OP spokesman: There will be OCU in Ukraine, only OCU
Advisor to the Head of the Office of the President Mykhaylo Podolyak said that there would be only one Orthodox denomination in Ukraine – the OCU.
Only the Orthodox Church of Ukraine will exist in Ukraine. On March 30, 2023, Mykhaylo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the President's Office, announced this on the air of Channel 24.
“We will reach the right ending. The UOC will lose all opportunities to influence the inner world of Ukraine. The UOC will gradually leave for Russian cities and do something there. In the long run, there will be an OCU, only an OCU in Ukraine,” Podolyak said.
He expressed his conviction that only the OCU should remain in the country, because the UOC is guilty of the war in Ukraine.
“I reiterate that there should be a single Ukrainian canonical Church in Ukraine. By the way, Bartholomew, the Patriarch of Constantinople, constantly speaks about this. He clearly stated that the ROC (and hence the UOC-MP) are just as guilty of the genocidal war of Russia against Ukraine,” Podolyak said.
Commenting on the conflict around the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, he stated that "the UOC once again showed its true face." Podolyak said that “even in the course of the war, what they said, especially at the beginning of the war, viz. ‘we separated from the ROC, we do not support those calls of the ROC to kill Ukrainians’ and so on, that all this is fiction.”
Earlier, the UOJ wrote that according to Podolyak, the UOC took a position in relation to the war that is fundamentally different from the ROC: “There is the ROC, which, of course, supported Russian aggression, but as for those confessions that are in Ukraine, these are somewhat different confessions, including the UOC. She took a different position, and this is a lot of people who listen to priests, etc. People will make all decisions, and I think they have already made. Including the UOC that made all the decisions only to benefit Ukraine.”
