Religious scholar Mykola Mitrokhin noted in an interview with Dialog.Tut that the authorities in Ukraine are now using the same methods to fight the UOC that Nikita Khrushchev used in his time to fight religion in the USSR.

“This campaign (against the UOC – Ed.) is carried out by people who come from the Soviet atheists, the same methods: from angry young people to taking away churches allegedly at the request of the workers,” he said.

Mitrokhin also added that there is “an obvious violation of human rights in Ukraine, a massive one, which they try to justify with issues of state security” and gave the example of times when security services prosecute people for words they said “some years ago,” or for literature that has been freely distributed for decades.