The Security Service of Ukraine and Ukrainian police raided a 1,000-year-old Orthodox monastery in Kyiv on Tuesday morning as part of an operation to counter alleged “subversive activities by Russian special services,” Reuters reported. The Russian Orthodox Church says the raid is an “action of intimidation”.
Lavra Pecherska in Kyiv, which translates as Lavra Pecherska, is the oldest Christian Orthodox monastery in Ukraine and the seat of the Russian-backed wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church known as the Moscow Patriarchate.
“These measures are taken… as part of the SBU’s work to counter the destructive activities of Russian special services in Ukraine,” the SBU said in a statement.
The SBU stated that the search was conducted with the aim of preventing the use of the Pechersk monastery as a “center of the Russian world” and was conducted to check suspicions “about the use of the premises… to shelter subversive and intelligence groups, foreign citizens, to store weapons.”
The SBU did not specify what the result of the raid was.
The Russian Orthodox Church said on Tuesday that the raids by Ukrainian special services were an “act of intimidation”, Reuters reported.
“Like many other cases of persecution of believers in Ukraine since 2014, this act of intimidation of believers will almost certainly go unnoticed by those who call themselves the international human rights community,” noted church figure Volodymyr Legoyda.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church condemned the support of Patriarch Kirill
In May, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate cut ties with the Russian Church over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and condemned Patriarch Kirill’s support for what Moscow calls a “special military operation.”
A survey by the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center in 2020 showed that 34% of Ukrainians identified themselves as members of the Main Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and 14% as members of the Church of the Moscow Patriarchate of Ukraine.
In 2019, Ukraine received permission from the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians around the world to create a church independent of Moscow, which largely ended the centuries-old religious ties between the two countries.
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