Metropolitan Arseny's case: the hearing on the change of jurisdiction was held with irregularities, and the appeal was postponed

In the case of Metropolitan Arseniy, the vicar of the Sviatogorsk Lavra, new developments occurred: on November 17, 2025, the Dnipro Court of Appeal held a hearing on the prosecutor’s motion to change jurisdiction, which, according to the defense, was accompanied by numerous procedural violations. The next day, November 18, another hearing was postponed — to consider an appeal against his arrest.

According to the Telegram channel of Sviatogorsk Lavra, on November 17, in Krivoy Rog, the court considered a petition of the prosecutor’s office to transfer the case from the Slavyansk city district court of Donetsk region to one of the courts of Dnipropetrovsk region. The prosecutor motivated this by the aggravation of the security situation in the Donetsk region. The defense party noted that it had previously made a similar request, which was rejected over the active objection of the same prosecutor.

According to the source, the hearing was accompanied by a number of violations. In particular, the lawyers were not duly notified about the hearing, and people’s deputy Viktoriya Hryb, who is ready to bail the metropolitan, was not included in the meeting. Vladyka Arseniy himself was able to join the videoconference from the pre-trial detention center late, and the court allegedly ignored his presence for some time. The defense filed challenges to the secretary and the panel of judges, but they were rejected.

The hearing continued under conditions of power outage, which prevented the participants from seeing each other and working with documents, as well as after the end of the official working hours of the court. In addition, according to the lawyers, the secrecy of their confidential conversation with the defendant was violated, as it was videotaped. As a result, due to technical problems with communication caused by blackouts, the lawyers lost the opportunity to participate in the hearing, and its final decision remained unknown.

Meanwhile, the hearing of the Dnipro appeals court on the complaints against the preventive measure in the form of detention, scheduled for November 18, did not take place. As Lavra reports, the reason for the postponement was that the case materials have not yet arrived from the Dnipro Cathedral Court to the appeal instance. The new date of the appeal hearing will be announced later.