The US, which provided behind-the-scenes support for Kiev’s creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), bears the main responsibility for the church split in the country, Russian Foreign Ministry Ambassador-at-Large Gennady Askaldovich has said.
Askaldovich stressed that Washington ‘has long been hatching plans to eliminate canonical Orthodoxy in Ukraine.’
‘It was with their tacit behind-the-scenes support and pressure that the Patriarchate of Constantinople (Fanar) in every possible way facilitated the creation of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine and granted it a ‘tomos’ of autocephaly,’ RIA Novosti quoted him as saying.
Therefore, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry representative, the USA and the Patriarchate of Constantinople bear the main responsibility for the Orthodox split in Ukraine.
Earlier it was reported that a priest of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, beaten during the seizure of the cathedral in Cherkasy by schismatics from the OCU, was hospitalised in serious condition.
At the end of September, a law came into force in Ukraine that allows banning the work of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
