The people behind the clampdown on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church are “infidels,” the Russian president has said
The largest Christian Church in Ukraine is being persecuted because the country is run by godless people, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said. Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky and many of his associates are ethnic Jews but have never been seen at a synagogue, he added.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was outlawed by Zelensky earlier this year over alleged links to Moscow. Speaking at his end-of-year press-conference on Thursday, Putin described the move as a “blatant violation of human rights, the rights of believers.”
“The church is being torn apart in front of the whole world. It is like an execution by a firing squad,” he added.
The president said he is sure that these actions will come back to haunt the members of Zelensky’s government.
“They are not even atheists, these people. Atheists are people who believe in something, they believe… that there is no God. But it is their faith, their conviction. But these people are not atheists. These are simply people without any faith at all, infidels,” he said of the Ukrainian leadership.
Putin noted that Zelensky and many of his associates are “ethnic Jews,” adding: “But who has seen them in a synagogue? I think no one has seen them in a synagogue. They are apparently not Orthodox [Christians] because they do not go to churches either. They are certainly not followers of Islam because it is unlikely for them to appear in a mosque.”
“These are people without kith or kin. They do not care about anything that is dear to us and the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian people,” Putin added.
The members of the current government in Kiev will “flee [Ukraine] some day” to faraway countries and “they will be going not to church, but to the beach,” the president concluded.
Ukraine has been gripped by religious tensions for years, with two rivals claiming to be the country’s true Orthodox Church.
Kiev supports the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), which was established in 2018 and which the Russian Orthodox Church considers schismatic. Zelensky has explained the clampdown on the UOC by citing its alleged contact with the Moscow Patriarchate and the need to protect Ukraine’s “spiritual independence” and deprive Russia of an opportunity to “to manipulate the spirituality of our people.”
The crackdown on the UOC intensified after the escalation of the Ukraine conflict in February 2022. Several of its churches have been seized by force, and criminal cases have been opened against clerics. A law banning the activities of the UOC in Ukraine officially came into force in late September.
