A village council taken away from church raiders in Ugrinov

On November 14, the first session of the reformed united territorial community was held in Volyn, with the center in the village of Gorodishche in Lutsk region. As a result, the persons participating in church raiding lost the possibility of administrative management in the village. This is reported by the UOJ correspondent.

The association included five village councils of Lutsk and Gorokhov districts, including a local government in the village of Ugrinov, which became known as a result of a three-year interfaith confrontation.

On October 29 Svetlana Sokolyuk, chairwoman of Gorodishche village council of Lutsk district, was elected head of the new unified community, winning more than 50 percent of the vote.

Two years earlier, when options for the reduction of village councils and community associations were considered, an active participant in the raider attack of the Holy Cross Exaltation Church of the UOC in Ugrinov, deputy of the Volyn Regional Council, Andrei Turak, made a lot of efforts to keep the village council within his influence, but he failed.

In September 2014 in Ugrinov, supporters of the Kiev Patriarchate, led by Andrei Turak, in the presence of the chairman of the local village council and law enforcement officers, seized the temple of the Holy Cross Exaltation of the UOC. Later, the Kyiv Patriarchate privatized the church house and tried to evict from there the family of the UOC priest despite their having a residence permit by drawing on the administrative resource.

In April 2017, after the sudden death of the senior priest of the UOC community in the village of Mikhlin, the same group of church raiders got interested in this parish, but the local community managed to repulse the attack.