Metropolitan of Nizhyn and Pryluky Clement (Vecherya) commented on the paragraph of the decision of the Council on the conditions for dialogue between the UOC and the OCU. He said, the UOC has no illusions about any dialogue with Dumenko’s structure.

“It would be wrong to convene a Council just to stop some provocations from the OCU. In my opinion, the OCU is more of a political organization than a religious one. In all the discussions that are heard from the OCU, exclusively political rhetoric is used, there is almost no canonical argumentation and arguments that would be perceived as important for believers, mostly slogans and chants,” said the bishop.

“A serious stumbling block for the perception of the OCU as a religious structure is the fact that the ordinations of the bishops who are at the origins of the OCU, to put it mildly, raise questions,” the hierarch added.

“There are calls from different sides about communication, about dialogue between the UOC and the OCU, but on the Ascension Day in the city of Fastov there was a vivid example of such a dialogue – a man who called himself a “priest” of the OCU kicked a priest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the stomach. Moreover, our priest did not take anything, on the contrary, they tried to steal the church from him. The leadership of the OCU – has it made any decisions regarding its, as they call it, “priest”, who committed not only an ecclesiastical, but also a secular crime?” – the metropolitan described the model of the “dialogue” between the UOC and the OCU.