Conflicts among Churchgoers in Ukraine – Non-Peaceful Transfers to the OCU not Covered by Media and State
Despite Poroshenko's electoral campaign in the country's regions and an active information campaign promoting the OCU, the majority of the UOC-MP faithful don't want to change their denomination and consider the OCU "non-blessed" and "uncanonical". The local authorities' attempts to initiate an "accelerated" transfer to the OCU lead to conflicts in congregations. UOC-MP's media have covered dozens of incidents, with videos and eyewitness testimonies, when a religious community, which allegedly joined the OCU, claims that it is unwilling to do so, and after that it is deprived of its church and has to gather at home or by the church walls in the freezing cold. In some cases, to prevent trespassing and the church's seizure, the faithful stay on twenty-four hour duty in it for several weeks [...]
Interactive maps at several websites show that within three months there have been more than 500 voluntary transfers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate’s (UOC-MP) parishes to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine recently created by Patriarch Bartholomew and president Poroshenko. The UOC-MP parishes total 12,000, so this is a significant value. However, according to the OHCHR Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine from 16 November 2018 to 15 February 2019, not all of these transfers were voluntary – in some cases they were undertaken by local authorities or far-right organizations, and those members of the UOC-MP who didn’t want to join the OCU faced threats.
Though, the number of transfers vary. According to the official statistics of the UOC-MP, 36 parishes transferred voluntarily; 24 were seized, which will be challenged in court; and there were 200 failed attempts to seize a parish. Every interactive map shows a different number of transfers, most of them cannot be verified.
Despite Poroshenko’s electoral campaign in the country’s regions and an active information campaign promoting the OCU, the majority of the UOC-MP faithful don’t want to change their denomination and consider the OCU “non-blessed” and “uncanonical”. The local authorities’ attempts to initiate an “accelerated” transfer to the OCU lead to conflicts in congregations. UOC-MP’s media have covered dozens of incidents, with videos and eyewitness testimonies, when a religious community, which allegedly joined the OCU, claims that it is unwilling to do so, and after that it is deprived of its church and has to gather at home or by the church walls in the freezing cold. In some cases, to prevent trespassing and the church’s seizure, the faithful stay on twenty-four hour duty in it for several weeks.
We estimated that of 414 transfers mentioned in the media as of mid-March at least 92 entailed conflicts, which demonstrates the differences in the OCU and UOC-MP supporters’ views on the incidents.
The Ukrainian non-profit organization the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ), which openly supports the UOC-MP, publishes those views that are not represented in the state-run or mainstream Ukrainian media supporting the OCU.
There are 58 cases of the authorities’ interference; 16 times non-residents were involved in voting, agitation and seizures; 18 times “transfers” were carried out under far-right groups’ pressure. 38 times religious communities held their own meetings and decided to stay within the UOC-MP. There were 31 cases of local communities meeting without the laity. On the pretext of implementing the local community’s decision to change the jurisdiction, the OCU supporters broke and changed the locks in 19 churches. Nine UOC-MP communities complained of provocations, seven conflicts led to fights, churchgoers of six parishes faced open threats. Moreover, the media reported on four “transfers” of the UOC-MP churches that officially had no communities.
Here are 18 cases covered by the Union of Orthodox Journalists in English:
Zhitomir region, Baranovka town, temple of the Nativity of the Virgin
You can download the full list of articles available in Russian and Ukrainian here.
Obviously, the truth is not that visible in this competition of the UOC-MP and pro-government media. But the attitude of such sites as the UOJ is noteworthy – at least because they are at risk covering the events from a UOC-MP supporter’s point of view. A number of times the UOJ has been subjected to pressure (which was mentioned in one of the OHCHR Reports) from far-right organizations like the racist C14 whose members set the UOC-MP churches on fire and whose leader Yevhen Karas doesn’t is proud of his ties with the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). Pressure on opposition journalists and activists, their murders are quite common in Ukraine – see the cases of Ruslan Kotsaba, Oles Buzina or the recent blatant murder of Kateryna Handzyuk who stood against corruption. The UOJ’s reports on the churchgoers’ rights infringement aren’t sporadic and are based on the evidence of various people from across the country, with the names and surnames of those involved in the incidents.
Trustworthy are the facts of the OHCHR, which claims that in a few cases the transfers were not voluntary and were initiated by the state or local authorities or even members of extreme right-wing groups, who didn’t belong to those religious communities. Local authorities are collecting the lists of UOC-MP parishes that can “voluntarily change the jurisdiction”. For example, Lviv region has a plan of “voluntary transfers” for next several years!
About the author: Nadia Bazuk, an Orthodox Christian journalist from Ukraine, nadiabazuk@mail.ua
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
At the first glance, an ordinary citizen of the globe can think that probably it must be that everything that is now happening in Banderistan Ukraine and around, including and reconstruction of international relations and reformulation of the global order in politics, is just a big misunderstanding. For the same people, probably NATO's constant expansion to the east since 1999, i.e., to the direction of Russia, has nothing to do with the attempt to subdue and tear Russia apart as wanted the same both Napoleon (in 1812) and Hitler (in 1941). They will tell you that instead of a war ...
