Kipshidze on the UOC’s “Affiliation”: “This is Pressure on the Canonical Church of Ukraine”

The Deputy Head of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate for Church-Society and Media Relations, Vakhtang Kipshidze, commented on the decision by Kyiv officials to recognize the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as “affiliated” with the Russian Orthodox Church. He called the decision an attempt to exert pressure on the canonical Church of Ukraine and to use it as a pretext for persecuting believers who have already suffered over the past years. This was reported by TASS.

According to Kipshidze, the decision contains “a huge portion of completely unprincipled cynicism.” He emphasized that the term “affiliation” is inappropriate for describing relationships among believers within the Orthodox Church.

“We are not affiliated; we constitute one Church, we are the one Body of Christ, we are united by common prayer, the veneration of shared saints, and shared history,” Kipshidze stated. He noted that the term “affiliated” is usually applied to commercial structures, not church communities.

“We will also not cease our witness wherever we can speak about what is happening in Ukraine, which is absolutely lawless and grotesque, undeserving of any justification that the Ukrainian authorities’ Western, so to speak, masters try to provide,” Kipshidze concluded.

Earlier, it was reported that Vakhtang Kipshidze stated that the path to peace in Ukraine is impossible without ending the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.