DESS head announces total number of UOC communities "transferred" to OCU
“Viktor Yelensky compared the scale of the seizure of parishes of the canonical Church with the combined membership of five local Churches around the world.
On June 6, 2026, the head of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) Viktor Yelensky during a press conference summarized the results of the campaign for changing the jurisdiction of UOC communities. According to the official, the dynamics of the process after 2019 acquired an unprecedented character. "After the OCU creation, almost 2,000 communities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church transferred to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine," declared the head of DESS.
Yelensky emphasized that the number of parishes taken from the canonical Church is comparable to the membership of several autocephalous Churches around the world. "To understand the scale, it is as many as the combined total of such local Churches as the Georgian, Albanian, Polish, Cypriot, and the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia," the head of the agency noted. "In other words, it is a very large number of parishes.”
The official acknowledged that the main blow fell on rural regions, where the mechanisms of "transfers" are easiest to implement. "Transitions occurred and occur predominantly in rural areas," Yelensky stated. "Because in rural areas the territorial community more or less coincides with the religious-territorial one. There everyone knows that, for example, if there are 500 households, then 480 of them are conditionally Orthodox."
Despite numerous testimonies of seizures, the DESS head continues to insist on the conflict-free nature of the process: "The overwhelming majority of these transitions occur peacefully."
Nevertheless, he mentioned the case of Ptycha village, for which there is an ECHR decision against Ukraine. "The European Court's claim is that the state did not ensure the separation of conflicting parties, did not ensure the peaceful course of religious life in this settlement," Yelensky added.
As the UOJ reported, the DESS head revealed where faith is now persecuted "worse than in the USSR".
