Ternopil prosecutors: four UOC-related property cases before Ternopil and Kyiv courts, including Pochaiv Lavra land

On September 17, 2026, Vitalii Panchenko, head of the Ternopil Regional Prosecutor’s Office, told Ukrinform that four cases involving Ukrainian Orthodox Church religious organizations in the Ternopil region were before courts in Ternopil and Kyiv, according to RISU, Religion Pravda, and Ceske Noviny’s Ukrinform syndication. Panchenko said the suits concern two subjects: return of property to state ownership, and recovery of land plots from what prosecutors call unlawful possession. Three proceedings were started by prosecutor filings; in the fourth, prosecutors joined a suit by the Ternopil Regional Military Administration. Some Ukrainian outlets style the organizations “UOC-MP”; Panchenko’s quoted remark referred to the UOC. This brief records those filings as described. It is not a final confiscation. It is also distinct from Faith & World Brief’s earlier Boryspil DESS affiliation item.

As those Ukrinform-derived accounts set out the four cases: prosecutors seek to clear what they describe as obstacles to state use of about 12.3912 hectares of historical-cultural land under the Dormition Pochaiv Lavra complex, including by invalidating a Pochaiv City Council decision and canceling registrations of communal ownership and of the Lavra community’s use rights. A second case, in the Commercial Court of Ternopil Region on the military administration’s suit, seeks transfer to the state of eighteenth-century Holy Spirit Skete buildings that those accounts treat as part of the Lavra complex and as a local architectural monument. Two further suits ask courts to cancel registrar decisions that, prosecutors say, unlawfully recorded private ownership of national monuments for UOC communities, and to return to the state the All Saints’ Church of 1773 in the Pochaiv cemetery and the Intercession Church with its bell tower in Staryi Pochaiv, Kremenets district. Ceske Noviny’s Ukrinform syndication said two of the four cases concern the Lavra; RISU’s lede said one did.

Prosecutors frame the cases as recovery of state property and land. That is not the same as a court finding on religious liberty, and this brief does not treat a filing as a judgment that worship is unlawful. The same accounts also noted earlier Holy Spirit monastery litigation — an August 2024 return-to-the-state step and a January 2025 Supreme Court cassation in the monastery’s favor — as background to the current skete proceeding, not as a verdict on the four open cases. This item records Panchenko’s description of pending suits.