“The Kyiv regime and the West are trying to separate the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, to destroy the spiritual closeness of Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox believers,” Askaldovich said in an interview with RIA Novosti.

He added that recently "this process has acquired a threatening destructive power."

Earlier, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus' expressed confidence that there was “not so long to wait” for the church schisms in Ukraine to stop.

The initiators of such splits will be punished, he said.

Press Secretary of the Russian President Dmitry Peskov said that the Ukrainian side has long been at war with the Russian Orthodox Church and the arrival of the SBU in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra is a link in the chain of such actions by Kyiv.