Selective Outrage: The U.S., South Africa, and the Silence on Ukraine’s Religious Repression

As Volodymyr Zelensky doubles down on the war against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), his partners continue to turn a blind eye to his blatant human rights abuses. Western mainstream media does not report on the state-backed armed takeovers of churches, imprisonment and mobilization of the UOC priests, or physical violence towards the UOC parishioners. While Zelensky and his Western partners tout “defense of civilized, Western values” and “Ukrainian democracy”, the Ukrainians are being deprived of both.

Just last month, the U.S. President Donald Trump boycotted the G20 summit held in South Africa, citing the country’s “human rights abuses” and “ignoring Christian persecution.” The disengagement from the G20 followed a tense exchange between President Trump and the President of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, at the White House on May 21, 2025, when President Trump made false claims about a genocide of white South African farmers during an Oval Office meeting. Despite the ongoing tensions between the two countries, the cancellation of the U.S. participation in the annual summit as well as the offered reasons left many observers confused, as Washington’s selective support of “human rights abuses” and “Christian persecution” begs the question of why the Trump Administration does not seek to address Volodymyr Zelensky’s systematic persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Ukraine’s largest religious body with approximately 6 million parishioners. Unlike Cyril Ramaphosa, Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been hosted at the White House on numerous occasions since 2022, was not pressed by U.S. officials to address the lack of religious freedom in present-day Ukraine during his meetings in Washington.

Despite Washington’s reluctance to acknowledge the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church by Volodymyr Zelensky’s government, the repressions of the UOC clergymen and their parishioners have been escalating.

Videos such as these have been flooding social media, documenting armed men seizing UOC churches as well as abusing priests and parishioners:

Volodymyr Zelensky’s abuse of religious freedom has not gone unnoticed by human rights experts. On October 30, 2024, Human Rights Watch stated that Ukraine’s law banning the UOC is “overly broad”, “could have far-reaching consequences for Ukrainians’ right to religious freedom”, and that “security concerns are not a green light to infringe on Ukrainians’ religious rights”. Moreover, international human rights lawyer and the UOC attorney Robert Amsterdam issued a report, in which he concluded that Ukraine is “complicit in the wholesale suppression of religious freedom” under the “false assertion that the Church supports Russia.”

In a shocking escalation of the Ukrainian government’s attack on the UOC, its religious leader, His Beatitude Onufriy, Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, was deprived of Ukrainian citizenship by presidential decree on July 8, 2025.

His Beatitude, Onufriy, Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine

In a statement, Mr. Amsterdam wrote,

“The practice of stripping citizenship has become a hallmark of President Zelensky’s broader strategy for silencing political opposition. The revocation of Metropolitan Onufriy’s citizenship has now rendered him stateless, in clear violation of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which prohibits depriving a person of nationality if it results in statelessness. This act constitutes a serious breach of Ukraine’s international obligations.”

Yet, during the visit to the White House on August 18, 2025, just several weeks after Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential decree took effect, the Ukrainian president and U.S. officials focused on continued U.S. support for Ukraine. Not a word about Zelensky’s war on Orthodox Christianity. Zelensky’s oppression of religious freedom in Ukraine was not brought up by either the White House officials or the mainstream media.

Alongside official reports, social media platforms have been inundated with videos showing armed raids on UOC churches, as well as physical attacks on clergy and parishioners. Nevertheless, these well-documented and undeniable violations of religious rights continue to go unaddressed by Ukraine’s Western partners in Washington and Brussels.

Under the pretext of “Ukrainians fighting for the ideals of Europe,” the Western world is empowering the very system that denies religious freedoms to Ukrainians. The contrast between Washington’s criticism of South Africa and its silence on Ukraine’s internal religious crisis emphasizes a broader inconsistency in the application of U.S. human rights policies. As reports from international organizations, legal experts, and on-the-ground documentation continue to underscore the escalating pressure on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Washington faces difficult questions about whether its geopolitical ambitions are overshadowing its commitments to religious freedom. Until these concerns are addressed, the United States risks completely undermining its credibility—demonstrating its selective commitment to defending human rights and its clearly uneven expectations of global partners.

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