The State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience has applied to the court for the termination of the Kyiv Metropolia of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and for the transfer of its property into state ownership. On 30 October 2025 the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal heard the case for about five and a half hours and granted the Metropolia’s motion to compel production of all the documents on which the state’s studies and orders had been based.
The next hearing, listed for December 2025, did not reach the merits: the file was sent to the Cassation Administrative Court, which was to decide an appeal against a ruling of the first instance. Separately the same appellate court refused the service interim relief: by a ruling of 22 October 2025 in case No. 855/11/25 it dismissed the application to bar the Metropolia from disposing of its immovable property and from making payments from its accounts, and on 16 December 2025 the Supreme Court rejected the appeal against that ruling. The course of the hearings is reported by the Metropolia’s counsel.
On 6 April 2026, in a different case — No. 320/26027/23 — the same appellate court granted the Metropolia’s appeal in part: it declared unlawful the service’s failure to consider an application for the recusal of members of the expert group, declared unlawful its head’s approval of the religious-studies expert conclusion, and quashed its order of 27 January 2023. The judgment took effect on delivery.
On 10 July 2026 the Kyiv District Administrative Court opened proceedings on the Metropolia’s own claim against the Cabinet of Ministers, by which it challenges the resolutions creating that service; a preparatory hearing was listed for 27 August 2026. On 22 July 2026 the hearing in the case on its termination was still under way. We found no report of a final decision in either case.
Sources: Information and Education Department of the UOC — 30 October and 4 November 2025, 11 December and 16 December 2025, 30 April, 10 July and 22 July 2026.
