Religious scholar Nikolai Mitrokhin commented on the concert, which took place on January 23, 2023 at the Refectory Church of the Lavra, on his Facebook page.

“As expected, the OCU did not have believers to fill the churches taken from the UOC in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. Instead of them, as befits atheists who seized church space, the leadership of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra Museum-Reserve decided to send patriotic musicians into the temples. The first of them (besides the carols on the salt of the Assumption Cathedral a few days earlier) was the People’s Artist of Ukraine Taras Kompaniychenko with the group “Cossack Chorea”, who play light patriotic rock on banduras, pipes and ukuleles,” the religious scholar noted.

Mitrokhin also added that “the people, however, came to see them, five times less than for a regular service, but it doesn’t matter. Former communists who are at the head of the museum (and the director of the museum is a graduate of the Ryazan Airborne Forces School, who worked for many years in Soviet embassies abroad (apparently as a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate), dancing in the church never bothered. ”