What you need to know about DESS document on UOC’s “affiliation” with Moscow

The DESS document is simply a government-ordered tool for destroying the UOC. Photo: UOJ

The special government body under the Cabinet of Ministers dealing with religious affairs – abbreviated DESS – conducted a “study” and claimed to have discovered a connection between the UOC Metropolis and the Russian Church. This means the Metropolis falls under Law 3894, which bans the UOC. The Metropolis is the leadership of the Church. If it’s banned, the entire UOC will be banned.

Officials had a very simple task before them: to study the Statute of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. But they went much further. The main focus was on analyzing documents from the aggressor state – the Statute of the ROC.

Political analyst Konstantin Bondarenko explains:

“It creates a very interesting precedent, because they’re not appealing to Ukrainian law, but specifically to the Statute of the Russian Orthodox Church – a document created on the territory of the aggressor state, to use the official terminology. But in exactly the same way, we could set a precedent where the fate of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea would be decided based on the Constitution of the Russian Federation. In other words, our own domestic legislation and the Statute of the UOC don’t matter to them – they ignore them completely and appeal instead to another document created in a neighboring state.”

Law 3894 lists seven criteria for determining dependence of a Ukrainian Church on a Church from an aggressor state. DESS claims to have found four of the seven. And two of those four are based on provisions in the ROC’s Statute. And those provisions are accepted by officials without question.

The UOC’s Statute says it is independent from the ROC, while the Russian Church’s Statute claims the UOC must obey its decisions. Whom does the Ukrainian government believe? Of course – the Russians.

The UOC says Patriarch Kirill’s name is not commemorated in its services. The ROC says it should be. Whom does the Ukrainian government believe? Of course – the Russians.

Metropolitan Onuphry wrote to the State Service for Ethnopolitics to emphasize he is no longer a member of the ROC’s Synod. But the Ukrainian authorities don’t believe him. They believe the Russians.

Bondarenko comments: “It just shows the sheer stupidity and treachery of Ukrainian officials.”

The only thing the DESS officials actually analyze in the UOC’s Statute is the 1990 Tomos (Charter) from Patriarch Alexy granting independence and self-governance. But they completely twist its meaning.

In the UOC, that Tomos is cited as proof of apostolic succession, a kind of birth certificate. It shows the UOC didn’t arise from nothing but is the continuation of the thousand-year-old Church whose history dates to the Baptism of Prince Volodymyr.

Ukrainian officials latch onto the wording of the Tomos while completely ignoring the decisions of the 2022 UOC Council declaring full independence from Moscow.

It is especially important to stress that the team of five DESS “researchers” are ordinary amateurs: administrators and lawyers with no education in religious studies or theology. They have absolutely no standing to discuss autonomy, autocephaly, or canonical relationships.

But they do discuss them. Simply because they are carrying out an order. An order from the Office of the President to destroy the UOC.

This becomes especially obvious when you remember that the document appeared just a week after Zelensky’s decree stripping Metropolitan Onuphry of citizenship.

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