Clashes broke out outside the Lavra of the Caves monastery in Kiev today, as the monastery’s monks defied orders from Ukrainian authorities to leave.

Kiev had ordered the monks of the Lavra of the Caves to evacuate the monastery premises until March 29.

The Ukrainian government has decided to expel the non-autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) from the Lavra of the Caves monastery, due to violations of its contractual obligations. The contract of the Ukrainian state with this part of the Orthodox church still under the Moscow Patriarchate, which was concluded in 2013, was terminated yesterday March 29, according to a letter from the state body managing the site, which has also been a museum since the years of 1920. This decision followed a decree issued by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in December 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Zelensky has repeatedly complained that the UOC is full of “spies”.

Ukraine is important to the Russian Orthodox Church, as some of its main monasteries are located there. However, in late May 2022, the wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate announced that it was severing relations with Russia due to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. In May 2019, amid diplomatic tensions, part of the Ukrainian church represented by the Kyiv Patriarchate cut ties with Moscow and declared allegiance to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.

The Lavra of the Caves is located in the southern part of the Ukrainian capital. It was built in the middle of the 11th century and is considered the oldest monastery in Ukraine. Since 1990 it has been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Tensions over the presence of priests at the monastery have risen since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hours after the eviction deadline passed at midnight on Wednesday, members of the UOC refused entry to representatives of a government committee who wanted to inspect buildings in the sprawling gold-domed monastery complex.

Clashes broke out shortly afterwards in which a Reuters reporter was hit and pushed by an unidentified man, while another reporter was pushed away by a cleric as she tried to approach him. No one was injured.

Culture Minister Oleksandr Tkachenko later condemned the “brutal” treatment of committee members. He said in a statement that the Ukrainian government had filed a complaint with police and that efforts to inspect the buildings would continue tomorrow, Friday.

A week ago the abbot of the Lavra of the Caves monastery announced that the monks would not leave the monastery, as they had been ordered, calling on the faithful to defend them. According to him, the expulsion is “worse” than the Soviet crackdown on the clergy in 1917, 1937 and the 1960s, when tens of thousands of Orthodox priests were sent to the gulag or executed. “This is proof that there are no human rights, only violence, the devil is here,” the Ukrainian metropolitan said at the time. “We will not throw stones, we will just pray. But I cannot guarantee security because provocateurs will come,” he stressed.

In November, Ukraine’s counterintelligence service searched the monastery, which is also the residence of the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, whom it called suspected of ties to Russia.

The Moscow Patriarchate reacted strongly to the decision to expel the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from the monastery, which it saw as the “culmination of lawlessness” in Ukraine.

Indicative of the friction within the Orthodox Church, Bartholomew said a week ago that the Russian Orthodox Church bears a share of responsibility for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, crimes committed and child abductions.