Ukrainian police and state officials have forcibly removed monks, clergy and worshippers from the St Michael’s Monastery in Pereyaslav, dragging the abbot from the church doors as officers pushed through crowds of faithful to hand the 18th-century site to state control — images that have shocked Orthodox communities worldwide and reignited debate about religious freedom in wartime Ukraine.
Video footage of the incident, which took place on Sunday 11 May and was widely shared across X and Orthodox media channels including the Union of Orthodox Journalists, shows officers in tactical gear forcing their way through a crowd at the monastery gates. Archimandrite Antoniy, the monastery’s abbot, was physically pulled away from the entrance alongside monks and laypeople who had gathered to resist the eviction. Some of the faithful were seen clinging to the gates as officers moved them on. State inventory officials subsequently entered the premises.
Police special forces, accompanied by employees of the court enforcement service and representatives of the Pereyaslav museum-reserve, stormed the monastery. The abbot and monks, along with the faithful who were attempting to protect the site, were pinned down and forcibly expelled from the grounds.
The operation enforces a 2023 court ruling that the historic state-owned property should be returned to the National Historical-Ethnographic Reserve “Pereyaslav,” with plans to operate it as a museum. A previous attempt to carry out the eviction in June 2023 was blocked when the community, led by Archimandrite Antoniy, formed a human chain in front of the entrance. Sunday’s operation succeeded where the earlier attempt had not.
The monastery belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the canonical church under Metropolitan Onufry — the country’s largest Orthodox denomination, with around 12,000 parishes. The UOC has long been viewed with suspicion by the Ukrainian government due to its historical ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, despite the church’s own 2022 declaration of independence from Moscow. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Ukrainian government has launched raids on UOC churches, imposed sanctions on bishops and lodged criminal cases against dozens of clergymen as part of a broader effort to sever institutional links between Ukrainian religious life and Russia.
The Pereyaslav eviction is the latest in a series of monastery seizures. Several other state-owned sites held by the UOC are expected to follow, including monasteries in Chernigov and the Pochaiv Lavra in the Ternopil region, all of which are described by Ukrainian authorities as state cultural property. The most prominent earlier case was the eviction of monks from the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra — the ancient Monastery of the Caves — in 2023, a move that drew significant international attention.
The Ukrainian government frames these actions as legitimate reclamation of national cultural heritage from an institution it regards as insufficiently independent of Russia. Supporters of the UOC describe them as religiously motivated persecution, drawing comparisons to Soviet-era closures of churches. The images of elderly monks being physically removed from sanctuary doors have lent particular force to that argument, regardless of the legal basis underpinning the eviction.
Ukrainian authorities have not made a formal public statement on Sunday’s operation at the time of publication.
