The Chairman of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, Viktor Yelensky, in an interview with Ukrinform, stressed that when they talk about the ban on the UOC in Ukraine, they mean the liquidation of “precisely the structures of the Moscow Patriarchate, and not the ban on the Orthodox of the current UOC-MP to profess faith and express their religious feelings.”

He added that “subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate is not part of the Orthodox faith.”

Yelensky noted that one cannot “simply ban” the UOC. “What does it mean? How do you imagine that? We woke up the next morning after the signing of the law and all the structures of the Mospatriarchy vanished into thin air?” he remarked.

According to the official, in the proposal to “simply ban” the Russian Orthodox Church, “the message is unconditionally legitimate. But lawyers say they cannot stop the activities of a religious organization that is not in the Unified State Register. Well, how will you liquidate it if de jure it does not exist? How to reveal this connection without religious expertise?”

The Chairman of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience recalled that such an examination had been carried out, and on its basis the government anti-church bill No. 8371 could be adopted. The content of this bill, according to Yelensky, will make it possible to ban the UOC in such a way as to fully comply with “the obligations that Ukraine assumed to join the Council of Europe.”