“Archbishop” of Kropyvnytskiy and Golovanevsk OCU Mark gave an interview in which he answered the question of what he would say to the believers of the UOC, who call today’s “processes with the transition” of parishes to the OCU infringements of their right to freedom of religion.

According to the representative of the OCU, “most of these people are well aware that this is not so. But in the heat of proving that they are not part of the Russian Church, they resort to manipulation.”

“We are not talking about the fact that someone takes away their faith. Not a single priest of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine has yet been convicted for believing in Christ or celebrating the liturgy. The state arrests and conducts an investigation for violating the laws of the country and cooperation with the occupier, spreading Russian narratives and for those things that a priest shouldn’t even be closely involved in. And some believers pretend that they don’t understand something. Even a letter from Patriarch Kirill that there is a church of the Moscow Patriarchate here is called a fake” , – he said.

The “hierarch” of the OCU stated that there are “two points of view regarding Orthodoxy in Ukraine. One point of view is Russian, which says that there is a canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate here. And there is a kind of non-canonical and ungrateful Orthodox Church of Ukraine, schismatics and the like. This is the position of the Russian Orthodox Church. There is the position of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which says that yes, in Ukraine there is a structure of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and there is an autocephalous, recognized Local Orthodox Church of Ukraine. This point of view is also shared by the Greek Orthodox Church, Cypriot Orthodox Church, Patriarchate of Alexandria”.

“Therefore, there are questions for Ukrainians who share the Russian point of view on the church issue in Ukraine. Why do they reject the point of view of other local churches? We do not live in a vacuum, we live in the family of Orthodox Churches. Why do you broadcast one point of view and another reject it?” he added.