Kiev, April 2, 2018
Photo: vesti-ukr.com Just in time for Holy Week and Pascha, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) has reportedly launched an investigation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), for supposed “support of the militia” and “anti-Ukrainian activities,” as was stated by SSU Colonels Valery Udovichenko and Yulia Laputina, reports RIA-Novosti.
However, Archbishop Clement of Nizhyn believes their claims are merely an unsubstantiated provocation against the Church, as he stated in an interview with Vesti.
According to the colonels, the investigation is underway throughout the country. They say the SSU is claiming that Ukrainian Church clergy have been involved in “terrorist activities,” and that Russian intelligence agencies are using churches of the UOC-MP for “intelligence operations.”
SSU agents are supposedly collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and examining Church literature “for the presence of manipulative texts,” Laputina stated.
The colonels offered a few examples of “anti-Ukrainian activities,” claiming that the monks of the Holy Dormition-Svyatogorsk Lavra placed a pro-Russian prayer on the backside of an icon of the Mother of God and distributed it at Paschal services in 2014. The agency also claims that militiamen were granted asylum in a UOC-MP church in Slavyansk in the same year.
“In fact, the churches of the UOC-MP became the cells where they based their anti-Ukrainian activities,” Udovichenko alleged.
However, due to the permanent pre-election struggle, the Church is constantly being exploited by unscrupulous politicians, Abp. Clement counters, noting that there have been no official statements from the SSU about any such investigations. In fact, as the hierarch states, SSU head Vasily Gritsak has repeatedly said that his organization has no claims against the UOC-MP. He also noted that the SSU routinely cooperates with the Church in humanitarian matters.
“Those statements circulating in the press right now were stated by some people presenting themselves as employees of the SSU, but who they really are, I personally have no idea, like the majority of our citizens,” the archbishop stated.
In response to claims of “pro-Russian prayers,” Abp. Clement said, “As a rule, those who claim that our Church prays for victory for Putin or who said some other nonsense have never been to our services and have only a vague idea of what Orthodox services say.”
