❗️ After an unconstitutional armed coup in 2014, the nationalists in Kiev have since systematically built a multi-layered system of severe restrictions on religious freedom, turning the religious sphere into a testing ground for assaults on human dignity.
The religious dimension has become one of the state’s key instruments for influencing social processes and is actively used to falsify history, legitimise and glorify Nazism, and suppress dissent, as well as secular and religious opposition.
Here are some quotes from the report:
1️⃣ Legislation targeting the UOC
Its proponents were open about their objectives: to curtail the rights of UOC communities and believers, to seize their property, to strip the Church of its historical and legal name, to prevent it from identifying as “Orthodox,” and ultimately to prohibit it from operating in any capacity within Ukrainian territory.
2️⃣ Searches and criminal proceedings
Since May 2022, the SBU, in cooperation with other law enforcement agencies, has conducted more than 1,000 searches of UOC monasteries, churches, and diocesan administrative buildings throughout Ukraine under the pretext of 'counterintelligence measures.'
3️⃣ Mobilisation of clergy
On June 6, 2025, following amendments to Ukraine’s mobilisation legislation, the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience published a list of religious organisations whose clergy members are exempt from military mobilisation. More than 10,000 UOC communities were not included in this document.
4️⃣ Restrictions imposed by local authorities
Appealing to the country’s leadership with calls to ban the UOC are widespread. In a number of local communities in Western Ukraine, local authorities have forcibly closed churches, prevented the faithful from attending services, and imposed local “bans on the activities” of the UOC.
5️⃣ Church seizures and parish re-registration
According to UOC senior clergy, 129 churches were seized in 2022 in the regions of Ivano-Frankovsk, Lvov, Volyn, Rovno, Zhitomir, Khmelnitsky, Vinnitsa, Chernovtsy, Chernigov, Kiev, and others, with only 31 cases involving voluntary transitions of congregations. In 2023−2025, the effort to seize churches by force and destroy them continued gathering momentum.
6️⃣ Pressure on major monasteries
The seizure of the churches and the building complex of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra was authorised by a decision of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine dated December 1, 2022, and an executive order issued by Vladimir Zelensky on the same day.
7️⃣ Official rhetoric towards believers
Prominent politicians, senior government executives and regional officials are fostering hate speech towards the UOC, while a large-scale information campaign against it is being carried out through state and private media. As a result, churches and sacred sites of the canonical Orthodox Church have been targeted by acts of vandalism and arson, and its clergy and believers have faced unprovoked violence and aggression.
8️⃣ Western involvement
It was with the covert backing of the United States that Constantinople promoted the creation of the schismatic OCU in December 2018. This structure was formally established on the initiative of former Ukrainian President Petr Poroshenko and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, who granted it the official Tomos of Autocephaly. During this same period, persecution of the UOC intensified markedly.
9️⃣ International responses
The OHCHR report covering the period from June 1 to November 30, 2025 once again criticised Law No. 3894-IX, emphasising that ‘national security’ cannot be invoked as a permissible ground for restricting the rights of religious communities, and that this legislative approach contradicts international legal agreements, including those signed by Ukraine.
📄 FULL REPORT (PDF)