People do not stop going to cathedrals to pray, even if they have been taken away, said Jan Taksiur, a member of the council of the Other Ukraine movement.
The Ukrainian authorities have taken away up to 3,000 churches from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) during a special military operation. This was told to TASS by a Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox writer and publicist, a member of the council of the Other Ukraine movement, Jan Taksur.
"I can say that during the special military operation they (the Ukrainian authorities - approx. TASS) squeezed out about two thousand and something temples, almost to three. There are no exact statistics," he said.
He stressed that a church or cathedral that has been taken away does not mean that the people who went there to pray have joined the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). "For example, the monastery of the Kiev Caves Lavra has been selected, and the Upper and Lower Lavras have been selected. My friends send me materials, say, from Kiev on Christmas Day. Well, it should be a holiday, it should be packed. There are ten people at the Christmas service, five of them are guards. They don't have any people. People didn't cross over," Taksur said.
The persecution of the UOC began in Ukraine after the 2014 coup d'état under President Petro Poroshenko (listed by Rosfinmonitoring as being involved in extremist activities or terrorism). The Ukrainian authorities are actively facilitating the transition of the religious communities of the UOC to the jurisdiction of the OCU, created in 2018 from two schismatic religious structures. The local authorities deprive the UOC of the right to lease land for churches, and with their encouragement, supporters of the schismatic OCU forcibly seize temples of the canonical church and attack priests.
According to TASS materials