The chairman of the profile committee on humanitarian and information policy, Nikita Poturayev, said that people’s deputies had registered 11 bills that make it impossible for “the work of the Moscow Church in Ukraine.” However, there are deputies in the Verkhovna Rada who actively lobby for the interests of the UOC. He said this in a commentary to the publication Glavkom.

“I’m not convinced that there is such a critical lack of votes, and I think that it would be possible to put it on the agenda and vote,” Poturaev said, “On the other hand, I understand that if he does not get enough votes, then it will go not very beneficial to our state and public interests, because then certain people will understand that we do not have enough political ability to resolve this issue in general,” Poturaev said about the draft law 8371.

Poturaev dismisses complaints about the ineffectiveness of the government bill and explains that the lengthy procedures prescribed in it comply with European standards and insure against appeals at the level of international courts. But the delay in taking any steps against the UOC, according to the people’s deputy, will potentially lead to a public escalation.

“There is a provocation of society to some actions that can later be passed off as persecution, although there is no persecution anywhere near. When people on the ground themselves decide that they do not want to go to church, which in one way or another is actually subordinate to the state institution of the state “a terrorist and an occupier, this is quite natural. But they are trying to manipulate and influence the deputies by talking about the persecution of the church and the persecution of faith. And some of them were parishioners of the same churches of the UOC-MP, retain some kind of connection not with the hierarchs , but with specific churches, where they may have been baptized or they got married there…They are told that we have a secular state, and the state cannot interfere in religion. But neither the bill of the Cabinet of Ministers, nor the bill of Kniazhitsky is in any way persecution on the basis of religion,” Nikita Poturayev said.