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Leading researcher at the Department of Religious Studies of the Institute of Philosophy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine Oleksandr Sagan has said the war in Donbas was a result of the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine.

Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv, he said the development of a local Orthodox church in Ukraine was "in fact a condition for the country's survival today."

"The problem of educating people is superimposed on the problem of the annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas. We see who educated them, what kind of Orthodox armies are running in Donbas, what ideas prevail there today. These are the ideas of the so-called 'Russian world' that came to Ukraine through the church," he said, according to an UNIAN correspondent.

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The religious scholar believes that Orthodoxy by the Moscow Patriarchate is away from the ideal of the very Orthodoxy, degenerating into political Orthodoxy. “It is now beginning to dominate not only in the territory of the Russian Federation, but also in Ukraine. This is a big problem since today the Moscow Patriarchate is beginning to drift from world Orthodoxy," he stressed.

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According to Sagan, the Ukrainian Orthodoxy has a chance to break out of this political Orthodoxy and join world Orthodoxy, which, in turn, has received another chance to be reborn through the tomos on autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church.

According to the religious scholar, the liberation of Ukraine from the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate will actually introduce a redistribution of world Orthodoxy. "We expect that Ukrainian Orthodoxy will change at the ecclesiological, organizational, institutional and other levels," he added.

According to Sagan, "the Ukrainian mentality is often lost under the pressure of not only Russian TV, Russian movies, but also church media: sermons in churches, upbringing of children and young people. What do they teach in Sunday schools in churches of the Moscow Patriarchate? They teach us to love Russia, and then we wonder why some of our fellow Ukrainians took up arms to fight against Ukraine — because there is supposedly no such country as they have been told since their early age in churches that this is a 'random political education' that claims to be some kind of 'artificial' language."

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As UNIAN reported earlier, on October 11, following a meeting of the Synod, a decision was announced, stating that the Ecumenical Patriarchate proceeds to granting autocephaly to the Church of Ukraine.

In addition, the legal binding of the Synod's letter of 1686 was abolished, thus taking the Kyiv Metropolis from under Moscow's canonical jurisdiction. Also, head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) Filaret and head of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) Makariy were reinstated in their canonical status.

On October 12, the UOC-KP urged the hierarchs of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) to prepare for a special unification council.