On 29 August 2025 the Commercial Court of the Kyiv Region granted in full the claim of the religious community of the Transfiguration Monastery at Kniazhychi in the Kyiv region and declared unlawful the decisions of the Brovary city council and its executive committee taken in the autumn of 2022. By those decisions the council had unilaterally terminated the community’s right of permanent use of the land plot and leased the non-residential buildings to outside bodies.
The court of first instance held that the local authority had committed gross procedural breaches by acting on its own. It separately rejected the respondents’ argument that legislative restrictions on religious organisations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church deprived the monastic community of its right to the land: the community is a separate legal person, is not covered by those prohibitions, and the authority had applied such provisions without grounds. The rights to the plot and to the buildings were restored in full.
The city council appealed. On 21 May 2026 the Northern Commercial Court of Appeal in Kyiv dismissed the appeal, and the first-instance judgment stood unchanged. A separate episode: on 5 December 2025 state enforcement officers attempted enforcement actions on the monastery grounds; the monastery’s counsel calls them unlawful and reports that complaints were filed, but we found no judicial assessment of that episode.
Sources: Information and Education Department of the UOC, 5 December 2025; the same department, 21 May 2026.
