Kiev, May 5, 2023
Deputy Artem Dmitruk. Photo: slovoidilo.ua
There will come a time when the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church will win all its court cases, overturning the many actions against it taken by local authorities, believes one Ukrainian Parliamentarian deputy.
The Union of Orthodox Journalists published an interview with MP Artem Dmitruk from Odessa yesterday. Dmitruk was elected to Parliament in 2019 as a member of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party, though he is no longer associated with it. He is a parishioner of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
There are many bills aimed at banning the Ukrainian Church, the UOJ recalled in the interview, and the President’s own representative in Parliament recently said the UOC will soon be banned. But such bills haven’t moved ahead, Dmitruk said, because they are fundamentally unconstitutional. For them to be adopted, the constitution would first have to be amended, “and many citizens of Ukraine will then have to decide for themselves whether they want to live in a country with such a constitution or not. So far, these bills banning one religion and allowing another are irrelevant.”
The deputy also notes that he personally thinks there wouldn’t be enough votes in Parliament to ban the UOC, otherwise it would have already happened.
The UOJ then asks why has government’s attitude to the canonical Church has changed so dramatically. The government was not so harshly and explicitly against the Church in the first months of the war. MInistery of Culture Tkachenko did a 180 in just a few months, the outlet notes.
Dmitruk answers:
There is no explanation. We’re only witnesses of what is happening. Witnesses that there was one situation and one thing was being said, and then another. After all, it hasn’t been 10 years, not 5, but months. It’s like something clicked, and there’s a completely different story. Even I, as a People’s Deputy, as a witness to this, can’t answer why it happened like this. But the fact that the attitude of the authorities towards the UOC has changed a lot lately is true.
The UOJ then asks about all the decisions over the past months from local authorities banning the UOC in their areas, breaking lease agreements, and taking land from the Church:
—Everyone understands perfectly well that in the future, when this time passes, when the war ends, when there’s order in the country, the UOC will file in the courts, not only in Ukrainian, but also in international ones. And this will prove to be a very bad practice for the Ukrainian state itself, because the UOC will win these court cases.
—Do you believe Ukrainian courts will make a fair decision in these matters?
—Not now. But in the long run, yes. Today we can breed illegal decisions both from law enforcement officers and from the courts. All this can only bring temporary benefits to certain individuals: There will be some kind of response on the ground, it will create hype for someone. But in the future, it will have a very bad effect on the image of the country.
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