Authorities and UOC: How to convince Americans that there is no persecution

Kovalska and Yelensky. Photo: Pershyi Kozatskyi

Deputy Head of the Presidential Office of Andriy Yermak, Olena Kovalska – who oversees the religious sphere – published an article in the U.S. conservative outlet National Review. In it, she criticized Russia for persecuting Christians and assured readers that the Ukrainian state does not persecute Christians.

It is worth pointing out the simple trick that she employs – the same trick used by Yelensky, by Zelensky himself, and by all other representatives of the authorities together with their chorus of compliant religious figures. They paint in vivid colors the crimes of Russia against religion (the shelling of churches, the killing and arrest of clergy, and so forth), and then confidently declare that in Ukraine there is nothing of the kind. Supposedly, in a land of religious freedom everything is wonderful, and the persecution of the UOC is no persecution at all.

It is like a pickpocket pointing at a murderer and claiming that he himself is an honest man because he has never killed anyone. True, he never killed. But that does not mean he is not a thief.

Let us examine why this government strategy is a mixture of lies and manipulation.

While criticizing the Russians for closing Uniate churches in occupied Zaporizhzhia, the Deputy Head of the Presidential Office somehow “forgets” about the identical actions of the authorities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, who proudly reported on the closure of all UOC churches in their territories.

Kovalska accuses Russia of physically destroying churches. Yet Ukraine does exactly the same – not on foreign, but on its own soil: the Desiatynnyi Church in Kyiv, St. Volodymyr’s in Lviv, the Transfiguration Church in Ivano-Frankivsk – all were demolished by order of the authorities.

Kovalska assures Americans that the government “loves the UOC” and does not persecute either clergy or believers. Loves so much, indeed, that it stripped UOC clergy of the right to deferment from mobilization. Priests are already at the front, even bishops. Recently, the first priest was killed at “zero” position. Loves so much that it shamelessly seizes churches by the hundreds, turning a blind eye to the beatings of priests and parishioners.

Kovalska went so far as to accuse Tucker Carlson of lying, saying that his words about mass arrests of priests were false. According to her, thirty-eight convictions out of nine thousand clergy is “a drop in the ocean.” And here one cannot but marvel at her cynicism. Was it not this very government under Zelensky that drummed into the public mind that such cases are not isolated at all? That the UOC is filled with “FSB agents,” “collaborators,” and “Kremlin operatives”? And was it not precisely on this pretext that they demanded the Church be banned?

Kovalska claims that the authorities merely ask the UOC to sever its “legal ties” with Moscow. Another outright falsehood. The UOC has no legal ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. What exists are canonical ties. But this belongs to the realm of the Church alone – an ecclesiological, spiritual matter – which has nothing to do with national security and cannot affect it.

“We shall not renounce our religious freedoms,” Kovalska declaims with pathos. She might just as well have said: “We shall not renounce our conscience.” And yet, in these words, not for a single moment does one believe.

For one cannot renounce that which one does not possess.

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