Metropolitan Onufry. Photo: press service of the UOC-MP
Metropolitan of Kiev and All Ukraine of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate Onufry (Orest Berezovsky) and more than 20 priests of the UOC-MP have Russian citizenship, follows from investigationsconducted by the publication “Ukrainian Truth”.
According to information obtained from the Rospassport system, on March 20, 2002, Metropolitan Onufry received a Russian passport in Moscow. A year later, on June 23, 2003, he also received a passport of a Russian citizen.
These passports were not his first, since in 1998 a priest in Moscow was already issued a passport. And this means that Onufry had Russian citizenship much earlier than since 2002.
Bishop of the UOC-MP and deputy of the Tithes Monastery in Kyiv Gideon (Yuri Kharon), it turns out, also has Russian citizenship. He received a Russian passport in 2019 in Moscow, and in 2020 he received as many as two international passports of a Russian citizen.
Ukrayinska Pravda also found out that in January 2023, almost a year after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army, Gideon was serving in Russian Kazan. His prayer also contained words in support of the Russian troops and the Russian attack on Ukraine.
In December 2022, the former Metropolitan of Izyum and Kupyansky Elisey (Oleg Ivanov) also received a Russian passport. After Izyum was occupied by Russian troops, Elisha continued to pray for Patriarch Kirill and began working for the occupation authorities. In particular, he hosted representatives of the occupation administration of the Kharkiv region in his church. After the de-occupation of raisins, Ivanov fled to Belgorod, where he received a Russian passport.
Now the editorial office of Ukrayinska Pravda has confirmed information about the possession of Russian passports by more than 20 priests of the UOC-MP. In the near future, the publication promises to publish this data on its website.
Now, the editors cite only some of the names of high-ranking priests of the UOC-MP who have Russian citizenship:
Metropolitan Ioanofan of Tulchyn and Bratslav (Anatoly Elecki);
vicar of the Tulchinsk diocese, Bishop of Ladyzhinsky Sergiy (Sergey Onitsy);
Vicar of the Kyiv Diocese, Archbishop Panteleiman (Victor Bashchuk);
Metropolitan Meletiy (Valentin Egorenko), head of the Chernivtsi-Bukovina diocese;
Metropolitan Mark (Nikolai Petrovich), head of the Khust diocese;
Metropolitan Irenaeus (Ivan Seredniy), head of the Dnepropetrovsk diocese.
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