Russia is seizing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in occupied Crimea as part of a sustained attack across Ukraine

The Church of the Resurrection of Christ Photo Holos Krymu

Russian occupation authorities have taken control of the Church of Christ’s Resurrection in occupied Crimea, in what Father Yaroslav, the church’s rector, sees as the latest attack on Ukraine’s Orthodox Church and on Ukrainian identity in Crimea.

Father Yaroslav informed Holos Krymu [Voice of Crimea] that local occupation authorities “sealed” the church on October 4, claiming it was the property of the local occupation administration. The Church of Christ’s Resurrection is located in the settlement of Biiuk-Onlar in Kurmansk Raion of Crimea, which Russia continues to call Oktyabre. The community there had been celebrating services there since 2002, when they decided to switch from the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate” to the Kiev Patriarchate (now the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, OCU).

This is the latest attack of its kind on a place of worship of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, says Father Yaroslav. It is being carried out by the occupying regime, instigated by local collaborators who have betrayed Ukraine and are trying to prove their new value. bosses’. ““The destruction of the Ukrainian Church is the destruction of the Ukrainian language and culture, the Ukrainian identity for a significant part of the population of the peninsula, for whom the Church remains the only center of Ukrainian identity in Crimea,”

Andriy Shchekun, authorized representative of the Crimean Diocese of OCU, emphasizes that Russia’s destruction of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in occupied Crimea is about more than just the destruction of a religious structure. “We are witnesses to how the Ukrainian community in Crimea, its national civic associations and political structures, as well as clergy of the Crimean Diocese of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine did not collaborate with the occupation regime and did not choose personal cooperation.” win. This is not just the occupying regime’s revenge for the resistance, but rather Russia’s conscious, centuries-long policy aimed at the annihilation of the entire Ukrainian people. It is effectively ethnocide and we should talk about it and document Russia’s crimes for which it is finally being held accountable.”

Although all faiths, except the Russian Orthodox Church, quickly came under attack following the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, it was the then Orthodox Church under the Kiev Patriarchate that came under particular attack. This was undoubtedly due to the strong pro-Ukrainian stance of the Church and especially Archbishop Klyment, as well as the public statement of March 11, 2014 condemning Russia’s occupation of Crimea.

Russia has indeed set out to eradicate the Ukrainian language and everything related to Ukrainian identity in all the territories it occupies, with this becoming clear for the first time in Crimea. For many Ukrainians, the church was an important contact point for people who wanted to hear Ukrainian and be with Ukrainians. The archbishop himself has been attacked for his passionate appeals to the international community on behalf of the faithful and in defense of the ever-growing number of Ukrainian political prisoners in Russia. The Russian attack, of course, also involved banal looting, particularly of the Cathedral of Saints Vladimir and Olha in Simferopol. After Moscow’s attempt to bribe Archbishop Klyment with a significant sum of money to vacate the cathedral failed, Russia resorted to other illegal methods to expel the church from the cathedral, the center of the Crimean diocese, and ultimately from occupied Crimea.

Illegal occupation courts have reportedly initiated proceedings to evict the church, first from part of the cathedral and, as of 2019, from the entire site. It even ignored the intervention of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which called on it to stop the planned eviction.

In July 2018, a land registration law was amended to cancel any acts that were not re-registered under Russian law. It has long been clear that the requirement for re-registration would serve to either force religious communities to accept Russian citizenship and jurisdiction or to expel them from Crimea. For a long time, the Crimean diocese rejected any proposal for such a new registration, which would effectively result in recognition of Russian rule. Faced with the real prospect that his congregation – and all Ukrainian believers in Crimea – could be deprived of any church, Archbishop Klyment finally applied for such a re-registration, but only of the congregation, not the diocese itself. The occupation authorities found pretexts for three rejections of this application.

Despite the closure of the case by the UN Human Rights Committee, on May 11, 2023, Russians stormed into the cathedral and began looting the church premises, which they cynically described as “liberation”.

At the end of 2023 it also became known that the entire Orthodox Church of Ukraine had been expelled from Crimea, with Russia using the threat of forced mobilization into the Russian army as a final weapon.

In July 2024, the Russian occupation authorities in Yevpatoria began demolishing the Holy Cross Chapel there. At that time it was said to be the last remaining Orthodox church in Ukraine [OCU] Place of worship in occupied Crimea. It appears that this was not the case as the occupying regime has now seized the Church of Christ’s Resurrection.

Russia only withdrew from the European Convention on Human Rights in 2022 (after being effectively expelled from the Council of Europe due to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine). Therefore, his attempts to deny the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and his damning judgment of June 25, 2024 in the case of Ukraine v. Russia (on Crimea) are pathetic. The ruling found that Russia had violated all rights enshrined in the European Convention (with the exception of the ban on slavery), including, of course, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion (Article 9).