PRESIDENT Zelensky has signed a decree depriving the Primate of Ukraine’s Moscow-linked Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky), of his Ukrainian citizenship, in a growing crackdown on the Church’s links with Russia.
The President signed the decree after what the Ukrinform news agency said was confirmation that the Metropolitan also held a Russian passport. The President issued a statement.
“We are continuing our entirely justified targeting of various individuals who have aligned themselves with Russia,” he said. “Figures with political influence and Russian passports, who work against Ukraine’s independence in all its dimensions, including its spiritual independence, anyone who supports or justifies aggression: such people have, and never will have, any place in Ukraine.”
The claim about the passport was denied, however, by the UOC’s spokesman, Metropolitan Klyment (Vecheria), who said that his Church would take legal action to defend the 80-year-old Onufriy.
“Apart from the Ukrainian one, he does not have any other passports, including that of the Russian Federation,” the Metropolitan, who leads the UOC’s Synodal Information and Educational Department, told the BBC. “He has already explained that he never applied for citizenship to any other state bodies.”
Lawsuits have continued across Ukraine over the new law against religious communities’ maintaining links with Russia. It is expected to accelerate the legal confiscation of UOC buildings and assets.
In a statement in April 2023, Metropolitan Onufriy said that he had been a “de facto Russian citizen” while training and living as a monk in Moscow under Soviet rule, but had given up his citizenship after Russia’s 2014 forced annexation of Crimea.
In a report last week, however, Ukraine’s intelligence agency, the SBU, said that the Metropolitan had voluntarily obtained Russian citizenship again in 2002 without notifying the Ukrainian authorities, and had maintained contact with the Moscow Patriarchate, which “openly supports Russian aggression against Ukraine”.
A religion expert at Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences, Lyudmila Filipovych, warned in a TV interview that Onufriy’s loss of Ukrainian citizenship would risk worsening inter-Church relations and have “no serious consequences” unless he tried to go abroad.
Also last weekend, another UOC leader, Archbishop Iona (Cherepanov), said in a social-media post that six other UOC bishops and archbishops had been stripped of citizenship in 2023, but had continued to “live and serve the Church and people of Ukraine”.
