KYIV, Ukraine – Scuffles broke out exterior a Kyiv monastery on Thursday after a Ukrainian department of the Orthodox Church that the federal government says has ties with Russia defied an eviction order.
Tensions over the presence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) on the 980-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery have risen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February final 12 months.
Kyiv accuses the UOC of sustaining ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The UOC says it broke all hyperlinks with the Russian Church in May 2022.
Hours after a deadline to depart the monastery handed at midnight on Wednesday, members of the UOC refused entry to representatives of a authorities fee who wished to examine buildings within the gold-domed monastery’s sprawling complicated.
Shortly afterward, scuffles broke out wherein a Reuters reporter was hit and shoved by an unidentified man and one other reporter was pushed away by a cleric as she tried to strategy him. No one was harm.
Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko later condemned the “brutal” remedy of the fee members. He mentioned in an announcement that the federal government had filed a criticism with police and that efforts to examine the buildings would proceed on Friday.
The UOC is Ukraine’s second-largest church, although most Ukrainian Orthodox believers belong to a separate department of the religion, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, shaped 4 years in the past by uniting branches impartial of Moscow’s authority.
Russia condemned Kyiv’s push towards the UOC as an outrage and against the law.
“Such actions are increasingly plunging Ukraine into the Middle Ages in the very worst sense of the word,” overseas ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on the Telegram app.
The deputy head of a Ukrainian state physique accountable for the monastery earlier this month mentioned {that a} authorities fee was being established to make selections on questions associated to the UOC’s tenancy settlement on the monastery.
The authorities says the UOC broke the phrases of its tenancy and constructed buildings on the monastery illegally. The UOC denies this. — Reuters
Source: www.gmanetwork.com
