DESS head: There isn’t a single word about UOC in bill 8371

Viktor Yelensky. Photo: Unian

The DESS head Viktor Yelensky in a comment to the Voice of America assured that bill 8371 on the UOC ban has nothing to do with the UOC, and those who criticise it, do it for money.

"Of course, if people get very big money for discrediting Ukraine and this bill, it is profitable for them to distort its content," Yelensky said and assured that "in reality, there is not a single word in the law about the ban and the UOC-MP".

According to him, the law only talks about religious organisations with a centre in the aggressor country.

"If there are such ties, they are established by a special religious expertise," Yelensky said. According to him, the State Ethnopolitics Service sends such denominations a prescription to remove the ties, and "if such ties are not broken, the State Ethnopolitics Service files a lawsuit."

"This means there is no talk of a ban here. But, of course, there is a strong demand from both society and the Church itself that there should be no ties with the Moscow Patriarchate, which is directly involved in the war of the Russian Federation in Ukraine," stressed Elensky.

As earlier reported, according to Yelensky, the state already has a plan to fight the UOC but he will not reveal it.

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