“We believe that attempts to include His Holiness the Patriarch or representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church on the sanctions list are in line with the statements that we have already heard from the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry.
We continue to regard them as absurd.
We also remember that over the past years, since 2014, the Ukrainian authorities have been constantly trying to put pressure on believers belonging to the canonical church: depriving them of churches, provoking violence against both clergy and ordinary believers.
All this, in our opinion, constitutes gross state interference in the affairs of religious organizations, ”said the interlocutor of RT.
Earlier it became known that the Verkhovna Rada is proposing to impose sanctions on representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), including Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia.