On October 12, 2022, “Metropolitan” Epiphany gave an interview to Suspilna, in which he stated that the OCU “continues the peaceful struggle for the right to be present in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.”

He noted that representatives of the OCU “resolve the issue through diplomacy, bypassing conflicts”:

“The Ukrainian Church should be present in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, it will be.  It is also an inevitable process.  Now we see that there is a certain blocking of our presence on the territory of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra as a national shrine of the Ukrainian people.”

The report notes that at the moment, worship services in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra are performed by representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, however, there have been initiatives to transfer the Lavra to the use of the OCU.  Last month, the head of the Ukrainian State Service for Ethnopolitics, Olena Bohdan, during a conference at the Ukrainian Catholic University, noted that there are fewer monks in the OCU in Kyiv than in the UOC only in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, and that in the event of a transfer of 600 people, including seminarians  and teachers of the academy, will have to leave it.  She also stressed that the utility bills in the Lavra and its restoration are paid by the UOC.

“Metropolitan” Epiphany stated that “officials should not interfere in the affairs of the church, and the OCU will achieve its goal even despite the resistance of some civil servants”:

“It is not for officials to comment on such things, because sometimes it even looks strange that a person who is a sociologist begins to evaluate who has more people, who has fewer people.”

According to the head of the OCU, “this is already a kind of interference in the internal affairs of the church.”