Ex-Reserve director: That Lavra is a monastery is RF imperial narrative

Maksym Ostapenko. Photo: Reserve's Facebook

Dismissed from the position of director of the Lavra Reserve, Maksym Ostapenko, in an interview with "Babel", expressed outrage at Minister Tochitsky's words that he did not fight enough against the UOC. The former director emphasized that during his two years of leadership, more was done in the fight against the UOC "than in the previous thirty".

He credited himself with the fact that instead of the UOC, the OCU now «serves» at the Dormition and Refectory Churches. However, Ostapenko is convinced that the main thing in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra is not the services, not the monastery, but the Ukrainian spirit.

"The Russian imperial narrative is that the Lavra is exclusively a monastery. And the whole world lives with the thought that the Lavra is a monastery of the ROC. For the last two years, we have been doing everything to show that it is a center of Ukrainian and world culture. We wanted to reveal the Ukrainian identity in the Lavra," emphasized the former director of the Reserve.

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that Ostapenko called Drabinko's book Moscow propaganda.

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