DESS created a legal conflict for the UOC in order not to exempt priests from mobilization

The State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience is increasingly being revealed as a similar structure to the Soviet era. Previously, it was the “commissioners for religious affairs,” and now it is an organization that is supposedly aimed at respecting freedom of conscience, but in fact works to control and suppress this very freedom.

This time, the DESS has actually created a legal conflict to limit the access of the clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to the possibility of reservations from mobilization to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Two mutually exclusive provisions aimed directly at the UOC were introduced in the rules governing the deferment, making it impossible for the Church’s priests to be exempt from military service.

“One of the criteria for inclusion in the List is that the religious organization is not included in the list of religious organizations in Ukraine affiliated with a foreign religious organization whose activities are prohibited in Ukraine. Instead, there is another criterion: only organizations whose statutes (regulations) have not lost their validity in the part that defines the full official name of the religious organization can be included in the list. And the charters of a large number of religious organizations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church have lost their validity in terms of their name, so they cannot be included in this list,” – Vyacheslav Horoshkov, head of the Department of Religious Affairs of the State Department of State Services of Ukraine, explained recently.

Based on the official’s words, the following picture emerges. Despite the fact that Law No. 3894, aimed at banning the activities of the UOC, has come into force, the State Emergency Service has not yet been able to prove that any religious organization that is part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church belongs to centers located in Russia. In other words, from a legal point of view, the provision on “religious organizations included in the list of religious organizations in Ukraine affiliated with a foreign religious organization whose activities are prohibited in Ukraine” cannot be applied to the UOC at this time.

However, in order to limit the access of UOC clergy to the deferral of mobilization, the State Emergency Service decided to go the other way. The refusal to allow the priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to be drafted is motivated by the fact that the parishes of the UOC ignored the discriminatory norm “on renaming”, according to which religious communities of the Church must indicate in their statutory documents their affiliation with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Thus, the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience requires the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to independently indicate in its statutory documents its affiliation with a foreign religious organization located in Russia (the Russian Orthodox Church), while within the framework of Law No. 3894, the State Service itself has not proved that any of the religious communities of the UOC have such an affiliation.

It turns out something like this. We can’t show you any affiliation with Russia, so rename yourself the ROCUS so that we can prove your connection to Moscow. And you will not get a deferral from mobilization, no matter how you do it. Whether we prove it or not, you are still the “Russian Church” for us.