The head of the international committee of the Federation Council, Grigory Karasin, said that the West is playing a bad role as a guardian of human rights and a defender of religious freedoms in Ukraine. He wrote about this in his Telegram channel.

The senator called shameful silence by the Western media on the situation around the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra in Ukraine. “The impudent attempts of the Kyiv regime to take away the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra from the monks do not receive coverage of the Western media at all. Usually noisy human rights activists shyly keep quiet about this. It's a shame, gentlemen, Western curators," he wrote.

Earlier, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that the Russian Federation considers the silence of the UN on the situation with the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra unacceptable.

On the eve of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, Metropolitan Pavel (Lebed), in an appeal to the Ukrainian authorities, said that the crosses on its Refectory Church turned black after "sacrilege."

Patriarch Kirill called for preventing the forced closure of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, stressing that this would lead to a violation of the rights of millions of Ukrainians to freedom of religion, including those guaranteed by the Constitution of Ukraine and the UN charter.

On March 10, it became known that the monks of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra were ordered to leave the monastery buildings by March 29.