say, Romanian Orthodox communities in Ukraine? But the ‘UOC issue’ is being placed on the same level as territorial claims… Is the UOC leadership willing to be a bargaining chip in such dirty, blood-soaked deals? I know that many ordinary believers and priests of the UOC are categorically opposed to this. But what does the Church leadership think?” — Shumylo asks.

It should be recalled that earlier, commenting on the results of the UOC bishops’ meeting on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Council in Feofaniya, Serhii Shumylo stated that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continues to remain canonically dependent on the Moscow Patriarchate — a fact which, according to him, only deepens its internal crisis and alienation from Ukrainian society and the state.