UPTs INCREASINGLY MISINFORMS ABOUT CONFLICTS AND ARSONS
Religiia v Ukraine, 16 April 2018
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UPTsMP) is increasingly resorting to fake news and distorted information for purposes of presenting their confession as the most persecuted one in Ukraine, a correspondent of Religiia v Ukraine reports.
Thus, on 4 April, on the official website of the UPTs there appeared the news that "Orthodox believers were forced, under the gun, to abandon the UPTs church in the village of Ptichya." "At around 23:50 automobiles with militants of 'Aidar' and 'Azov' arrived and with their help schismatics in a matter of minutes pushed representatives of the UPTs parish out of the church, threatening them with weapons. The parishioners called the incident nothing other than a terrorist act," the UPTs website writes.
The article was circulated in the Ukrainian and Russian news media. However, it turned out, this was false information, recorded hastily from the words of local parishioners of the UPTsMP.
As TSN reports, a representative of the CSCE [Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe] mission came to the village the next day after the conflict. He questioned parishioners of the Kiev and Moscow patriarchates as well as the local police. It was revealed that nobody except the police had been armed. The surveillance camera also did not record the participants of the conflict with weapons. There also were no troops of "Aidar" and "Azov" among the combatants.
As for the injured parishioner, she explained that when they began cutting the lattice of the church building, she sprayed the parishioners of the UPTsKP with a fire extinguisher, for which she received from them a blow to the head.
On 6 April, the official website of the UPTsMP published, under the title "Vandals in Kiev commit another arson of a UPTs church," an article which declared dogmatically a deliberate attempt to set fire to a church. At the same time no supporting evidence was provided.
Meanwhile, a report of the emergency service of Ukraine maintained that fire fighters at the scene of the incident discovered: on the grounds of the municipal Academy of Variety and Circus Arts, where the church of the Jerusalem icon of the Mother of God is located, four square meters of trash was burned, which subsequently spread to the nearby wooden church. A correspondent of the website kiev.informator.ua reported from the site of the incident that the fire started at the back side of the church and burned construction materials. Then the flame spread to the front of the building. A guard of the academy noticed the fire and called the division of the emergency service. According to a priest who arrived at the scene of the incident, the cause of the blaze may have been somebody's cigarette thrown from the child care center onto wooden materials. The cause of the incident is being investigated by the operational investigative group.
On 28 March the website of the UPTsMP published an article "Another outrage against a church building committed in Odessa oblast." It spoke of another "desecration" and "outrage" in a UPTs church. At the same time, the UPTsMP website did not indicate that this crime was connected with a robbery of the church building. The reader gets the impression that the crime was committed not for the purpose of robbing the church but exclusively in order to denigrate the liturgical building and the already "persecuted" confession in Ukraine. The UPTsMP website placed an ordinary robbery in the context of "persecution" of the church.
However the fact of the robbery of the church of St. Serafim of Sarov in the village of Roksolana, in Ovidiopol district of Odessa oblast, was confirmed on the website of the Odessa diocese, which was quoted by the official website of the UPTsMP. Photos added to the article more likely confirm that the damage in the church was the collateral result of the search by robbers for money and valuable objects.
It should be noted that since the start of the economic crisis in Ukraine in recent years, an increase in the number of robberies in many liturgical buildings has been observed. Churches of various confessions have been subjected to robberies and not just one. At the same time, every time there appear on the UPTsMP website articles in which the main incident is presented not so much as a case of robbery as that the damage inside the church accompanying it is presented as "another desecration and outrage" on the part of "persecutors" of the UPTsMP. (tr. by PDS, posted 16 April 2018)
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