Over half (54%) of respondents in a recent poll said the so-called Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) must be banned once and for all, and a quarter (24%) supported the idea that the state should supervise the activities of this church and its representatives while not prohibiting it completely.
As it is, more than three-fourths (78%) of the 1010-respondent sample held an opinion that the current policy of Ukrainian authorities toward the UOC (MP) has to be intervention, in some way or other, as against 12% who thought that the state should not meddle in the UOC (MP) affairs, only investigating offenses by its individual representatives should such offense occur. Another nine percent found this question difficult to answer, according to the survey carried out by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) from Dec. 4-27, 2022.
In an earlier survey this year, KIIS found out that although a majority of Ukrainians considered themselves Orthodox, only four percent identified themselves with the UOC (MP).
“Obviously, to a large extent, we are talking about the political component in this identification and, among other things, the data testify to the unsuccessful attempts of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (MP) to distance itself from the image of the “Russian” Church. Our current results only continue to demonstrate that the steps taken by the UOC (MP) this year did not convince the majority of Ukrainians that it is really a Ukrainian Church, but rather the image of the ‘fifth column of the Kremlin’ is preserved and the results of the latest searches by law enforcement officers and the latest statements from representatives of the Church do not help them much,” KIIS Deputy CEO Anton Hrushetsky commented.
