The situation that Ukraine witnessed in 2015, when Onufriy and the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church chose not to stand up in the Verkhovna Rada session hall to honor the Ukrainian fallen soldiers, recently repeated.
On August 29, as Ukraine marked Day of Remembrance of Defenders of Ukraine, Metropolitan Onufriy and his closest associates did not attend the events where Ukrainian fallen heroes were honored.
There is no mention of this important memorable date on the ROCinU official website. Instead of an article on commemoration, the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine tells about the launch of construction of new temples allegedly “captured by the OCU”, sends Onufriy’s greetings to the Jerusalem hierarch, features Onufriy’s sermons on various topics, as well as a praising piece dedicated to a Paralympic medalist who is an ROCinU follower.
There are two possible versions of such a contemptuous attitude on the part of the Moscow Patriarchate’s hierarchy to Ukrainian defenders.
Either the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, Onufriy (Berezovsky), and all his allies leaders are so brazen they don’t even want to “waste their time” honoring Ukrainian defenders, or the websites run by the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine had been instructed not to cover such news (even if the celebrations were held at the regional level), only not to spoil good relations with Moscow, where their patriarch sits.
