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The Ukrainian parliament has approved legislation banning religious organisations with ties to Russia, paving the way for Kyiv to end the activities of the Moscow-linked orthodox church on its soil.
The Verkhovna Rada approved the law on Tuesday in its second and final reading, with 265 lawmakers voting in its favour and 29 against, according to MP Yaroslav Zheleznyak.
Ukrainian officials have long argued that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate operates as an arm of the Russian Orthodox Church to undermine Ukraine and that it is complicit in Russia’s full-scale war.
In particular, Ukrainian officials accuse the UOC-MP of working closely with Russia’s powerful security service, the FSB.
The bill needs to be signed by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to become law, but he signalled in a meeting with Ukrainian religious leaders on Saturday that he would not hesitate to do so.
Zelenskyy said Russia used the church to suppress the independence of other states and to limit the freedoms of their citizens. “Therefore, it is our common duty to guarantee Ukrainian spiritual independence,” he said.
Zheleznyak said in a statement posted on Telegram that the law would come into effect 30 days after its publication in the parliament newspaper, save for one clause, according to which UOC-MP parishes and monasteries would have nine months to sever ties with Moscow.
A court would then ultimately need to decide on a national ban against the Russia-linked church.
Ukraine’s security service has raided several monasteries and offices of the UOC-MP since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Officials in Kyiv said they seized money and paraphernalia linking the church’s clergymen to Moscow’s efforts to destabilise Ukraine.
The UOC-MP has denied the charges.
In a statement published after the passage of the law, Robert Amsterdam, an international lawyer representing the UOC-MP, said Tuesday marked “a dark new chapter for human rights in Ukraine”.
“Since last October we have warned Ukraine’s allies of this egregious law, which seeks to impose collective punishment against an entire religious denomination in violation of every known international law, and today, we have seen the majority of Verkhovna Rada cave in to nationalist pressure and step into lawlessness,” said Amsterdam.
The lawyer vowed to “continue our fight to protect our client and its parishioners from these violations” and to pursue legal action against what he described as a “religious cleansing law”.
Metropolitan Onufriy, the head of the UOC-MP, declared independence from the Moscow patriarchate three months after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The church, which used to represent a majority of the Ukrainian population, split in 2018, four years after Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea and covert invasion of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region under the guise of a separatist uprising. A new pro-Kyiv Orthodox Church of Ukraine was formed.
The OCU and many Ukrainian politicians and officials maintain that Onufriy’s church is an instrument of the Kremlin that should be disbanded.
Roman Lozynskyi, a Ukrainian MP who voted for the law, called its passage “historic”.
“We still have a long bureaucratic path ahead of us,” he wrote on Facebook after the vote. “But today we have embarked on the inevitable path of cleansing from within the Kremlin’s agent network, which for decades hid behind the mask of a religious organisation.”