Foreign Minister Klimkin: ROC destroys UOC-MP with own hands

The Russian Orthodox Church mirrors the policy of the Russian state leadership which entered into confrontation with the whole world, and this leads to a real rift in the Orthodox Church.

Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said this in his column on Ukrayinska Pravda.

“The ROC is making the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) escape from reality, self-isolate and marginalize itself. The Russian Orthodox Church practically destroys the UOC (MP) with its hands,” he notes.

According to the diplomat, the Russian Orthodox Church is pursuing a policy of persistent self-destruction.

“Indeed, empires, as a rule, are destroying themselves from within. It seems that their churches tend to choose the same path,” the minister said.

Klimkin is convinced that it is better for the UOC (MP) to be actively involved in the discussion about the future of the Ukrainian Unified Local Church, and not to interfere with this process.

“Given the traditionally strong position and scale of the UOC (MP), it would enable its hierarchs (at least those who want to) to make a decisive influence on the process of unification, to become an irreplaceable creator of the new Ukrainian church," he notes.

The minister recalled how Patriarch Kirill, in his statement, called the Russian Orthodox Church an “island of freedom”.

“It seems to me that the metaphor is not very elegant, because the USSR dubbed this way the communist Cuba ... Freedom from whom and from what? It turns out that from the thought of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and this is nothing else but a split,” says Klimkin.

According to him, the Russian Orthodox Church itself sowed the grain of this split when it supported Russia's aggression against Ukraine and boycotted the Pan-Orthodox Council in 2016 in Crete.