Moscow reveals why they don't want the UOC-MP to be called the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine

Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church said this during the live broadcast of the Rossiya 24 TV channel.

"The previous president of Ukraine, Poroshenko, decided to create a new "Church" that is completely independent of the Russian Orthodox Church. To do this, he resorted to the services of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. The new entity was created on the basis of a schismatic group that has existed since the early 90s and has no legitimacy from the point of view of Orthodox canons - it is just a group of impostors who were declared a "Church". And the canonical Church, which has more than 12 thousand parishes, several hundred monasteries, more than a hundred bishops and millions of believers, was actually outlawed," the DECR chairman said.

In particular, he referred to the law adopted by the Verkhovna Rada, on the basis of which the UOC-MP should change its name to the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

"First, the Church chooses its own name independently. Secondly, any forced renaming of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the current conditions will lead to the fact that it will have to re-register all its dioceses, parishes, which means that in each specific place, there will be pressure on believers, priests, bishops to re-register as a schismatic entity," the representative of the Russian Orthodox Church said.