Religionist and sociologist Mykola Mitrokhin said that after the failure of the offensive, the Ukrainian authorities predictably took up the UOC, because “show mast go he”. He wrote about it on his own Telegram channel.

“Again they went to close the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, raided the cathedral in the White Church at 6 a.m. – breaking down the doors with a sledgehammer as usual, there are again a bunch of materials on the beaten stories about the alleged collaboration of individual priests or “oh horror”, re-registration of dioceses in the occupied regions under the structures of the ROC. Today, the elderly Metropolitan Pavel (Lebed) was sent to jail – formally for a few phrases said in private phone conversations (with the statement of some theses of Russian television), it is unclear when, but listened to and recorded without a court decision. It is obvious that his transfer from house arrest to prison arrest is not even revenge for his publicly expressed stroopness, but an attempt to suppress the Lavra monks’ resistance to the closure of the monastery,” Mitrokhin wrote.

He added that “under Ukrainian law, a person who actually organizes terrorist attacks against the military will only get a ten (if the case did not come to the victims), while under the article on anti-Soviet agitation in the USSR of the 1960-1980s (the very same one with a terrible colonial past) for “anti-Soviet agitation” was given seven. But, of course, Ukraine is not Russia, where the same seven is now given for doubting state propaganda.