Ukrainian church to forbid Russian prayers

The authorities of the new occupation have mandated that all prayers at the Kiev Pechersk Lavra be recited in Ukrainian.

The leader of the freshly established Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) declared on Sunday that prayers at Kiev’s famed Pechersk Lavra should now be offered in Ukrainian. Up until recently, monks from the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) resided in the mediaeval monastery.

Recently, the monastery came to be at the middle of a dispute between the UOC and the Ukrainian government. The Orthodox Easter holidays are set to be observed next week, and the Kiev-backed church now intends to offer services there.

On the eve of Orthodox Easter the following Sunday, prayers would be held at the monastery, Metropolitan Epiphany, the head of the OCU, announced to the Ukrainian media. On December 2, 2022, the day President Vladimir Zelensky outlawed all religious groups “associated” with Russia from operating in Ukraine, Kiev officially certified the Lavra as an OCU monastery.

Up until recently, the UOC monks still resided at the monastery. The leasing agreement between the Ukrainian government and the UOC, which had permitted the monks to reside at the Lavra, was cancelled by Kiev in late March. The monks resisted being asked to leave and lodged an appeal of the ruling with a Kiev court. The hearing for their case will now take place later in April.

Epiphany said to the Ukrainian media that the OCU does not wish to “evict the monks.” He said, “The Lavra should be Ukrainian; prayers in Ukrainian and for Ukraine should always be held there. We want the spirit of the ‘Russian world’ to no longer reign here.”

He said that the OCU will worship “peacefully and quietly” in the Lower Lavra, which is still occupied by the UOC monks, as it previously did in the upper section of the monastery that the UOC monks had left empty. The OCU Metropolitan claimed that the monastery’s “Ukrainization” was unavoidable.

When the Ukrainian security agency (SBU) initiated a criminal prosecution over chants honouring Russia in the Lavra amid the continuing crisis between Kiev and Moscow in November 2022, tensions between the monastery and the Ukrainian government grew.

During the armed war with Russia, Ukrainian authorities accused the UOC of being a security concern due to its historical links to the Russian Orthodox Church. The SBU has been conducting raids on UOC churches, purportedly looking for weapon caches and proof of treason.

Metropolitan Pavel, a senior bishop of the UOC and the head of the monks in the Larva, was taken into custody by Ukrainian law enforcement in late March. He was charged by the SBU with promoting religious animosity as well as “defending and denying Russian military actions.”

Moscow requested Pavel’s release while charging Zelensky’s administration with discriminating against religion. The Ukrainian government was reprimanded by Kiev after a report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) last month suggested that its measures “may be discriminatory.”