Almost 1,400 religious communities transferred from UOC (MP) to OCU in 2022-2025 - State Ethnopolitics Service
Between 2022-2025, almost 1,400 religious communities transferred from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), according to the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience.
Specifically, according to the State Ethnopolitics Service’s response to an inquiry from the Interfax-Ukraine agency, during 2022-2025, 1,378 religious communities made decisions to change their subordination in canonical and organizational matters from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
It is noted that in 2022, 483 religious communities made such a decision, in 2023 - 471 religious communities, in 2024 - 233 religious communities, and in 2025 - 191 religious communities.
Speaking in terms of regions, during 2022-2025, the most religious communities transferred from the UOC (MP) to the OCU in Kyiv Region (306), Khmelnytskyi Region (295), Vinnytsia Region (159), Zhytomyr Region (128), and Cherkasy Region (104).
The fewest religious communities transferred during these years in Kyiv city (6), Kherson Region (6), Kharkiv Region (6), Mykolaiv Region (6), Ivano-Frankivsk Region (4), and Dnipropetrovsk Region (4), while in Luhansk, Donetsk, and Zaporizhia regions, not a single religious community transferred from the UOC (MP) to the OCU during 2022-2025.
The Service also reported that as of January 1, 2025, there were 10,118 religious organizations of the UOC (MP) in Ukraine, of which 9,792 were religious communities.
Earlier, the Interfax-Ukraine agency reported that in 2018, 2 religious communities of the UOC (MP) changed their subordination in canonical and organizational matters to the OCU religious centers, in 2019 - 319 communities, in 2020 - 30, and in 2021 - 25 communities.
As previously reported, on August 20, 2024, the Verkhovna Rada adopted in second reading and as a whole a bill banning the activities in Ukraine of religious organizations affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church (No. 8371 "On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Sphere of Religious Organizations’ Activities").
On August 21, 2024, the head of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience, Viktor Yelensky, stated that if the primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), Metropolitan Onufriy, approached him with a desire to join the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, he would propose a fair model.
On August 29, 2025, the State Ethnopolitics Service filed a lawsuit to terminate the activities of the UOC (MP), which has been recognized as affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC).