On 30 October 2025 the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal in Kyiv heard the claim of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience to terminate the Kyiv Metropolia of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Interfax-Ukraine news agency reported that the court began examining the case and heard the parties’ motions, decided to sever a counterclaim against the service into separate proceedings and send it to the Kyiv District Administrative Court, and announced a recess until 10:00 on 11 December 2025.
The Information and Education Department of the UOC, citing the Telegram channel of the Metropolia’s lawyer, reported that the hearing lasted about five and a half hours with a break and that hundreds of the faithful prayed outside the court throughout.
According to the lawyer, the court granted the Metropolia’s motion to compel production of all the documents on which the studies and orders were based. He said the service had not provided all the documents, in particular an internal memo, which, in his words, it classified after receiving a lawyer’s request.
The lawyer also said that more than a thousand applications from the faithful to join the case as third parties had been filed (hromadske and Radio Svoboda also reported this, citing the lawyer) and that about three hundred more were at a chancery office. In his words, the Metropolia’s representatives had not been able to read the applications, so a motion to postpone the hearing was filed.
The Department said the court decided to postpone the hearing by a month and a half so the parties could read a large body of data, and gave the next hearing as 11 December 2025 at 10:00. According to the lawyer, the question of bringing the faithful and some legal entities, including diocesan administrations and monasteries, into the case would be decided at that hearing, once all the representatives had read the applications.
Viktor Yelenskyi, the head of the service, said in a comment reported by Radio Svoboda that, in his view, the Metropolia’s representatives were deliberately delaying the consideration of the case.
Sources: Information and Education Department of the UOC, 30 October 2025; hromadske, 30 October 2025; Interfax-Ukraine, 30 October 2025; Radio Svoboda, 30 October 2025.
