Ukrainian rule of law: Will OCU clerics be jailed only for murder?

Hryshchuk and Zasansky. Collage: UOJ

On May 5, Nazariy Zasansky, an OCU cleric from Cherkasy, published a video in which he called UOC believers “rot that must be cleaned out” and declared them to be an “enemy inside the country.” “If we do not deal with it, there will be no victory for us – not even close,” Zasansky said. There was no grounds whatsoever for such statements: the OCU cleric was speaking in the context of the actions of a UOC parishioner who merely wanted to have her fallen hero-nephew given a funeral service in her own Church.

Even to someone with no legal background, it is obvious that “rot” and “enemy” are insults and incitement to hatred against a specific group of people, while phrases such as “clean out” and “deal with” amount to a call for violence against them.

Zasansky’s statements are not an exception, but merely one example among many. Not long ago, another OCU cleric, R. Hryshchuk, compared UOC believers to zombie corpses from a Hollywood film and said they should be shot and destroyed in exactly the same way.

Now let us imagine the reverse situation: suppose someone from the UOC clergy called OCU supporters “rot that must be cleaned out,” enemies who must be “dealt with,” or directly called for them to be shot. Can you imagine that? No – such a thing is impossible in principle.

And yet it is UOC priests and bishops, by the dozen, who are being targeted with criminal cases for “inciting hatred” against the OCU – not the other way around. On what grounds? For using quotation marks around ecclesiastical titles, for mentioning church seizures, or for calling defectors “Judases.” All of this deeply wounds the feelings of OCU representatives and deprives them of their spiritual equilibrium.

The authorities constantly assure their Western partners that all confessions in Ukraine are equal. But reality has long since become entirely different. For some, courts hand down sentences on ridiculous charges; for others, the state will not so much as wag a finger over explicit incitement to violence – even to murder.

In an old Soviet comedy, one character says of another: “Who would jail him? He’s a monument!” One gets the impression that the authorities will notice the activity of certain OCU representatives only when they themselves begin to act on their own calls.

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