KYIV: Ukraine’s parliament voted Tuesday to ban the Russian-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a move Kyiv says strengthens its independence as the country cuts ties with institutions it considers aligned with Moscow.
Kyiv has been trying to curb spiritual links with Russia for years — a process accelerated by Moscow’s 2022 invasion, which the powerful Russian Orthodox Church endorsed.
A majority of Ukrainian lawmakers approved the bill outlawing religious organizations linked with Russia, which will mostly affect the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
Zelensky said the ban would boost his country’s “spiritual independence” and MPs hailed the bill as historic.
Russia condemned the move that its church called “illegal.”
The Russian church has been furious over a 2019 schism that resulted in the creation of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, spiritually loyal to Moscow’s Istanbul-based rival Patriarch Bartholomew.
Zelensky, who still needs to sign the bill for it to come into force, said he will be talking to Bartholomew’s representatives in the coming days.
It may take years to implement the ban, causing some dismay among followers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
The Moscow-backed church in Ukraine officially broke ties with its Russian counterpart in 2022, but some lawmakers have accused its clerics of collaborating with Russia.
Russian Orthodox Church spokesman Vladimir Legoida condemned the vote as “an unlawful act that is the grossest violation of the basic principles of freedom of conscience and human rights.”
In Kyiv, believers were praying outside the Russian-affiliated part of the historic Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, a regular practice since that area was closed to the public last year.
“There’s no politics here. We just come and pray for our children and our loved ones... I’ve never seen any KGB agents,” said 56-year-old Svetlana, who declined to give her name due to the sensitivity of the question.
In a lilac dress and matching headscarf, Svetlana said she had been baptised and married in the church and worried about its potential full closure.
“If they close, people will still pray in the streets, maybe we’ll put up tents, there will be prayers anyway,” Svetlana said.
The schism between Ukrainian and Russian-linked Churches was triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war between Kyiv and Moscow-backed separatists in the east.
The Istanbul-based head of the Eastern Orthodox Church granted a breakaway wing, called the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), autocephaly — religious independence — from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2019.
The split has impacted church going in Ukraine.
In the Ukrainian-affiliated part of the Lavra monastery, which remains open, 21-year-old Igor said:
“Everything is political. There can be no such thing as art, sports, or even religion outside politics.”
“I actually totally support this ban,” he said, accusing the Russian Orthodox Church of being a Kremlin agent that “has metastasized so much that we will be fighting it for decades.”
The bill was hailed by many Ukrainian politicians.
“There will be no Moscow Church in Ukraine,” Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, said on Telegram.
Ukraine MPs vote to ban Russia-linked Orthodox Church
https://arab.news/y3z4d
Ukraine MPs vote to ban Russia-linked Orthodox Church
- Kyiv has been trying to curb spiritual links with Russia for years — a process accelerated by Moscow’s 2022 invasion, which Russian Orthodox Church endorsed
Trump takes unconventional approach to communicating to the public about war in Iran
- The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war
Typical of an unconventional presidency, the Trump administration waited more than 48 hours to make any live, public communication to the American people about why it had decided to go to war with Iran.
President Donald Trump discussed why he launched the attack prior to a White House ceremony honoring military heroes on Monday but took no questions from reporters. Earlier in the day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine briefed journalists at the Pentagon.
The two days previous, Trump delivered two pretaped statements that were released on Truth Social, the social media site owned by the president’s media company, and granted telephone interviews to more than a dozen journalists — several of which produced fragmented responses that, to some, clouded as much as they cleared up.
The communications strategy opened Trump to criticism that he hadn’t done enough to explain the rationale and objectives of the war, even as the American military suffered its first casualties. By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has teamed with the US against Iran, delivered two statements the day the war began and addressed reporters Monday at the site of a missile attack that killed nine people. The Israeli military has held multiple press briefings each day.
“The American people need a commander in chief, and he has been absent in that role,” Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, said on CNN Monday. Emanuel, a Democrat, is contemplating a run for the presidency in 2028.
An unconventional strategy leads to criticism
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote on social media that “after Trump launched a new war on Iran, he did not rush back to the White House to make an Oval Office address to rally the nation as other presidents have done. He stayed at Mar-a-Lago to attend a glitzy political fundraiser.”
That post provoked a response from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. “Imagine being a reporter so consumed with Trump Derangement Syndrome that he wants President Trump to mimic the failed policies of the past. The truth is that President Trump spent the majority of his time monitoring the situation in a secure facility, in constant contact with world leaders, and made multiple addresses to the nation that garnered hundreds of millions of views. He also took dozens of calls with reporters.”
The calls included one with Baker’s colleague at The Times, Zolan Kanno-Youngs. Trump’s mobile phone number is known to many of the reporters who cover him, and the president often takes their calls for on-the-spot interviews. Besides The Times, he spoke in the aftermath of the attack to journalists for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Axios, Politico and an Israeli television station.
Most of the calls were brief and marginally illuminating; Politico’s Dasha Burns said Trump answered but said he was too busy to talk. The public couldn’t hear what Trump said in the interviews and was dependent upon what the journalists chose to report on the conversations.
“I spoke to President Trump today and he told me that the operation in Iran is going to go very fast,” Libby Alon, a reporter for Channel 14 News in Israel, wrote about her interview on X. “It’s doing very well, and (will) make the people of Israel very happy, and the people of the world very happy.”
The Times reported that in its six-minute chat, Trump “offered several seemingly contradictory visions of how power might be transferred to a new government — or even whether the existing Iranian power structure would run that government or be overthrown.”
In one of his two conversations with Trump, ABC News’ Jonathan Karl said when he asked about the death of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president said: “I got him before he got me. They tried twice. Well I got him first.” CNN’s Jake Tapper went on the air minutes after his conversation Monday, saying Trump told him “the big one is coming soon,” an apparent reference to a future attack.
Asked for comment, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said: “President Trump is the most transparent and accessible president in American history. The American people have never had a more direct and authentic relationship with a president of the United States than they have with President Trump.”
Hegseth briefing concentrates on friendly reporters
Pentagon reporters learned late Sunday about Hegseth’s briefing. Reporters from The Associated Press, Reuters, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and Stars & Stripes were permitted into the briefing room, but Hegseth did not call on them. Instead, he took questions from NewsNation and Trump-friendly outlets like the Daily Caller, Daily Wire, One America News and the Christian Broadcasting Network. Most mainstream news outlets left their regular stations at the Pentagon last fall rather than agree to Hegseth’s rules restricting their work.
Hegseth denounced the “foolishness” of people wanting to know details of the operation in advance, such as whether Americans would commit to more than air power, and said the operation would continue as long as it took to achieve objections. He initially ignored NBC News’ Courtney Kube when she called out a question: “President Trump put a four-week time limit on it. Are you saying he’s wrong?”
Later, Hegseth denounced Kube for asking “the typical NBC sort of gotcha-type question. President Trump has all the latitude in the world to talk about how long it might take — four weeks, two weeks, six weeks, it could move up, it could move back. We’re going to execute at his command the objectives he set out to achieve.”
Unlike Pentagon briefings in past administrations, reporters were given assigned seats, with the Trump-friendly outlets seated in front. Jennifer Griffin, Hegseth’s former colleague at Fox News Channel who left the Pentagon with other reporters after not accepting his new rules, was seated in the last row.
