The vicariate of the UOC-KP in the United States and Canada suggests that negotiations between the OCU and Constantinople on the status of Filaret’s parishes in the diaspora, which have been going on for two years, will lead to the surrender of the interests of believers and clergy in favor of the Phanar. This is stated in the letter of the believer of the UOC-KP in the USA, Professor Alexander Kachur, which was published on the website of the “Kyiv Patriarchate”.

“From the text of the Tomos, it turned out that 40 million Ukraine is worthy only of the Church at the level of the Metropolis. Not the Patriarchate, like Romania, Serbia, Georgia and Bulgaria, and not even the archdioceses, like Greece and Albania, but only the metropolis, of which there were already 11 in the UOC-the Kyiv Patriarchate itself. That is, the Church of Ukraine was put on a par with the churches of Poland or the Czech Republic and Slovakia, where Orthodoxy is in a marginal state. The Church was proclaimed independent, but not completely – the issue of considering disputes and preparing myrrh passed to Constantinople.

But the main shock was not the humiliation of the status of the Church, and not even its proposed name, the Holy Church in Ukraine. The permitted activities of the newly restored church were limited exclusively to the borders of Ukraine, and all Ukrainian parishes outside its borders were taken away from it into the possession of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Ukrainians in the diaspora were not just abandoned, they were betrayed, once again being subjugated to some foreign church,” recalled Alexander Kachur.

According to him, after the replacement of the secretary of the vicariate of the UOC-KP in the USA and Canada with a person loyal to Filaret, the OCU exploded with “an angry statement, the tone and truthfulness of which any tradeswoman from street market would envy.” Alexander Kachur also recalled that the new secretary of the vicariate, Bohdan Zgoba, who was declared the “hand of Moscow” in the OCU, in 2016 helped to ensure that the church in Philadelphia was transferred from the ROCOR to the UOC-KP. “As you can see, all these statements are an aggressive lie, a deliberate violation of the ninth commandment, with the obvious goal of retaining power in the vicariate by any means,” Kachur writes.

“All these two years, the Vicariate Secretariat has been holding negotiations with representatives of the OCU and Constantinople, the results and decisions of which were not much publicized, but most likely related to the terms of surrender… And the OCU can hardly be proud of its activities in Ukraine. After the inheritance of six and a half thousand parishes from the UOC-KP and the UAOC, the church added another half thousand in the first year, and then the process stopped and is unlikely to resume. The expected creation of the united Ukrainian local church did not take place. And the Tomos on the restoration of the Kyiv Metropolis of the Patriarchate of Constantinople under the name of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine may go down in history as another, not very successful, attempt in the series of the liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people,” summed up the representative of the diaspora in the United States.