MinCulture dept: Impossible to fight against UOC media, they must be banned

Maksym Vikhrov, analyst at the Center for Strategic Communications. Photo: SPRAVDI

On November 20, 2025, Maksym Vikhrov, an analyst of the Center for Strategic Studies at the Ministry of Culture, stated that the state should block resources covering the life of the UOC from non-governmental positions. He made this statement at a meeting at Media Center Ukraine, which the organizers called "(Un)holy War. How the Moscow Patriarchate Supports Kremlin Agents in Ukraine".

Vikhrov stated that UOC resources "often use dehumanizing rhetoric, specific vocabulary aimed at dehumanizing Ukrainians and Ukraine as a whole, and in particular the OCU".

According to him, these resources react in bursts to certain events. As an example, Vikhrov cited the situation with the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. He assured that Telegram channels and other resources covering such events "try to demoralize and destabilize Ukrainians from within, provoke conflicts so that UOC-MP believers fight with someone, break doors in churches or vice versa board them up, and so on, creating all this 'move'".

Vikhrov does not consider the possibility that illegal actions by the OCU against UOC communities occurred in reality.

He claims that the coverage of events around the UOC is an information war that the authorities are losing because they are allegedly opposed by people "in uniform".

"The fact is that it is impossible to defeat them with just arguments," Vikhrov complains. Therefore, according to him, the authorities act through "sanctions, blockades, arrests, and so on."

"Therefore, now Ukraine is already doing this, and Europeans are joining in," Vikhrov reported. He believes that these are exactly the "methods that allow blocking the channels of this lie, manipulation, and provocations."

According to Wikipedia, the Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security (CSCS) is a government organization created under the Ministry of Culture as one of the mechanisms for developing national resilience.

Earlier, SPJ wrote that, according to the archons of Phanar, the UOC persecutes and kills members of the OCU.

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