A map of historical spreading of the Ukrainian territorial imperialistic project. A nation which occupied and annexed parts of ethnohistorical lands of all its neighbors. A historical map of evidence:Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]A Crimea census of 1926 (done by anti-Russian USSR's authorities): ...
Exclusive: U.S. mainstream media sees itself as the definer of what’s true and what’s “propaganda,” but has gotten lost in a fog of self-delusion and is now the principal purveyor of “post-truth” news, writes Nicolas J S Davies.For several months, Western officials and media outlets repeated thousands of times that there were between 250,000 and 300,000 civilians trapped under Syrian and Russian bombardment in East Aleppo. Western reports rarely mentioned the Syrian government’s estimate that there were only one-third that number of civilians in the rebel-controlled enclave – nor that its estimates were solidly based on what it had found in Homs and other ...
More than 6,400 civilians have been killed and nearly 16,000 injured as result of criminal actions of Kiev regime during the conflict in Donbass, Chairman of the Russian Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin said on Thursday. Also, more than 10,000 residential infrastructure facilities have been fully or partially destroyed and burnt. Since last April, more than 1 million Russian-speaking residents of Lugansk and Donetsk regions had to flee their homes, and more than 110,000 people having a refugee status have applied for the Russian citizenship. The war has been continuing.Ukrainian capital being wrapped in smoke due to a spate of regional ...
The interviews with three snipers of Georgian nationality, conducted by the Italian journalist Gian Micalessin and aired last week as a breathtaking documentary on Milan-based Canale 5 (Matrix program), still have not paved its way to the international mainstream media. That is hardly surprising taking into account the bombshell evidence against the real perpetrators and organizers of the 2014 coup d’etat in Kiev, generally known as the “revolution of dignity“.The documentary features Alexander Revazishvili, Koba Nergadze and Zalogi Kvaratskhelia, Georgian military officers who were recruited to carry out a “special mission” in Kiev by Mamuka Mamulashvili, a close aid of ...
On January 5th, a very interesting online conference and debate with experts regarding the current Ukrainian crisis was held. The information presented in the debate is very interesting for anyone dealing with the Ukrainian crisis and European policy towards the crisis.Hansjörg MÜLLER (former member of Bundestag from AfD): Training soldiers makes Germany participant of the war. A Bundestag council stated that Russia would be right if attacking Germany in the framework of international law, because Germany started participating in anti-Russian aggression. Treating Ukrainian soldiers in German hospitals is a good sign of humanity. Sending weapons and training soldiers has nothing ...
Since putschists usurping power in Ukraine launched war without mercy in April 2014 against freedom fighters in Donbass rejecting fascist rule, Washington provided political and military support.Under Obama, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) funding included hundreds of millions of dollars to Kiev for weapons and other material support, along with training by US special forces.Trump may increase support for escalated aggression. A Pentagon and State Department proposal calls for supplying Javelin missiles, possibly along with anti-aircraft weapons.Claiming these and other US-supplied weapons are only for defense, not offense, ignores where they’ll be deployed – along the contact line, separating armed ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSave
On September 22, Ukraine’s Azov Battalion had a ceremony honoring its fighters who were killed in combat in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass regions. It is natural for any military unit to honor its dead. But it is evident from the images on Azov’s own website that this ceremony used iconography that is disturbingly reminiscent of the 1930s Nuremberg rallies, including the use of searchlights, the banners with Waffen-SS stylized logos and the flames.The background of Azov, its leadership, its recruitment and emblems are all deeply disturbing. It grew out of the Social-National Assembly of Ukraine (S.N.A.), a group of far right and neo-Nazi organizations ...
"If the American people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us" George H.W. Bush, 1992In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign ...
Ukraine matters. It’s territory is Europe’s largest after Russia’s. It borders seven countries in Europe’s heartland – Belarus, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Russia.It shares a strategically important 1,500-long land and sea border with the Russian Federation.The country is resource rich. Zbigniew Brzezinski once said:“without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”Separately, he said if Russia reunites with Ukraine, it’ll be a Eurasian powerhouse. If Ukraine allies with Western Europe, Moscow will be significantly weakened geopolitically.The Obama regime’s February 2014 coup d’etat replaced democratic governance in Kiev ...
1. Kosovo is not ancient Albanian landIts very name comes from the Serbian word “kos,” meaning blackbird. Its Albanian name, “Kosova,” means nothing whatsoever.Kosovo was the heartland of medieval Serbian state and the site of the 1389 battle in which both the Serbian prince and the Ottoman sultan died, checking the Turkish expansion into the Balkans for almost 70 years. Ethnic Albanians were settled there by the Ottomans over the intervening centuries, and became a majority due to pogroms and persecution of Serbs – which began under Ottoman rule but continued under Austro-Hungarian occupation in WWI and German/Italian occupation in ...
