The former MP said that the AFU deliberately shelled the churches of the UOC on the frontline

Ruslan Koshulynskyy, the former deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament and a functionary of the Freedom parliamentary faction, has said that units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces are targeting Ukrainian Orthodox Church churches on the front line. Koshulinskyy claims that the servicemen do so because they do not consider the UOC religious buildings to be religious buildings, as they «belong to the Moscow Patriarchate». The corresponding statement of the former MP is published on the page of the «Freedom» in Facebook.

In the broadcast of the program «Great Lviv speaks», Koshulinsky told a story about his «mortar man friend» from the AFU, who during the fighting, seeing the temple of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, opened fire on it, because he was convinced that the religious buildings of the UOC — «is not a church» . «The commander, you can see, was a good, normal Ukrainian. He said, ‘This is not a church. This is the Moscow patriarchate. A house with a cross.’ That is, it is not the Church, and this should be realized by our rulers», — quoted Koshulinsky words, allegedly said at the front.

We shall remind you that earlier it was reported that for three and a half years of military operations in Ukraine at least 700 religious sites, most of which belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, have been damaged or destroyed. During the entire period of the war at least 346 churches of the UOC were damaged. Such data is cited by the Workshop of Academic Religious Studies. In most of these cases, the Ukrainian side accuses the Russian armed forces of shelling religious buildings on the territory of Ukraine.