The State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) said on its website on 17 July 2025 that, following a study of whether the Kyiv Metropolia of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church showed signs of affiliation with a foreign religious organisation whose activity is banned in Ukraine, it had issued the Metropolia a prescription to remedy violations of the legislation on freedom of conscience and religious organisations. According to DESS, the Metropolia is obliged to remedy the violations by 18 August 2025.
DESS published the text of the prescription with its announcement. Under that text the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, the Primate of the UOC, is required, among other things, to provide decisions of the UOC’s highest church authorities on the UOC leaving that organisation’s structure and on recalling UOC clergy, monks and nuns from its governing bodies; to state publicly, orally or in writing, disagreement with appointments to its statutory bodies; and to prepare a statement severing ties. According to the text of the prescription, a report on remedying the violations, with supporting evidence, is to be sent to DESS. Suspilne reported part of these requirements on 17 July.
In a comment to Ukrinform, reported on 15 August by Detector Media, the head of DESS, Viktor Yelenskyi, said the deadline had moved to 24 August because, in his words, the Metropolia received the prescription by post on 24 July. He added that if the prescription was not carried out by 24–25 August and no request for an additional 60 days came in, DESS could bring a claim in court to terminate the Metropolia.
On 16 August 2025 the UOC Information and Education Department published the text of a letter that, it said, the Kyiv Metropolia had sent to DESS. The published text of the letter ends with the signature of Metropolitan Onufriy of Kyiv and All Ukraine, Primate of the UOC. In it the Metropolia gives 21 July as the day DESS’s letter No. 4499/11-09/25 of 17 July, with prescription No. P-1, reached it, and says that it had received no official notice of the start or the end of the study or of its results, nor DESS’s order of 8 July 2025 No. N-101/11, which approved the signs of affiliation.
The Metropolia says the study group consisted of five DESS staff members who are not specialists in theology or canon law, that it applied to a court for interim measures over the order on the group’s composition, and that the proceedings are not finished. It also says the study rests mostly on documents of a foreign state that carried out armed aggression against Ukraine and on a first-instance court ruling of 18 September 2024 that had not entered into force. The Metropolia concludes that the items of the prescription are fictitious, have no bearing on the UOC and therefore cannot be carried out.
Sources: DESS, 17 July 2025; DESS, text of the prescription (PDF), 17 July 2025; Suspilne, 17 July 2025; Detector Media, 15 August 2025; Information and Education Department of the UOC, 16 August 2025.
