In Ivankiv, there’s an attempt to secretly re-register UOC community to OCU

The Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos in vlg. Ivankiv. Photo: news.church.ua

There are attempts to re-register the religious community of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the urban village Ivankiv, Kyiv region, to the OCU, reports the PavlovskyNews channel.

According to the resource, a message appeared on the website of the Kyiv regional administration that UOC believers from Ivankiv allegedly submitted documents to re-register their religious community. At the same time, neither any of the members of the community nor the rector submitted any documents to the Regional State Administration and were not going to transfer to the OCU.

“The Regional State Administration replied to an official inquiry that they had not received any requests regarding the transfer from this UOC community. Then where did the message on the site come from? The UOC officials answered us that this was not a simple mistake, but an attempt to secretly re-register the community and the temple into another confession. People say that in this way they want to deceitfully transfer them to the OCU,” reports the resource.

The head of the Legal Department of the UOC, Archpriest Alexander Bakhov, in a comment to the Telegram channel, noted that such secret re-registrations are difficult to track down, and as a rule, they become known after the fact when the "new community" comes to take away the temple from the believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

As the UOJ reported, in order to seize the Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos in Ivankiv, the OCU raiders have repeatedly resorted to dirty technologies, including registry fraud. Attempts to transfer the temple to the OCU have continued since early 2019 when an initiative group of local residents who are not members of the religious community held an impromptu meeting on the transfer to the OCU. Deputies of the village council also joined in the attempts to seize the temple of the UOC.

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