On 30 October 2001 the Interreligious Council of Crimea (southern Ukraine) asked Crimeans and the Crimean government to forbid the celebration of Halloween, a holiday which is native to English-speaking countries and is becoming popular in Ukraine.
The Council, headed by Metropolitan Lazar (Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate), calls the holiday celebrated on 31 October “an anti-Christian holiday” and “one of the forms of the Satanic Sabbath.” In a statement publicized in Symferopol on 29 October, the Council called upon the Ministry of Education of the autonomous republic of Crimea to forbid the celebration of Halloween in Crimean schools. The statement’s authors say that law-enforcement agencies should “use means for protecting law and order” in the Christian cemeteries in the peninsula. Information from this article was taken from the Ukrainian-language site www.radiosvoboda.org.