Member of Parliament Iryna Herashchenko, who belongs to the center-right European Solidarity Party, referred to the vote as “historic” in a video message, according to The Kyiv Independent. She claimed that the vote was about Russian influence rather than religion.
“The Verkhovna Rada took the first step to expel Moscow priests from Ukrainian land,” Herashchenko said, according to the Independent.
“[The legislation] is not about religion or church but about protecting the national security of Ukraine,” she claimed. “It’s about the fact that the church, which has a metropolis in Moscow, is not really a church but a branch of the [Russian Federal Security Service] and it can be banned in court.”
Last week Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the vote, saying that it “puts the Ukrainian state on a par with the most sinister atheistic regimes of the past.”
“The initiators and supporters of the adoption of this bill in Ukraine — top-level government officials, deputies of the Verkhovna Rada, radical politicians and public figures — do not hide that the bill is directed against the largest religious community in Ukraine,” Kirill said.
He claimed the measure “aims to eliminate the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a centralized structure as well as all its dioceses, parishes, and monasteries separately.”