Former cleric of the UOC in Kyiv region, Yevgeny Zotov, who joined the OCU, told the Spiritual Front of Ukraine how he served in his parish. According to him, he “gives blessings to everyone” and gives communion to representatives of other confessions.

“I do not believe that when a person reads prayers as a spell, then it is effective. I believe in a “smart” prayer. When a person understands how he is addressing the Lord God and what he says. And in the ROC, the psalter is in Church Slavonic, or rather in “Russian-Bulgarian”. People do not know this Russian-Bulgarian slang. They read gibberish. I know from my parish when people take hours to read or something else, and even a sexton reads the acts of St. Apostles or another book, then almost every word is a mistake, then how can this person understand what he is reading. Moreover, if he cannot understand what he is reading, then it is not surprising that they do not understand Jesus Christ. That they are led by the fact that they call my grandmothers and say that this is a curse to the seventh generation, for the fact that you went into schism, and so on. That is, they are frightened using pagan methods, anti-Christian.

I pass my blessing on to absolutely everyone. Everyone can come to communion with me. This sometimes outraged my sexton that I gave communion both to those in the OCU and to Catholics. But where should Catholics receive communion if there is no Catholic church in the village, and they want to receive Jesus Christ. I give communion to people without repenting, because I believe that it is a private matter for people if they believe that they should repent. Therefore, to repent is to change, it is not to re-read the list of your sins, and this is when a person wants to change,” said Yevgeny Zotov.