Court recognizes OCU ownership of UOC cathedral in Cherkasy
The Commercial Court of Cherkasy has transferred the UOC's St. Michael's Cathedral to the OCU's ownership as an "unauthorized construction".
The Commercial Court of Cherkasy Region granted the OCU's lawsuit and recognized its ownership of the UOC's St. Michael's Cathedral and the complex of buildings on the church grounds in Cherkasy.
Judge Oleh Chevhuz transferred to Dumenko's structure a complex with a total area of more than 5,000 square meters, including the cathedral, the eparchial administration, a school for orphans, a church shop, a church, a boiler house and a chapel. Meanwhile, OCU representatives and the city council did not appear at the final court hearing, asking the judge to consider the case without their participation.
Since Dumenko's structure had no documents for the construction work, the court recognized ownership under the provision on transferring an "unauthorized construction" to the permanent user of the land, which the Cherkasy City Council granted to the OCU community for permanent use in December 2025.
The court also refused to admit to the proceedings the actual owner and builder of the complex – the Administration of the Cherkasy Eparchy of the UOC, the Kyiv Metropolia of the UOC and more than 700 parishioners, stating that their rights are allegedly "not violated" by the transfer of the property to the OCU.
The judge also refused to suspend the proceedings until a dispute in Kyiv is resolved, where the UOC is challenging the Ministry of Justice's order revoking its ownership, and ordered that the court fee of 780,000 hryvnias be recovered not from the OCU but from the Cherkasy city budget.
St. Michael's Cathedral was built by the entire Cherkasy Eparchy of the UOC over 24 years under the leadership of the late Metropolitan Sophrony, who registered ownership for the eparchy in 2018. In March 2024, the Ministry of Justice annulled this registration, after which the city authorities declared the cathedral an "ownerless unauthorized construction" and re-registered the land.
Recall that on October 17, 2024, raiders in camouflage seized the cathedral by force during a night Liturgy, using tear gas and non-lethal weapons. As a result of the attack, 26 believers were injured, and 12 people were hospitalized. Metropolitan Theodosiy was hospitalized after the assault with a concussion and eye burns.
Earlier, the UOJ reported that https://spzh.eu/en/news/96809-ocu-posts-video-disproving-its-claims-to-cherkasy-cathedral.
