UOC spokesman comments on the accusations of SBU against the priests

The media are fueling rumors about the number of collaborators among the clergy of the UOC, but the number of cases of treason opened against officials and law enforcement officials is in the thousands, Archpriest Mykolay Danylevych, spokesman of the UOC, noted in his Telegram channel. He recalled that last week the SBU announced 23 criminal cases against clerics of the UOC, and acting head of the SBU, Maliuk, called the UOC "an ideal field for the functioning of the enemy residency."

However, journalists writing about this issue cover it one-sidedly, Fr Mykolay recalled and quoted the head of the SBU: “Enemy agents work in different directions: in the military, in the law enforcement bloc, in politics, there is also a collection of legal information from open sources. They have a wide range of activities."

“No one denies or justifies the fact that there are isolated (compared to the number of UOC clergy) cases of collaborationism; however <…> some sources say that actually there are fewer of these cases than it was reported,” the spokesman of the UOC noted.

He added that the media do not provide other statistics, and cited a number of facts: since the beginning of the war, DBR investigators have opened 420 criminal cases against law enforcement officers and government officials on the facts of treason and collaborationism, and the head of the National Police, Ihor Klymenko, announced 1358 facts of cooperation with the enemy. “And if we count from 2014, then only in Crimea there were about 2,000 cases of betrayal of the oath by the SBU,” recalled the spokesman of the UOC. In particular, in Donetsk and Luhansk, the number of cases of treason "counts in thousands, if not tens of thousands," and even the head of the "LPR" L. Pasechnik was a colonel of the SBU.

The spokesman of the UOC stressed that he was not trying to justify the facts of collaborationism. “I am only showing <…> the scale of this phenomenon in government and law enforcement agencies, the number of which is incommensurably greater than the number of similar cases in the Church. Therefore, in these matters one should have a cool head and not exacerbate the dividing lines in society,” summed up Archpriest Mykolay Danylevych.

As the UOJ wrote, the SBU saw a threat from the UOC.

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