OCU seizes UOC's Kazan Church in Chyhyryn

Zasanskyi hung a flag on the bell tower of the seized Kazan Church in Chyhyryn. Photo: Zasanskyi’s Facebook page

In the city of Chyhyryn, Cherkasy Region, around midday on December 22, 2025, the Church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God belonging to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was seized. The rector of the parish is Archpriest Anatolii Prykotenko, dean of the Chyhyryn district. This was reported by a UOJ correspondent.

According to parishioners, at the moment of the incident no one was inside the church. The raiders cut the locks with an angle grinder and gained access to the building. The seizure was led by Nazarii Zasanskyi, who calls himself a chaplain of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. He arrived in Chyhyryn with a group of about 50 people in military uniform who, according to eyewitnesses, introduced themselves as employees of the Territorial Recruitment Center (TRC).

The community recalls that on February 21, 2025, the parish had already been re-registered into the OCU without the consent of the UOC religious community, with the participation of the church’s builder and founder, Viktor Tymoshenko, a former member of parliament.

After that, according to a UOJ source, “having no OCU supporters in Chyhyryn to carry out their 'holy' 'angle-grinder-and-crowbar mission,’ they had to wait almost a year until ‘visiting performers’ were brought in to appropriate someone else’s church.”

“What is most striking is the brazen cynicism of Nazarii Zasanskyi, who complains in a video posted on his social media that there was nothing on the altar and the table of oblation – the thief is outraged that, apart from the walls, he did not manage to steal anything else,” parishioners commented.

As previously reported by the UOJ, in Chyhyryn, money has been offered in exchange for denunciations against UOC clergy.

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