116 agreements with the aggressor in year five of war: Who must “sever ties”?

Photo caption: Zelensky at the Phanar. Photo: Anadolu Agency

Foreign Minister Sybiha declared – with great fanfare – that 116 (!) documents are being scrapped.

In other words, after more than four years of a bloody war, Ukraine still maintained active legal relations with the aggressor state. And the very same officials who, all this time, turned a blind eye to these ongoing ties with Russia were simultaneously demanding – with indignation – that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church sever its supposed “connections” with the Russian Orthodox Church, connections whose very nature they scarcely understand.

President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, with a grave expression, repeatedly claimed that the UOC maintains “legal ties” with the Moscow Patriarchate. Government officials on ethnopolitics, having pored over the charter of the Russian Orthodox Church, now insist that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church must somehow “eliminate” and “break” certain provisions. The country’s leadership continues to speak insistently about the need for “spiritual independence.”

But how can those in power presume to issue demands in the spiritual sphere when they have yet to put their own house in order? When, even during wartime, those closest to them were allegedly funneling money to Moscow? When high-ranking officials have stolen – or continue to steal – staggering sums from their own people?

Or was the entire media storm around the UOC nothing more than a smokescreen?

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