In Ivano-Frankivsk, the first service was held in the Church of the Nativity on Dovzhenko Street, which belonged to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which was not without skirmishes, Mayor Ruslan Martsinkiv reports.

Several hundred people gathered near the temple, but they could not immediately get inside the premises - there were people at the entrance who did not let the clergy of the OCU into the premises, they sprayed gas in the temple. And on the eve of the unknown brewed the gate to the temple.

There was a skirmish between representatives of the Moscow Patriarchate and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the police worked on the spot.

According to the publication Blitz-info, the priests of the Orthodox Church offered to jointly pray in the temple for the dead Ukrainian soldiers, but representatives of the MP refused.

Finally, representatives of the OCU managed to get inside and hold a prayer service.

“It was the last temple in Ivano-Frankivsk, which belonged to the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate. Today this temple is the property of the community of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The community is officially registered and has the right to own these premises,” Ruslan Martsinkiv wrote on Telegram.

The mayor added that Ivano-Frankivsk became the first city in Ukraine where there is no Russian church.

In November, the SBU conducted searches in the Ivano-Frankivsk diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian propaganda literature was found in the church, which denies the existence of the Ukrainian people, language and the right of Ukraine to statehood.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has suggested that recent searches on the premises of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate “may be discriminatory”.

The Foreign Ministry called the conclusion unbalanced, urging OHCHR to refrain from such political assessments and base its reports on facts.