ANDREW KORYBKO MAR 24, 2024 READ

Most of this former Soviet Republic’s estimated 400,000 Romanian speakers belong to the formerly Russian-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which doesn’t recognize the “Orthodox Church in Ukraine” (OCU) that received “self-governing status” in a controversial move half a decade ago. The BOR doesn’t fully recognize the OCU and is worried that Kiev’s crackdown on the UOC to which most Romanian speakers in that country belong can cause problems for its co-ethnics.

BI reported that “the clampdown has been widened to include searches of UOC premises in a diocese in the Chernivtsi region in the west of the country, where most of Ukraine’s Romanian religious community live, with a Romanian-speaking metropolitan now facing trial for alleged ‘incitement to religious hatred’”. Ethnic Romanians “have (also) been complaining about several recent ‘suspicious’ incidents, with unidentified perpetrators burning down several churches or threatening members of the clergy.”