In accordance with the decision of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine dated December 1, 2022, "On certain aspects of the activities of religious organizations in Ukraine and the application of personal special economic and other restrictive measures (sanctions)", put into effect by the Decree of the President of Ukraine dated December 1, 2022. Within a two-month period, the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience provided a religious examination of the Statute on Governance of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for the presence of an ecclesiastical-canonical connection with the Moscow Patriarchate (Russian Orthodox Church).
This is reported by the DESS website.
To fulfill this task, an Expert Group was created, including five professors, doctors of science and one candidate of science — specialists in the field of religion, church history, freedom of conscience, state-confessional relations, and theology, who have professional scientific publications in history, sociology, philosophy, religion in general and in the field of research of Eastern Orthodoxy in particular.
The expert group reached the following general conclusions:
- The adoption of the new edition of the Statute on the management of the UOC (dated 27.05.2022) and the Resolution of the Council of the UOC did not lead to the severance of the canonical ecclesiastical connection of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the Russian Orthodox Church. The status of the UOC as a structural subdivision of the Russian Orthodox Church, which enjoys certain rights of independence, but does not form an autocephalous Church, remains unchanged.
- The UOC, in relation to the Russian Orthodox Church, has a canonical ecclesiastical connection of the part with the whole. The relationship between the UOC and the Russian Orthodox Church is not that of an independent (autocephalous) Church with another independent autocephalous Church. The UOC also does not have the status of an autonomous Church, which would be recognized by other churches, and therefore, from the point of view of ecclesiology and canon law, it is a structural division of the Russian Orthodox Church, with separate rights of independent formation without canonical subjectivity.
- The current activity or inactivity of the supreme Church authorities and management of the UOC shows that the UOC remains subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church. It does not act as an independent (autocephalous) Church and does not proclaim its own independence (autocephaly). The members of the Expert Group did not find any documents or actions indicating the transformation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church into a religious organization independent of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The full text of the Conclusion of the expert group can be found here.