UOC denies information about Primate's Russian passport
The UOC Information and Education Department recalled the SBU's repeated statements that it had checked all bishops for dual citizenship.
The information published on the “Ukrainska Pravda” website about the Russian citizenship of the Primate and a number of other bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church does not correspond to reality. This is said in a statement published by the UOC Synodal Information and Education Department.
"In connection with the appearance of unreliable and manipulative information about bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church on the Internet portal "Ukrainska Pravda", it should be reported that some of the bishops mentioned in the video were deprived of citizenship without any justification, and therefore they filed a lawsuit in court to restore their Ukrainian citizenship as they have no other. The court opened proceedings on their petition," the message said. “Since the SBU stated on multiple occasions that it had checked all the bishops of the UOC for dual citizenship and had not cancelled Ukrainian citizenship of the other bishops mentioned in the story, the information quoted in the video cannot correspond to reality".
The statement stressed that His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry has been a citizen of Ukraine since birth and does not have passports of other countries.
The Synodal Department also pointed out that "the author of the video footage provided as evidence footage with blatantly dubious and unsubstantiated content".
"At the same time, it is surprising that Ukrainian journalists are persistently looking for non-existent Russian passports of bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and instead ignore the frank statements of representatives of the OCU about the citizenship of the Russian Federation and the 'LPR' among the bishops of this religious organization", the document noted.
As reported, National Security and Defence Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov said that the existence of the UOC in Ukraine since 1991 has been a ‘special operation to seize our territory’.
