On 8 October 2025, at about half past ten in the morning, an investigator of the Kremenets district police, together with operational officers of the SBU, arrived at the grounds of the Pochaev Holy Dormition Lavra with a court warrant for a search. Everything known about what followed comes from the monastery itself: on 15 October it published a clarification, explaining that inaccurate reports had been circulating in the media.
On that account, the brethren gave unimpeded access to every part of the monastery the investigator asked for. At the same time, members of the community were forbidden to film, and the request that representatives of the monastery be entered in the record of the search was refused in all but one case. At about three in the afternoon the search was adjourned, and at about twenty past four it resumed with no representative of the brethren present; at that point, the Lavra states, the bolt of the service gate was cut and a search began of the room used by the monastery’s lawyer, without a separate court warrant for such a search and without a representative of the bar council.
This is the only account we have. We found no statement by the police or the SBU, no text of the search warrant, and no indication of its purpose; none of the circumstances set out above has been confirmed or refuted by an independent source.
Source: Information and Education Department of the UOC, 15 October 2025.
