On August 13, 2024, an important meeting took place between the Ukrainian delegation and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. The Ukrainian team was co-led by the Deputy Head of the President’s Office, Olena Kovalska, and head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, Viktor Yelenskyi.
This is reported by the Service’s press service.
The key point of the meeting was the patriarch’s unquestionable support for the course pursued by President Volodymyr Zelensky. His Holiness emphasized that he unquestioningly and with an open heart accepts everything that contributes to Ukraine’s good. This largely concerns the course and initiatives of the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, aimed at spiritual independence, which is a prerequisite for the upward progress of Ukraine and its place in the family of free democratic nations.
The Ukrainian side emphasized that no churches are shut down and that all religious communities in country are equal.
“The voice of a small number of religious communities in the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations sounds as loud as that of the churches to which the majority of the population of Ukraine belongs,” says the Service.
The representatives from Ukraine expressed their gratitude to the patriarch for his constant support, especially in the context of repelling Russian aggression. They also informed His Holiness of the occupiers’ crimes against religious freedom, including the killing of clerics and destruction of more than 630 religious buildings.
Patriarch Bartholomew emphasized that the world still knows very little about these crimes, and called for spreading the truth about religious freedom in Ukraine and about those who are actually trying to destroy it. He assured of his readiness to support Orthodoxy in Ukraine, especially his daughter – the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
The meeting wrapped up with the renewal of the invitation to the Ecumenical Patriarch to visit Ukraine on behalf of President Zelensky.
It should be recalled that earlier, SFU reported on the context of an unannounced visit of Metropolitan Epifaniy to Constantinople on August 12-13. It was about the OCU leadership demanding that the parliament pass Bill 8371 on banning the UOC (MP) in its current form, presenting it as self-sufficient. Demands are often accompanied by political blackmail – as to future loyalty at the “next election”. When convincing lawmakers of the need to pass the bill ASAP, the OCU argues that, once it is voted in, the “unity of Ukrainian Orthodoxy” will come immediately – under the following formula: “all hierarchs are traitors, and the parishes will transition to us.” The mediating mission of the Ecumenical Patriarch toward the unity of Ukrainian Orthodoxy has been blocked there for more than a year, and this information spilled into the public domain, OCU spokesmen, for the sake of trying to justify themselves, tried to claim there was “Moscow’s hand in the Ecumenical Patriarchate somewhere”. The SFU believed this was the scenario that Metropolitan Epifaniy would intend to convey to the Patriarch during a visit on August 12-13.
