The so-called Church of the Tithe Church of the Most Holy Theotokos is illegally located by the UOC MP on the territory of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine.

The MAF temple near the Tithing Church must be dismantled, because it is an arbitrary construction of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

This was announced by the Minister of Culture and Information Policy Oleksandr Tkachenko. He emphasized that the so-called Church of the Tithe Church of the Holy Mother of God is illegally located on the territory of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine.

The minister notes that the arbitrary seizure of the site by the religious community of the UOC MP began in 2008.

“At first, the building looked like three blocked kiosks. In 2012, under Yanukovych, the “legalization” of illegal construction began,” Tkachenko reports.

According to the minister, the specified religious organization never received any building permits or land use permits. At the same time, he added that the building itself was built without an approved project, without obtaining construction permits, and the building was not put into operation in the prescribed manner.

Tkachenko notes that since 2020, the trial of the lawsuit of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine regarding the removal of obstacles to the use of the land by the demolition of an arbitrary object has been ongoing.

“The Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine is involved in the case as a third party and contributes to this process. Currently, the examination has already been completed, and the next court session is already scheduled for January 18, 2023, so there is a reasonable expectation that soon the dispute will be resolved in a legal way.” , – emphasized Tkachenko.

Tithe church – what is known

The Tithe Church, or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was built on Starokyivska Gora in 989-996 at the initiative of Volodymyr the Great. It was considered the first stone Christian church in Kievan Rus after the adoption of Christianity.

Tithe church was destroyed in 1240 during the invasion of Tatar-Mongol hordes. It was not preserved except for individual structural and decorative fragments of the foundation.

In 2018, the Urban Planning Commission of the Kyiv City Council supported a petition demanding the demolition of the illegal Tithe Chapel of the UOC MP on the territory of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. The deputies tasked the KMDA “to take all the measures provided for by the current legislation, aimed at eliminating the detected offenses as soon as possible.”

In the same year, the Ministry of Culture called the chapel of the UOC MP an illegal building, which is located on a land plot of particularly valuable territories and leads to damage to objects of cultural heritage – a monument of national importance on the territory of the protection (buffer zone) of the UNESCO world heritage site.

Sanctions against the UOC MP

From November 22, 2022, employees of the SBU conduct searches on the territories of monasteries and dioceses of the UOC MP. In particular, on January 6, the SBU completed counterintelligence measures at the facilities of the UOC MP in Kherson, Kirovohrad, Dnipropetrovsk, and Rivne regions.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on December 1 that the National Security Council instructed the government to submit a bill to the Verkhovna Rada on the exclusion of religious organizations affiliated with centers of influence in the Russian Federation from operating in Ukraine.

The UOC MP leased the two largest churches on the territory of the Upper Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra – the Dormition Cathedral and the Tabernacle Church. The lease expired at the end of December. The Ministry of Culture stated that it would recommend not to extend the lease terms of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Dormition and Tabernacle Churches in the National Kyiv-Pechersk Reserve. On January 5 of this year, it became known that the Assumption Cathedral and the refectory church of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra were returned to the state. The corresponding decision was made by the commission, which was engaged in inventorying the property and inspecting the buildings.

On January 7, it became known that the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, terminated the citizenship of some priests of the UOC MP. According to the mass media, it is about 13 clergymen.