Members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery denied entry to representatives of the government commission.
Fighting broke out outside a Kiev monastery on Thursday after a Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church that the government says has ties to Russia defied an eviction order.
Tensions by the presence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in the 980-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery have risen since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
kyiv has accused the UOC of maintaining links with the Russian Orthodox Church, which has supported Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. The UOC has said that it severed all ties with the Russian Church in May 2022.
Hours after the deadline to leave the monastery expired at midnight on Wednesday, members of the UOC denied entry to representatives of a government commission who wanted to inspect buildings in the sprawling gold-domed monastery complex.
Shortly afterward, fighting broke out, the Reuters news agency reported. Nobody was hurt.
Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko later condemned the “brutal” treatment of commission members. He said in a statement that the government had filed a complaint with the police and that efforts to inspect the buildings would continue on Friday.
The UOC is the second largest church in Ukraine, although most Ukrainian Orthodox believers belong to a separate branch of the faith, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, formed four years ago by uniting independent branches of Moscow authority.
Russia condemned the kyiv offensive against the UOC as an outrage and a crime.
“Such actions are plunging Ukraine deeper into the Middle Ages in the worst sense of the word,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on the Telegram app.
The deputy head of a Ukrainian state body responsible for the monastery said earlier this month that a government commission was being set up to make decisions on issues related to the UOC’s lease on the monastery.
The government claimed that the monks violated their lease by making modifications to the historic site and other technical violations. The UOC monks questioned the violations, describing the claims as a pretext.
The Ukrainian government has been cracking down on the UOC for its historical links to the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader, Patriarch Kirill, has supported Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The UOC has insisted on its loyalty to Ukraine, has denounced the Russian invasion and has even declared its independence from Moscow.
But Ukrainian security agencies have claimed that some in the Ukrainian church have maintained close ties to Moscow.
They have raided numerous church holy places and then released photos of rubles, Russian passports and booklets with messages from the Patriarch of Moscow as proof that some church officials have been loyal to Russia.
Many Orthodox communities in Ukraine have severed ties with the UOC, once one of the main sources of Russian influence in Ukraine.
They gradually transitioned to the rival Ukrainian Orthodox Church after it received recognition from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who is considered first among equals among the leaders of the Eastern Orthodox churches but lacks the universal power of a pope.
The Moscow Orthodox patriarchs and most others refused to accept that designation, which formalized a split with the Russian church.
