THE Ukrainian government has defended a new law banning religious ties with Russia (News, 23 August, 30 August). Law 8371, On Protecting the Constitutional Order in the Field of Religious Organisations, was signed on 24 August by President Zelensky.
“International law allows Ukraine, like other countries, to limit religious freedom for a legitimate purpose — in this case, restricting subversive Russian Church activities on our territory,” the head of the State Service for Freedom of Conscience, Viktor Yelensky, told the Ukrainian daily Pravda on Tuesday of last week.
”This measure isn’t aimed at banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. It contains a very important clarification that if this Church withdraws from Russian Orthodox affiliation, making a corresponding statement with relevant documents, the law will not affect it.”
Mr Yelensky said that the restrictions had been many months in preparation and contained “almost exact quotes” from a resolution by the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly.
“The law does not establish a framework for one religious organisation and a different one for another, and is therefore not discriminatory,” Mr Yelensky said. “Submission to the Moscow Patriarchate is not part of the Orthodox faith — if you don’t submit to a particular patriarchate, you do not cease to be Orthodox; so it isn’t a burden on anyone’s conscience.”
Meanwhile, an undated statement by the Church of England about the new Ukrainian law was shown to the Church Times, urging the Kyiv government to seek legal advice on whether the law might contravene international human rights.
“Ukraine is fighting for its very existence in the face of an illegal invasion, war crimes and crimes against humanity — so it is understandable that Ukrainian legislators would want to prevent any threat to their national security,” the statement says.
“Yet it is important that, even within the horrors of this war, everyone in Ukraine, including in temporarily occupied Ukraine, has full freedom to manifest and practise their religion or belief.”
The Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, which is currently under parliamentary investigation for its links with Moscow, condemned the new law last weekend, accusing Kyiv legislators of serving a “cup of persecution and oppression, hatred and slander, aggression and attacks, accompanied by spilled blood”.
Moves have also continued against members of the Moscow-linked UOC. One senior abbot, Metropolitan Arseny (Yakovenko), was again refused release from pre-trial detention this week, five months after his arrest for suspected collaboration, and the Supreme Court of Ukraine issued an order that the UOC’s Assumption Cathedral in Kanev should be restored to state ownership.
Air attacks have continued, meanwhile, in both countries, to widespread condemnation. Preaching on Sunday, two days after a mother and her three daughters were buried after a missile strike in Lviv, the head of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), assured a congregation in war-damaged Odesa that Russia’s rulers would suffer God’s “due retribution” for their crimes.
Explosions were reported across Moscow on Tuesday of last week in what was believed to be Ukraine’s largest ever retaliatory drone strike. As Ukraine deployed reinforcements to its northern border to counter a military build-up in Belarus, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow praised his country’s close ties with Minsk. The break-up of “historic Rus” had been a “terrible tragedy” in allowing new states to “emerge on its territories”, he said.
The Patriarch said that “powerful forces” were at work to destroy relations between Russia and Ukraine. “My daily prayer is that the Lord will preserve the Ukrainian Church from any deviation into schism and division, so that, despite the undoubted difficulties, sorrows, and risks associated with its clergy’s service, the Church can continue its saving mission for the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian peoples,” he said on Sunday in an address at the Sretensky Monastery, Moscow.