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Fake OCU allegedly started selling “prayers from mobilization”

Propagandists are distributing videos and photos on anonymous Telegram channels and other media, allegedly taken in the Holy Trinity Church of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in Troieshchyna in Kyiv. In the video, an unknown person holds a piece of paper with the so-called prayer against mobilization, which, according to the propagandists, costs 10 hryvnia. However, this is fake.

This was found out by Ukrinform journalists. According to them, the postcard was forged using a graphics editor, and the ornament depicted on it was taken from Russian stock resources, where it is called a Russian pattern. The propagandists replaced the UOC symbol with domes with the OCU cross, printed out the leaflet and presented it as a real “prayer” that is allegedly sold in Ukraine for money. Also, in the text of the fake prayer, the letters “z” are replaced with the Latin z, which is a symbol of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Latin z is never used in the Old Church Slavonic spelling used in the UOC. This is further evidence that the postcard is a gross forgery. The video was filmed in such a way that it is impossible to accurately identify the location: apart from the hand holding the leaflet and the general church altar, which can be found in any Orthodox church, no other details are visible.

The fake was spread by an Instagram profile that is also used to spread other disinformation. At the time of its spread, the account had an avatar with an image of a church, but its name was deliberately drawn out. It turned out that this account had previously spread another fake about a supposed birthday celebration of Russian dictator Volodymyr Putin in a Las Vegas nightclub.

Russian propaganda is trying to show that the OCU allegedly uses religious doctrines for financial enrichment, thereby trying to sow distrust of this confession among Ukrainians and the international community. By creating such fakes, Russian propagandists are also trying to demoralize Ukrainian society, undermining trust in religious and national institutions, in particular, in war conditions, in order to disrupt the mobilization process. The purpose of spreading such fakes abroad is to undermine Ukraine's reputation in the international arena and to demonstrate it as a country where chaos and manipulation reign even in the religious sphere.

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