Ukraine has stripped an Orthodox bishop of his citizenship and barred him from entering the country as a dispute escalates over the Ukrainian and Russian branches of the church.
Ukrainian border guards said on Thursday that they had detained and deported Bishop Gedeon, the abbot of a Kyiv monastery, because he allegedly held dual Ukraine-US citizenship. The deportation was condemned by Russian officials, who called on the US to intervene.
In a blog post announcing the bishop’s deportation, Ukraine’s interior ministry said: “Yesterday #borderguards detained him on suspicion of dual citizenship. Also, he had actively supported Russia’s armed aggression in Ukraine.”
The ministry also published video of an interrogation of Gedeon, whose given name is Yuriy Kharon. He first wrote about his deportation on Facebook earlier this week.
Kharon, a bishop of the Russian-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox church of the Moscow patriarchate (UOC-MP), had received a US passport after serving abroad, according to Vakhtang Kipshidze, a church spokesman in Russia.
The Russian Orthodox church, which has authority over the UOC-MP, said Kharon had recently traveled to the US to complain about pressure against the Orthodox church in Ukraine.
Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch who is the spiritual leader of eastern Orthodox Christians, granted the church in Ukraine a formal separation from the one in Russia.
In response, the Russian Orthodox church broke off relations with him in one of the most significant rifts in Christian Orthodoxy in recent memory.
Ukraine has since sought to bolster the newly established Orthodox church of Ukraine and attract loyal clergy.
The Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko, signed a law in December that required the UOC-MP to change its name in order to make explicit its links to the Russian church. “It is easier to make a choice when all things are called by their names,” he said at the time.
UOC-MP officials have also complained about nationalist attacks against clergy and politically motivated investigations into their activities.
