Shoulder straps or a cassock: who writes the script for UOC "fighters"?

OCU activists magician Veliar and David Pshenychny. Photo: UOJ

A certain young man – David Pshenychny – invariably appears at the latest court hearings in the Lavra case. Together with several like-minded people, he harasses the UOC's lawyers as best he can, shouting, staging absurd performances, and even attempting to use force.

Despite his infantile appearance, Pshenychny is no newcomer to anti-Church conflicts. In 2024, he became one of the "heroes" of the forcible seizure of the Cherkasy Cathedral by a group of OCU "believers." He stood out from the crowd of militants by opening fire right inside the church. As it turned out later, he was using not a combat pistol but a traumatic one. Pshenychny shot cathedral parishioner Maria Prishchepa in the head – doctors had to stitch up her face.

Of course, he bore no responsibility for this. Now Pshenychny comes to court without a weapon, but he has plenty of other ways to stand out. Outside court buildings, he stages intimidation actions for UOC lawyers and believers: he puts portraits of hierarchs in three-liter jars, stylized as severed heads. Pshenychny wears T-shirts of the pagan brand Svastone with the Nazi "Black Sun" symbol and the inscription Sonne mit uns ("The sun is with us").

In other words, the leader of anti-Church actions and an OCU "parishioner" is a militant who sympathizes with Nazism and paganism.

And there is nothing original about this.

Quite recently, we witnessed similar activity by another OCU activist. For a whole year, a Satanist nicknamed the magician Veliar (real name – Bohdan Oryshchenko) "did his job" under the walls of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, along with several assistants. They staged blasphemous "funeral services" for the UOC, tore and trampled icons, waved anti-Church placards, and picketed the monastery. At the same time, Veliar campaigned for the OCU, declaring: 

"We want the Lavra to have the canonical Ukrainian church of Metropolitan Epifaniy."

In his spare time from "working" for the OCU, Veliar conducted black masses and read Tarot cards. In addition, Oryshchenko cooperated with the SBU and acted as a witness in court against believers who defended the Lavra. Perhaps it was precisely for this that he received the "Pride and Glory of Ukraine" order from the Rada Speaker. 

However, later Veliar, together with the witch Maria Tykha, turned out to be a figure in large-scale fraud schemes: swindling money out of the families of servicemen and evading taxes on a particularly large scale.

We do not know whether Pshenychny is connected to the SBU, but his methods of fighting the UOC strongly resemble Veliar's: scandals, blasphemy, intimidation, psychological and physical pressure. The difference lies only in the details: Oryshchenko was supposed to "drive" the UOC out of the Lavra, while Pshenychny's task is to make court hearings in the monastery cases as difficult as possible for the Church's lawyers.

There is one more similarity – complete impunity. It is hard to believe that all their "exploits" go unnoticed without patronage from above.

Everything indicates that both Veliar and Pshenychny are ordinary performers of someone else's script. There is only one question – does the scriptwriter wear shoulder straps or a cassock?

Read also