Even The New York Times was unable to spin the recent gruesome murder of Russian prisoners at the hands of Kiev Nazi regime forces.Even The New York Times was unable to spin the recent gruesome murder of Russian prisoners at the hands of Kiev Nazi regime forces. Unconditional honesty, of course, is not reasonably to be expected from the Establishment’s “paper of record,” in this or any other comparably tricky situation. Not that, with the abundant video and other evidence saturating the internet, there is the slightest doubt that (1) a gruesome crime in violation of the laws and customs ...
While much is said in some American media outlets about “fake news” in the US, the smallness of the matters being discussed might come into focus when compared with Ukraine, which is of late producing rather much fake news about the Holocaust and elementary points in World War II history.As we reported back in October, Ukrainian media outlet Radio Svoboda — the Ukrainian arm of the US Government-funded arm of RFERL — posted a picture from the US Holocaust Museum. It is an image of Polish Jews being deported to a death camp. There was just one problem. Radio Svoboda claimed the picture ...
The long-term crisis in the relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine entered its final - war phase on February 24th, 2022. The official reactions to the latest dramatic events in East Europe, which come from the Westerners, including the most important overseas Western political address, are usually dominated by two phrases: "flagrant violation of international public law" and "violation of the territorial integrity of an internationally recognized state". The perpetrator of the acts is, of course, Russia, and, as it is claimed, the innocent victim is neighboring Ukraine. However, the same Westerners do not want to see either flagrant ...
The media never merely report the news. They manipulate and distort the news. They want to tell you what and how to think. Pursuant to this role, they routinely rewrite history. A striking instance of media rewriting of history is in the reporting on Kosovo. In the AP article “US Prosecutor to Probe Kosovo Organ Trafficking”, it is reported that the alleged atrocity occurred “during Kosovo’s war for independence from Serbia” in 1999.Everyone remembers that war as one to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing, that it was “a humanitarian intervention”. But here it is now characterized and defined as a ...
The Russian army carried out a precise attack on the mercenary base in Kharkiv, the building was completely destroyed, the Ministry of Defense of Russia announced."On the evening of January 16, the Armed Forces of Russia carried out a high-precision strike on the point of temporary deployment of foreign fighters in the city of Kharkiv, the core of which was made up of French mercenaries," the Russian defense ministry announced.The result of the attack was the elimination of more than 60 mercenaries, while more than 20 were taken to medical facilities.The building they were in was completely destroyed.A day earlier, ...
The massive artillery bombardment of the peoples of the Donbass, that has been raining down shells and fire on them since Christmas, is a war crime of horrific proportions designed to terrorise the people and bring their refusal to be subject to the NATO-installed regime in Kiev to an end. It is also becoming clear that it has a political purpose, which is to increase anti-Russian, pro-NATO propaganda among the Ukrainian people to influence them to vote to join NATO in a referendum, the consequences of which will be dramatic because a vote for NATO will be a vote for ...
Even those in Donetsk who originally supported Kiev have come to realize that Ukraine is waging a war against its own people.The Ukrainian army’s shelling has turned many formerly pro-Ukrainian locals against KievAlthough this article tries to make the people of Donetsk appear gullible and indoctrinated, it does make one incredible admission: Kiev is waging a vicious war against its own people—something that East Ukrainians will never forget, and probably never forgive. This article originally appeared in Financial TimesAs world leaders convened in Minsk this week to decide the fate of east Ukraine, Tatiana Prussova, a teacher at Khartsysk school ...
Mirė vienas didžiausių pasaulyje tarptautinių karo nusikaltėlių JAV senatorius Džonas Makeinas. Jis , kaip ir kitas JAV karo nusikaltėlių gaujos sėbras Zbignevas Bzežinskis, darė karo nusikaltimus visame pasaulyje, žudė civilius gyventojus, moteris, vaikus, senelius Vietname, Irake, Jugoslavijoje, Libijoje, Sirijoje, Jemene, Somalyje, Nigerijoje, Gruzijoje, Ukrainoje, kišosi į visų pasaulio šalių vidaus reikalus, dalyvavo vykdant spalvotas revoliucijas visose Rusijos pasienyje esančiose buvusiose tarybinėse valstybėse, Vidurio ir Rytų Europoje, Pabaltijo respublikose, Šiaurės Afrikoje, Artimuosiuose ir Vidurio Rytuose, rėmė nusikalstamus fašistinius režimus, nacionalistines chuntas, islamo teroristines organizacijas minėtose šalyse, yra tiesiogiai atsakingas už jo remtų partijų – konservatorių, liberalų, socdemų, nacistų, nacionalistų, fašistų, islamo teroristų ...