Cherkasy City Council to consider the issue of seizing land plots from UOC

The Cherkasy City Council prepared a draft decision “On the seizure of land plots for reasons of public need from the structures of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the city of Cherkasy.” The document was published on the City Council website.

The project provides for an appeal to the Cabinet of Ministers "in order to initiate before the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine the withdrawal from permanent use" of five land plots on which the UOC temples stand: at 212 Nadpilna St., at 30 Heroyiv Dnipra, at 39/1 Sumhayitska St., at 18 Vikentiya Khvoyky St., and at 168/1 Vyacheslava Chornovola St..

The authors of the project refer to the conclusion of the “religious expertise” of the State Ethnopolitics, according to which the UOC “has a church-canonical communion with the Moscow Patriarchate”, and therefore allegedly falls under the law “On the basic principles for the forced seizure in Ukraine of objects of property rights of the Russian Federation and its residents”.

In addition, the City Council plans to instruct the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning "to conduct an analysis of land regarding the undocumented use of the structures of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the city of Cherkasy, including under buildings and structures."

As the UOJ reported, on September 29, 2022, deputies of the city council voted to deprive the Cherkasy diocese of the UOC of the largest of the mentioned land plots – at 212 Nadpilna St., on which the Archangel Michael Cathedral stands. It is located in Cathedral Park, which was leased to the diocese in 2001. The mayor of the city Anatoly Bondarenko did not support the decision of the deputies.

After that, the secretary of the city council, Yuri Trenkin, applied to the court with a demand to withdraw the site from the Church, but the judge did not accept the claim for consideration.