No matter how many videos are made about interfaith confrontations in Ukraine, international experts and organizations can understand the situation, says Andrei Yurash.
Head of the Department for Religious Issues, Ensuring the Right of Citizens to Freedom of Worldview and Belief of the Secretariat of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine Andrei Yurash shifted responsibility for inter-confessional conflicts and fights around “transfers” to the OCU onto the clergy of the UOC.
“The people who provoke these fights are morally responsible,” he said in an interview on the DetectorUA channel. – <...> This is the moral responsibility of those who want to stop objective processes.”
According to him, communities go to the OCU by a majority vote, but “there are 5-10 people who, as a rule, are mobilized by a clergyman who does not want to.”
“This is the responsibility of two planes: common ideological – that they do not want, in principle, a priori, any changes, and want to stop those processes that, in my opinion, cannot be stopped, <...> and the second level of responsibility is in those specific communities where they deliberately manipulate the very often incompetent, poorly educated position of a significant minority of the former community, who are trying to resist, to deny this trend,” Yurash said.
He explained that he was talking about “shepherds who deliberately bring out these elderly women and men not so that they feel the grace of God in a fight but in order to create a picture, to show this as a kind of argument and means in the global ideological confrontation that we have”.
However, Andrei Yurash emphasized, no matter how many such arguments were made on international platforms, for example, in the UN and the OSCE, during all this time “Ukraine has not received a single signal that it violates the rights of people. <...> No matter how much of this is filmed, international experts and organizations are able to understand the situation.”
According to Yurash, the developed mechanism for the transition of communities to the OCU works, but there are still internal and external factors that are trying to influence this process.
