OCU raiders break Royal Doors while seizing Dormition Cathedral in Kremenchuk

DECR Communication Service, 04/01/2025

On 27^th December 2025, in Kremenchuk city of Poltava Region, Ukraine, activists of the schismatic OCU forced the locks and got inside the Holy Dormition Cathedral of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

According to the parish’s statement, the raiders entered the church “to carry out the so-called inventory of the church property.” It was done “with the connivance of law enforcement officials.”

The report cited by the website of the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ) says that the OCU activists “broke the Royal Doors of the iconostasis and entered the chancel.” In defiance of the ecclesiastical canons, among those who entered the sanctuary was a female activist.

Leading the church seizure was the suspended Archimandrite Feodosiy Ovcharuk. “The activists were violent and rude, using abusive language; the raiders who don’t believe in God; the people who are splitting society and sowing religious enmity,” the parish’s statement reads.

As the statement also points out, the people who came to make an inventory of the property had done nothing for the church in the past, they were “raiders who came to seize the property of the UOC religious community.”

As the UOJ reported earlier, in October the community of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church managed to defend the Dormition Cathedral against a group of people in balaklavas who tried to seize it, but after the attempted seizure the police sealed the church.

Print publication

OCU raiders break Royal Doors while seizing Dormition Cathedral in Kremenchuk

Patriarch

Department Chairman

Sermons

Patriarch

Department Chairman

Sermons