Metropolitan Luka of Zaporozhye and Melitopol sent letters to the hierarchs of the Local Churches, in which he spoke about the situation in Ukrainian Orthodoxy. In response to the message of Metropolitan Luka, Bishop Gerasim of Gorno-Karlovatsk (Serbian Orthodox Church) appealed to the government of Croatia with a request to protect the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the European Parliament. This was reported by the Information and Education Department of the UOC with reference to the Telegram channel of Metropolitan Luka.

In his letter to the Prime Minister of Croatia Andrey Plenkovic, Bishop Gerasim of Gorno-Karlovatsk asks him to inform his European colleagues that the rights and freedoms of citizens are being violated in Ukraine, legal violence against believers of the UOC is being carried out and the systematic destruction of the UOC is being carried out.

“The UOC, as a single canonical Church, suffers from terror, which deprives it of fundamental human rights, which is also expressed in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, namely in Part II, under the heading Freedom, Article 10 – freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” the hierarch noted. Serbian Church.

As Bishop Gerasim noted, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, “more than 250 churches have been confiscated in the UOC by violent means or as a result of illegal actions of state officials, about 100 are in the process of confiscation.”

“Several bills have already been registered in the parliament, providing for a ban or restriction of the rights of the UOC. Twelve bishops of the UOC were deprived of their citizenship, which is the main purpose of their deportation outside Ukraine, as well as a testing ground for possible deprivation of citizenship and persecution of dozens of other clergy of the UOC,” the hierarch added.

“It is for this reason that we once again appeal to you and ask you to help as much as you can, namely: to inform the competent European organizations about this in order to preserve fundamental human rights and freedoms,” he summed up.