The appointment of Bogdan Zgoba as the secretary of the vicariate of the UOC-KP in the USA, Australia, Canada and Japan seems to his opponents ridiculous and incomprehensible. This is said in a statement circulated by media.

“For what kind of vicariate and what parishes should this newly appointed “church leader” be secretary, except perhaps over himself and the only parish headed by him, although that one is completely Russian. It is also not surprising that not so long ago this “fighter for the Kyiv patriarchy” applied to Bound Brook, to the Consistory of the UOC in the United States as part of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, where he was refused for his previous “merits”. And the brother of this “patriot” is a cleric of the Russian Orthodox Church in New York”, write the accusers of the new head of Filaret`s vicariate.

The document notes that before that, “Zgoba destroyed the Ukrainian parish of St. Nicholas in Cooper City, and by the same patriarch who gave him this appointment, he was expelled from the clergy of the Vicariate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate in the USA and Canada for behavior incompatible with the title of a priest”.

“We should not forget that Bogdan Zgoba is the person who convinced Patriarch Filaret of the need to write a letter to the Moscow Patriarch in November 2017 and who, through his connections in the Moscow Patriarchate, organized the negotiations between Patriarch Filaret and the Russian Orthodox Church, which ended in failure. We have no doubt that he still retains those ties and can be an instrument of influence of the Russian Church on the current statements of Honorary Patriarch Filaret”, the authors of the document continue.

They also noted that the “honorary patriarch” does not have the right to take the antimension from the head of the vicariate Viktor Polyarny who was dismissed by him, because they consider Epiphany Dumenko to be their leader. And “no decisions, orders and other documents issued on behalf of the honorary patriarch of the UOC-KP, or under the name of its statutory bodies after the legal registration of the Kyiv Metropolis of the UOC (OCU) on January 30, 2019 do not have canonical and legal force and are initially invalid and are not asubject to execution”.

Earlier “archbishop” of the OCU Yevstratii Zorya was asked in the Kyiv Patriarchate not to interfere in Filaret’s affairs abroad, and under the terms of the tomos, the OCU has no right to operate outside Ukraine.