On December 9, 2022, Archbishop Viktor of Baryshivka expressed his opinion on the latest developments around the UOC. The Archbishop’s reflections are published on the Politika website.

The hierarch said that in recent weeks the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been under severe pressure. Its churches, monasteries and diocesan administrations are subject to mass searches; local authorities “prohibit” the UOC in the regions; The President has announced legislative initiatives that could lead to a restriction of its activities or even a total ban; The media and social networks are filled with false, hate-inciting materials about the Church.

“And one gets the impression that all this is an organized attack on the UOC, which was planned and coordinated by certain forces. Forces seeking to organize an internal conflict during the war, set Ukrainians against each other. Why do we think so? But because the narratives that are actively promoted in society, allegedly the UOC is a hostile and “Kremlin” organization, are absolutely false,” the hierarch emphasized.

Archbishop Victor noted that “the Church supports its defending warriors and its country. By the way, it has been supporting since the first day of the war. A huge number of believers of the UOC are fighting in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. There are parishes in the villages where almost all the men went to the front. Relatives of the priests, their children, are fighting. They fight and die.”

Vladyka recalled that on August 30, the priest of the Belotserkovsky diocese, Yaroslav Nagay, buried his dead son Vasily. In the Volyn diocese, Father Nikolai Yakovlyuk buried his warrior son Andrei. There are cases when priests even leave the service in the temple for the sake of protecting the Motherland. In July, such a warrior Bogdan Kaplun was buried in the Odessa diocese. His father, the priest Anatoly Kaplun, sang the funeral service. The priests of the UOC and their relatives-heroes are buried. Back in April, Metropolitan Luka of Zaporizhzhia had a funeral service for his brother Alexander. And it is impossible to count how many fathers bury parishioners. Funeral services are held in churches almost daily.

“Our parishes are constantly buying and sending cars, copters, clothes, food and the like to the front. This aid is measured in thousands of tons. And hardly any other confession helps the army more than the UOC. But no one in society notices all this, the media do not talk about it. In any case, we are “FSB agents”, “Moscow priests”, “traitors in cassocks”, etc. In other words, there is an objective reality, and there is a virtual, fictional one. In objective reality, millions of believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church support the Armed Forces of Ukraine and are themselves fighting the enemy, giving their own lives. And in the invented “reality”, what happens is what their imagination tells the authors of various publications,” the hierarch noted.

“And people watch TV, read the media, and believe what they see and read. And many of them really, not virtually, begin to consider the UOC an enemy and fight it. And sad and absurd situations turn out, ”summed up the bishop.