Berezan City Council deputies ban UOC due to a "split in society"
The UOC was banned in the Berezan community because of the "split in Ukrainian society on religious grounds."
At an extraordinary meeting, which took place on October 31, 2022, deputies of the Berezan City Council banned the UOC on the territory of the municipality. This was reported on the official page of the authority on Facebook.
According to the authorities, the activity of the UOC allegedly poses a threat to the national security of Ukraine and is an undisguised form of a hybrid war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
The report says that the decision was made "taking into account the speculation on the religious feelings of citizens by the Russian occupier, the artificially created opposition of certain groups of the Ukrainian people and the split of Ukrainian society on religious grounds."
The believers of the canonical Church, meanwhile, emphasize that there are no "speculations". The wife of the UOC priest and winner of the Voice of the Country show, Svitlana Klymenko, who lives in Berezan, wrote on her Facebook page that everything was calm in the city, without religious conflicts and confrontations.
“Has any collaborator been discovered??? <... > No, it hasn’t. And now the city council declares some ‘speculations on the religious beliefs of our citizens, a split in society and an artificially created confrontation between individual groups’ ...
It seems that this confrontation and split is artificially created by the government itself ... which incites religious discord,” matushka comments on the decision of the city council.
As the UOJ reported, the Vatutine City Council wrote to the Rada calling for a ban on the UOC.
