Kiev, April 30, 2026
Photo: kp.ru
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has won a significant legal victory after an appeals court ruled that a 2023 state examination declaring the UOC remains part of the Moscow Patriarchate was conducted with substantial procedural violations.
On April 6, the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeals issued a ruling in case №320/26027/23, brought by the Kiev Metropolitanate of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church against the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience and its head Viktor Yelensky.
The appeals court overturned the first instance court’s decision and recognized key arguments of the Kiev Metropolitanate as justified. The court ruled that the state agency’s failure to consider the UOC’s January 10, 2023 application for recusal of biased expert group members was unlawful and constituted a substantial procedural violation.
The court concluded that this violation “causes defectiveness of both the conclusion of the religious examination and the contested order of the State Service.” Based on this finding, the court recognized the actions of Viktor Yelensky in approving the examination as unlawful and canceled the State Service’s order dated January 27, 2023.
The ruling entered into legal force immediately upon its adoption.
Background: The 2023 examination
In January 2023, the State Service announced results of an examination concluding that the UOC remains part of the Moscow Patriarchate despite the Church’s adoption of new statutes in May 2022 declaring its independence. The examination was ordered by President Zelensky following a December 2022 National Security and Defense Council directive to identify religious organizations “affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation.”
The “expert group” concluded that “the status of the UOC as a structural division of the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoys certain rights of independence, but does not form an autocephalous church, remains unchanged.”
However, the UOC had submitted an appeal in early January 2023 requesting that biased members be excluded from the expert group and that international religious scholars be included. This appeal was ignored.
According to Archpriest Alexander Bakhov, head of the UOC’s Legal Department, several expert group members had made openly hostile statements against the UOC. He also noted that although the group was tasked with studying the UOC’s statutes, they instead drew conclusions from Russian Church documents that pre-dated the UOC’s May 2022 amendment of its statutes.
Political context
The examination’s political context was highlighted by the dismissal of Elena Bogdan, the previous head of the State Service, less than a week after Zelensky’s decree. Bogdan had repeatedly stated that the UOC statutes confirmed the Church’s independence and had warned that banning it would cause societal instability.
Her replacement, Viktor Yelensky, oversaw the examination that the appeals court has now ruled unlawful.
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