Journalists ask Ministry of Culture to stop trampling on UOC hierarchs with fake reports

Orthodox journalist Vasiliy Anisimov called the accusations of the Ministry of Culture of the UOC clergy as slander. He writes about it in the article, published on the site of «Radonezh» society.

«Soviet actors and workers of culture used to continually live on accusations, but they concerned writers, philosophers, scientists, directors, artistes – Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Zinovyev, Nekrasov, Lubimov, Nuriyev, Stus, Berdnik, Chichibabin etc. The Ministry of Culture of Evgeniy Nishchuk has opened a new page in this notorious activity: it reports on Orthodox hierarchs,» he claims.

«At times the Ministry of Culture even seems to have been taken over by some wicked totalitarian sect, called to intimidate and run down on the clergy of Jesus Christ's Church by slanderous reports,» says the journalist.

«The UOC is the only big Ukrainian structure which has not abandoned the Crimea. Three Crimean UOC eparchies guide the peninsular-based Orthodox, including 350 thousand ethnic Ukrainians and are under the omophorion of His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and all Ukraine. Instead of broad support and encouragement of Orthodox hierarchs who remained loyal to Kiev the Ministry of Culture tramples on them,» underscores the journalist.

«For the first time I've encountered the practice of the state structure publicly commencing a no-more-no-less case of «anti-Ukrainian activities», referring in its official documents to certain anonymos «public information sources», such as the Internet, and presuming this information to be true, reliable and sufficient for its accusatory conclusions,» notes Vasiliy Anisimov.
On 31 January 2017 the Ministry of Culture published a “Statement as per the separatist and anti-Ukrainian rhetoric and actions of particular clergymen of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church”, in which the agency accused the UOC clergymen of carrying out religious actions of a worship character upon an order of the RF military and persons who form a part of the «LNR», as well as utterances bearing an anti-Ukrainain character, in the Ministry's opinion.

A number of experts gave a highly negative evaluation of the above statement and called it intimidation of the UOC.