Head of the Kharkiv Diocese of the OCU: only five parishes joined us in the entire Kharkiv region — and even that with compromises

The head of the Kharkiv and Slobozhansky diocese of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), Mitrofan Butynsky, complained that in the Kharkiv region, the process of “transfers” from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) to his structure is moving very slowly. According to him, only five parishes have changed jurisdiction along with their priests. This was reported by Ukrinform.

“As of today, there are already more than 35 churches (OCU – ed.) in the Kharkiv region, five of which came from the Moscow Patriarchate. And we already have more than 55 priests, 25 of whom are chaplains,” Butynsky said.

He admitted that joining the OCU in the Slobozhanshchyna region is “very difficult” — even despite calendar compromises.

“We are developing. There are transfers. But here, in Slobozhanshchyna, they happen very painfully, with scandals. Even though we make concessions on the calendar — they can remain on the old one, it’s not so essential for us,” the hierarch noted.

He separately emphasized that Kharkiv remains unreachable for the OCU — there have been no “transfers” in the city at all.

It should also be recalled that another “scandal out of nothing” occurred in one of the churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Kharkiv. The reason for the incident was religious literature from Russian and Belarusian publishers, sold in the church’s icon shop. The activists who staged the scandal over the books described the situation in pure Russian on social media and accused the shop assistant of lacking patriotism.