On July 27, 2022, the head of the OCU, Epiphanius Dumenko, on behalf of his organization, addressed Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople and the leaders of the Local Orthodox Churches with a proposal to “consider the activities of the Patriarch of Moscow” in order to “deprive him of the throne.” The letter to the Phanar, copies of which will also go to the Local Churches, most of which do not recognize the OCU, has been made public on the website of this structure.

“Many with the election to the patriarchal chair of Metropolitan Kirill (2009) associated certain hopes for the revival of church life. However, today, when twelve and a half years have passed since Kirill took the Moscow cathedra, it is obvious that the announced reforms did not take place, and the only real achievements of the 16th Patriarch of Moscow were the concentration of power in the hands of one person with the complete degradation of real church catholicity and complete dependence of the Church on the Russian state.

Metropolitan, and later Patriarch Kirill, has never been the standard for confession of the Orthodox faith. Some of Vladyka Kirill’s theological statements—for example, the identification of the Third Hypostasis of the Most Holy Trinity with the Divine energy eternally descended from God the Father—even caused controversy and temptation among the clergy of the Russian Church. Cyril’s almost complete indifference to theological issues protected him from completely falling into space of heresy. The situation changed when the hierarch, whose attention had long been focused on geopolitical issues, decided to join in the creation of the doctrine of the “Russian world” – a nationalist ethnophyletic theory about the special role of the Russian nation and state in the world and the Church.

…We would also like to draw the attention of Your All-Holiness to another heretical aspect of the “Russian world” doctrine, which significantly distorts Orthodox anthropology. We are talking about the denial of the rights of peoples to historical self-determination or the historical fatalism inherent in the doctrine of the “Russian world” in the interpretation of Patriarch Kirill. According to the mythological historical concept of the latter, Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians allegedly belong to the common civilization of the “Russian world” and as such have no moral right to further historical self-determination. The choice made in the past supposedly obliges them for life to be part of the “Russian world” or the Russian state,” the appeal reads.

According to the above, the head of the OCU proposes to recognize Patriarch Kirill as a schismatic and deprive him of the throne.

Earlier it was reported that the OCU structure, which is small in terms of the number of parishioners, published its appeal “on behalf of all those killed in the war of Russia against Ukraine.”