UOC Wins Key Legal Victory Against State Agency

His Beatitude Metr. Onuphry of Kyiv. Photo: UOC

KYIV — The Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal on April 6, 2026, partially granted the appeal of the Kyiv Metropolis of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), overturning a lower court ruling and invalidating key actions tied to a state religious examination. The UOC’s Legal Department later issued clarifications, arguing that public claims misrepresented the scope and meaning of the appellate decision as supporters of the state-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) attempted to downplay the significance of the ruling.

For context, in January 2023, Ukraine’s State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) released the results of a government-ordered examination — initiated after a directive from President Volodomyr Zelensky and a National Security and Defense Council decision — concluding that the UOC remained part of the Moscow Patriarchate despite its 2022 declaration of independence through updated statutes. The expert group stated that the UOC still functioned as a structural division of the Russian Orthodox Church with limited autonomy and was not an autocephalous church.

The UOC objected early in the process, requesting the exclusion of allegedly biased experts and the inclusion of international scholars, but this request was not addressed. Church representatives also alleged that some participants had shown hostility toward the UOC and that the review relied on outdated Russian Church documents rather than its revised statutes. The process occurred amid leadership changes at the state agency, including the dismissal of its former head, Elena Bogdan, shortly after the presidential directive and her replacement by Viktor Yelensky, under whose tenure the now-overturned examination was completed. 

Now, the court has identified serious procedural violations by DESS, concluding that the entire expert review process was fundamentally defective. The legal department of the UOC also publicly rejected claims that the court left the review intact, insisting such interpretations distort the ruling.

Officials emphasized that such violations rendered both the order and the underlying conclusion legally defective. The court stressed that failure to ensure impartiality undermined the legitimacy of the entire review. “The claim that the religious expert review was supposedly ‘not annulled’ . . . does not correspond to the actual content of the court’s decision,” the legal department stated. 

The ruling also annulled the January 27, 2023, order approving the review, confirming systemic procedural failures. The UOC maintains that no valid legal basis now exists linking it institutionally to the Russian Orthodox Church. UOJ-Ukraine emphasized that the decision, now in force, underscores broader concerns about fairness and legality in state-conducted religious examinations.

Previously, the UOJ reported that the UN criticized Ukraine for imprisoning Christian believers.

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