DESS expert: UOC must answer for educating the flock in love for Russians

Liudmyla Fylypovych. Photo: a screenshot from the Youtube channel "Pershyi"

Religious scholar and DESS expert Liudmyla Filipovich in an interview with Poroshenko's "Pershyi" channel stated that Metropolitan Onuphry and the UOC clergy should be held accountable for educating their flock in love for Russians.

Commenting on Zelensky’s revocation of His Beatitude’s citizenship, Fylypovych stated that she does not consider this step by the authorities to be a sufficient punishment.

"Whether Berezovsky has a passport or not, he is not the only one who will live in Ukraine today without a Ukrainian passport," said the expert of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience. "The issue is different, and it seems to me, it is much deeper. It’s about the degree of collaboration with the aggressor country, the level of dependence on the ROC, and the responsibility that the leadership of this Church must bear for spending the last 30 years teaching its flock to love the Russian people, to love the Moscow tsardom, to love the Moscow Patriarchate, to love Patriarch Kirill, President Putin, and the like. That's what should be addressed."

In the interview, Fylypovych also emphasized that the bloodbath in Chernivtsi, when OCU militants brutally beat priests during the seizure of the Holy Spirit Cathedral, is "a very vivid example of the fact that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian state cannot come to an agreement".

Whether this means she accuses the authorities of organizing the raid on the cathedral, Fylypovych did not specify.

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that, according to Fylypovych, the authorities' plans to ban UOC services remind her of 1937.

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