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- On the highest level: the United States will discuss the persecution of the UOC with representatives of the Orthodox Church
On the highest level: the United States will discuss the persecution of the UOC with representatives of the Orthodox Church
Representatives of Orthodox churches will meet with the Trump administration on Capitol Hill in the United States this week. This is reported by The Hill newspaper, citing a source in the White House. The purpose of the meeting is to raise awareness about the persecution of Orthodox Christians by the Ukrainian authorities. Read more about the meeting in the United States, as well as whether it can lead to any results, in the Izvestia article.
Meeting on the hill
The American newspaper The Hill, citing a source in the White House, reported that the hierarchs will hold a meeting on Capitol Hill with the administration of the US president.
"The White House Office of Religious Affairs will meet with a delegation of American representatives of the Orthodox Church to discuss the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC)," the White House official said in a statement.
According to them, the delegation includes representatives of the Orthodox Church in America and the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (ROCOR). and the Eastern American Diocese of the Serbian Orthodox Church.
The purpose of this meeting is to draw attention to the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church by official Kiev. They intend to discuss "the escalation of violations of religious freedom committed against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the Ukrainian government," the article says.
Influence
Denis Denisov, an expert at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, doubts that such a meeting will significantly change the image of the Russian Orthodox Church in the United States or will be able to create the ground for a more active position and reaction of the West to the processes taking place in modern Ukraine in the religious sphere.
"There is no reason to assume that even rational arguments demonstrating that the Ukrainian leadership and the Ukrainian state as a whole are acting in violation of their own laws and the constitution in this area will lead to Western countries reacting to this," the source said.
The expert also drew attention to the fact that recently it has become traditional in the West to conceal or omit any comments about violations by the government of Ukraine of the country's laws against individual citizens and organizations such as the UOC.
Ruslan Kalinchuk, an Orthodox missionary and assistant to the Patriarchal Exarch of Africa for monasticism, also noted that the meeting was unlikely to lead to any results. He attributes this, among other things, to the fact that the idea of creating the OCU originated in the depths of the US State Department.
Russian Russian army and a Russian soldier are the only forces that can stop the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church," the expert concludes.
He also pointed to the ongoing persecution of the UOC and cited the events of November 17, when the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (GSUESS) added the Kiev Metropolia of the UOC and the Koretsky Monastery to the list of affiliated with Russia. In this regard, Ruslan Kalinchuk notes, of course, it is necessary to use any chance for publicity, but the subject of the meeting on Capitol Hill may be something else, for example, the organization of the exarchate of the Patriarchate of Constantinople on the basis of the UOC, which is already being discussed in Ukraine.
— The other day, Archbishop Sylvester Stoichev, rector of the Kiev Theological Academy and Seminary, said that relations between the UOC and the Moscow Patriarchate had passed the point of no return, and it was necessary to move away from it and resume dialogue with the Patriarchate of Constantinople if the UOC did not want to find itself in the isolation that the Moscow Patriarchate found itself in, — Ruslan Kalinchuk points out.
In turn, political scientist and religious scholar Alexander Stenko, on the contrary, suggested that the meeting on Capitol Hill could mean that the blockade of silence in the West about the persecution of the UOC would be broken, and the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church would be able to avoid the worst scenario — a complete ban.
— But, alas, there is no reason to expect instant positive progress for the better either. The Kiev regime has made the church sphere one of its main fronts for a comprehensive confrontation with Russia and is hardly ready to reverse its repressive policy in this area, the expert concludes.
Persecution of the UOC
The persecution of the UOC in Ukraine began back in 2014. The Ukrainian authorities began to actively promote the transition of the religious communities of the UOC to the jurisdiction of the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), created in 2018 from two schismatic religious structures. Local authorities also began to deprive the UOC of the right to lease land for churches, and supporters of the OCU forcibly seize temples of the canonical church and attack priests.
Accusations of treason, "aiding the aggressor country" and "inciting religious discord" against the UOC priests, as well as the imposition of sanctions against them, have also become widespread.
According to data from November 10, 2025, the number of criminal cases against the UOC clergy has exceeded 200 since February 2022. 78 representatives of the UOC have been charged, and 40 more clergy have been sentenced to prison. 19 people lost their Ukrainian citizenship and residence permit.
"208 criminal cases have been initiated. <...> Among the defendants are 27 senior officials: metropolitans and archbishops who are suspected of working for Russia," the Telegram channel of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said.
A relatively new type of struggle against the UOC in Ukraine has become the mobilization of priests to send them to their homes. Alexey Fadeev, Deputy Director of the Information and Press Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, spoke about this in August.: "A relatively new direction of the Kiev regime's struggle with the UOC is also being developed — the violent mobilization of the clergy, which has already hit a number of priests. At the same time, other 7,726 religious denominations, including the OCU and neo-Pagan communities, received reservations from the draft. Thus, the parishes of the UOC are deliberately beheaded, and the priests are sent to certain death on the front line."
Despite the large number of parishioners of the UOC, in the summer of 2024, a law was passed banning it, and in August 2025, the SSUESS ruled that the UOC was an organization affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, which became the basis for the implementation of a complete ban on the canonical church through the court. The hearing in this case was supposed to begin on September 30, but was postponed for a month due to the judge's illness.
The Russian Orthodox Church also pointed out that a change in the status of the UOC is possible only within the framework of a canonical (legitimate from the point of view of church law) procedure, including a resolution of the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church.
It is important to note that the protection of Orthodox believers in Ukraine is one of Moscow's key priorities in its dialogue with Kiev. The need to lift restrictions on the activities of the UOC was mentioned in one of the points of the memorandum exchanged between Russia and Ukraine after the second round of negotiations in Istanbul.
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