“Neither Crimea, nor Odessa, nor Donetsk”: Poroshenko was besieged in Moscow
Ukrainian politicians, demanding that the Patriarch of Constantinople approve the creation of a Church independent of the Moscow Patriarchate, forget that after the baptism of Rus', when the Kiev Metropolis was subordinate to the Greek Patriarch, its borders did not include either Crimea or the territories where Odessa and Donetsk subsequently appeared.
Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk, Chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate, stated this during a visit to Athens.
“The Kiev Metropolis was included in the Moscow Patriarchate by the decision of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the temporary nature of this decision was not specified anywhere, no deadline was set. None of these documents say that the Kiev Metropolis is transferred to the Moscow Patriarchate for ten years, for twenty years, for 100 years. Never in the past three-plus centuries has the Patriarch of Constantinople challenged the presence of the Kyiv Metropolis within the Moscow Patriarchate - neither Patriarch Demetrius, nor his predecessors, nor the current Patriarch Bartholomew until recently.
In addition, we must not forget that the Kiev Metropolis at the time when it became part of the Moscow Patriarchate was territorially much smaller than present-day Ukraine. There was no Odessa, no Donetsk, no Crimea in it. Accordingly, the current Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is a completely different territory than the one that was then annexed. It is this Ukrainian Orthodox Church that is the single canonical Local Church of Ukraine,” said Metropolitan Hilarion.
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