The head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department for External Church Relations, Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk (Alpheyev), said that the so-called Orthodox Church of Ukraine was created by the United States solely for political purposes
The hierarch noted that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s meeting during his visit to Kiev with the head of the PCU, Epiphany Dumenko, but not with other religious leaders, was not a coincidence.
“The fact that the US Secretary of State met with the head of the schism, but did not meet with any other religious leader – neither with the head of the canonical Church, nor with Muslim or Jewish leaders – once again shows that the so-called PCU led by the so-called metropolitan (in fact, false metropolitan) Epiphany is a US project, a political project from start to finish”, – Metropolitan Hilarion said.
The head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate stressed that the United States continued to be guided by the “divide and rule” principle not only at the political level, but also at the church level.
Currently, Ukraine has only one canonical Orthodox church – the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. However, thanks to the efforts of the country’s past leadership, a non-canonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine was established in Kiev in December 2018 on the basis of schismatic organisations – the Kyiv Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.