Authorities need to disrupt UOC Procession to distract from Tomos, – expert

Political expert Kirill Molchanov

The disruption of the religious procession of the UOC is designed to make up for the negative response due to the absence of the Tomos, states politologist and Candidate of Political Sciences Kirill Molchanov during the press conference at the information agency Golos UA.

"The entire breakdown (of the religious procession of the UOC, – Ed.) is aimed, on the one hand, to reduce the turnout, and on the other hand, to make up for the negative response due to the absence of the Tomos," Molchanov said.

According to the political expert, now that the Phanar delegation has paid a visit to part of the Local Churches, none of them has yet expressed support for Ukraine and therefore, it is unlikely that Patriarch Bartholomew will agree to a split not even of the Ukrainian but of the world Orthodoxy.

"In view of the fact there will be no Tomos by Friday, there is no need to be a religious expert or a pundit, since Filaret himself said that this will occur before the end of the current year, or they can say by the end of the next year, thus the situation there is sad," considers Molchanov.

For this reason, according to the political expert, the authorities want to quantitatively underestimate the number of participants in the UOC procession on Friday.

"This is done in order to distort the picture of the UOC Cross procession by saying there are not so many of them and there is no need reckoning with them at all," the expert added. "However, on Saturday 28th, supporters of the Kyiv Patriarchate will be delivered in batches and the media will try to show they exceed many times."

However, according to Molchanov, statistics reveals the fact that in the past years the UOC supporters prevailed dozen times over those from the Kyiv “patriarchate” in the cross processions.

Earlier the Ovruch eparchy reported that its believers are prevented from their participation in the Kiev-based Cross procession on July 27.

Metropolitan Luke (Kovalenko) of Zaporozhye and Melitopol said that civil servants are forcing believers to attend the events of the Kyiv Patriarchate, which will be held in the capital in honor of the Baptism of Rus. The expert on religion in Ukraine, Aleksandr Yermolenko, commented on this information, saying that the administrative resource was involved throughout Ukraine because the authorities are faced with the task of "providing the quantity of the UOC KP followers in the procession."

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