Religious scholar: Uncertain status of UOC is a strategy to maintain ties with ROC

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is in a difficult canonical situation, and its current strategy is a forced attempt to maintain ties with Moscow without uniting with the OCU. According to experts, this “game of hide and seek” is due to the pressure of external circumstances and the lack of a clear canonical status in the UOC, which puts its Primate, His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufriy, in a very difficult position.

As explained by religious scholar Ihor Kozlovsky, the UOC is not officially recognized as a separate church structure in world Orthodoxy. “The UOC is not in the diptych, they are not a separate church. An independent church – there is no such status. Either autocephaly, or autonomy, or exarchate. And the UOC is neither the first, nor the second, nor the third,” the expert noted.

According to him, the problem is that the Moscow Patriarchate will not grant the UOC autonomy, and the Ecumenical Patriarch, represented by the OCU, has already granted autocephaly to the Ukrainian Church. Thus, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church faces a dilemma: in order not to unite with the OCU and at the same time not to lose its canonical status, it needs to maintain at least a formal connection with Moscow.

To recap, OCU hierarch Oleksandr Drabynko said that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will not disappear from Ukraine, but may go underground. In his opinion, it would be much better for the OCU to establish a dialogue with the clergy and believers of the UOC than to intensify confrontation.