Citizenship of Metropolitan Onufrius: The current passport of the head of the UOC MP was found in the bases of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation
Metropolitan's worldly name is Orest Berezovsky. The search system of the Main Directorate for Migration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia contains a list of invalid passports, but there was no document of Orest Berezovsky. In the usual bases, the passport of Orest Berezovsky is, he was published in March 2002 in the Air Force in the Northern Butovo district in Moscow. These bases say that the clergyman is registered in Moscow, according to the media.
The presence of the Metropolitan of the UOC MP Onufri and another 20 priests of the Russian passports became known thanks to the investigation of journalists of the Ukrainian Pravda. They checked the data in the Rospasport system and found out that Berezovsky Orest Vladimirovich (Onufri) had Russian citizenship at least from March 20, 2002. Onufrius changed his foreign passport twice - in 2003 and 1998, so he became a Russian citizen before 1998, the authors of the material emphasized.
Onufrius denied the presence of Russian citizenship of Russia on April 7. The church has accused journalists of disseminating invalid information. And the next day, the Metropolitan of the UOC-MP acknowledged that he was a Russian citizen for a long time, but after the start of the 2014 war, he allegedly abandoned the passport of the aggressor country. The clergyman explained that he received a residence permit in Russia for joining the seminary and the Academy in Moscow.
He then spent 19 years in St. Trinity Sergiy Lavra until 1988. "When relations [between Ukraine and the Russian Federation] began to deteriorate, especially in the last ten years, I left Russian citizenship. I have no Russian passport," Onufri said. We will remind that in early January this year President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky ceased citizenship of Ukraine for 13 priests of the UOC -MP.