A bill was introduced on Thursday that would ban the Kremlin-backed branch of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has passed the first reading of a bill banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC MP), People’s Deputy of Ukraine Yaroslav Zheleznyak reported via Telegram.
The bill was supported by 267 MPs. Most of those who voted for the initiative belonged to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s Servant of the People party – 175 of them voted for it.
For the bill to come into force, it must be approved in second reading and signed by Zelensky.
The UOC-MP has an ecclesiastical-canonical relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and as such is considered a fifth column for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.
On June 7, Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Ukrainian Minister of Culture and Information, said that if the law was passed, the UOC deputy would have to stop using the property of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, where the monastery is located, within three days of the most important spiritual and historical sites of Ukraine.