Deputies of the ruling Servant of the People party are proposing to nationalize the property of the Ukrainian church under Moscow’s jurisdiction within 48 hours of the law’s adoption. But she gives her parishes, monasteries and seminaries 14 days to “change subordination”. In addition to the Moscow Patriarchate, Ukraine has an autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which recognizes the sovereignty of the Patriarch of Constantinople (Moscow considers him “non-canonical”).
MP Oksana Savchuk, who introduced the bill, accused the Moscow Church of “assisting the aggressor in conducting intelligence activities.” At the beginning of the war, several people were caught gathering such information in Kyiv and the Dnieper and linked to the Moscow Patriarchate.
The drop that turned into a spell was the uprising of parishioners near Cherkasy, who opposed their parish priest because he refused to hold a memorial service for a Ukrainian serviceman.
At the same time, the church itself, which is subordinate to Moscow, is on the verge of breaking with it due to the attitude of Moscow Patriarch Kirill to the war. He never mentioned the victims on the Ukrainian side, let alone condemned the aggressor. Inspired by his example, some Russian bishops, for example, considered “deserters” those who emigrated from the country (in Ryazan), or called for a “final solution to the Ukrainian question” (in Syktyvkar).
As a result, in Ukraine, 1/3 of the dioceses stopped praying for Patriarch Kirill (and in many other churches in the dioceses that remained, for example, in the Pochaiv Lavra). Especially those who were on the front line, such as the Sumy diocese. “The Russian Orthodox Church has lost Ukraine,” said a Moscow columnist. Everyone also notes the “decline in the authority of the Russian Church in the Orthodox world,” where “communication with Patriarch Kirill is interpreted almost as complicity in aggression.”
“We have a very negative attitude to this,” a Kremlin spokesman said of the Ukrainian bill. Although the Verkhovna Rada continues to work, it is unclear whether and when it will consider the bill.