Head of DESS Announces Total Number of UOC Communities That "Transferred" to OCU

On June 6, 2026, the head of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience Viktor Yelensky during a press conference summarized the results of the campaign for changing the jurisdiction of UOC communities. According to the official, the dynamics of the process after 2019 acquired an unprecedented character. "After the creation of the OCU, almost 2,000 communities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church transferred to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine," declared the head of DESS.

Yelensky emphasized that the number of parishes seized from the canonical Church is comparable to the composition of several autocephalous Churches of the world. "To understand the scale - this is as many as such local churches as the Georgian, Albanian, Polish, Czech Lands and Slovakia, Cypriot have taken together," noted the head of the department. "That is, this is a very large number of parishes."

The official acknowledged that the main blow fell on rural regions, where the mechanisms of "transfers" are easiest to implement. "Transitions occurred and occur predominantly in rural areas," Yelensky stated. "Because in rural areas the territorial community more or less coincides with the religious-territorial one. There everyone knows that, for example, if there are 500 households, then 480 of them are conditionally Orthodox."

Despite numerous testimonies of seizures, the head of DESS continues to insist on the conflict-free nature of the process: "The overwhelming majority of these transitions occur peacefully."

Nevertheless, he mentioned the case of Ptycha village, for which there is an ECHR decision against Ukraine. "The European Court's claim is that the state did not ensure the separation of conflicting parties, did not ensure the peaceful course of religious life in this settlement," Yelensky added.

As SPJ reported, the head of DESS told where faith is now persecuted "worse than in the USSR".

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