The State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience published on its website an appeal regarding the destruction of the Transfiguration Cathedral of the UOC in Odessa as a result of shelling.

“On the night of July 22-23, the Russian invaders carried out another barbaric shelling of Odessa. The terrorist country once again showed its misanthropic nature to the world. managed to get the icon of the Kasperovskaya Mother of God – the patroness of Odessa,” the appeal says.

It is noted that the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Savior has become one of more than five hundred already sacred structures “destroyed, desecrated, damaged by the Russians since the start of a full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022.”

“Today, the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience once again appeals to the hierarchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with a call to break ties with the Russian Church, which has become a direct participant in the bloody aggression against Ukraine. To withdraw from all its bodies, to expose the anti-Christian teaching of its leader, to condemn the anti-canonical , a shameful capture of the Ukrainian dioceses, as well as those who help the enemy to destroy Ukrainians,” the SSEFC stressed.

The State Service also promised that “Ukraine will rebuild the Transfiguration Cathedral. As it rebuilt it in 2001, 65 years after the red-star predecessors of today’s thieves completely destroyed it.”