Ukraine has adopted a law to ban religious groups linked to Moscow in a move targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which the government has accused of complicity in Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The parliament passed the law by 265 votes to 29 on Tuesday.

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Lawmaker Iryna Herashchenko said it was an issue of national security.

“This is a historic vote. Parliament approved a legislation which bans a branch of the aggressor country in Ukraine,” she wrote on Telegram.

Most Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians but the faith has split between the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which is traditionally allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, and the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which has been recognised since 2019.

The UOC says it broke ties with Moscow after the February 2022 invasion, but Kyiv has questioned that claim and launched dozens of criminal proceedings, including treason charges, against the church’s clerics. At least one has been sent to Russia as part of a prisoner swap.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the vote as a step to strengthen Ukraine’s “spiritual independence” and is expected to sign the bill into law.

Russia condemned the move as a “powerful blow against the whole of Orthodoxy”, while its church, whose patriarch has characterised the invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war”, called the bill “illegal”.

Ukrainian leaders have accused the UOC of abetting Russia’s 30-month-old war on Ukraine by spreading pro-Russian propaganda and housing spies.

The UOC’s spokesman, Metropolitan Klyment, reiterated that the church had no links with “foreign centres” and criticised the bill as targeting the church’s property.

“The Ukrainian Orthodox Church will continue to live as a true church, recognised by the vast majority of practising Ukrainian believers and churches of the world,” he told Hromadske TV.

Opinion polls show that about 82 percent of Ukrainians do not trust the UOC.

The process of banning the church is likely to take months because each Orthodox parish operates an individual entity and would have nine months to decide whether they want to leave it.

After this period, cases could be brought to court to ban it.

In Kyiv, believers were praying outside the historic Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, the UOC’s former base, which was raided by the authorities in 2022.

“There’s no politics here. We just come and pray for our children and our loved ones… I’ve never seen any KGB agents,” said 56-year-old Svetlana, who declined to give her surname, referring to allegations of collaboration with security services.

The schism between the Ukrainian and Russian-linked churches was triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war between Kyiv and Moscow-backed separatists in the east.

The Istanbul-based head of the Eastern Orthodox Church granted a breakaway wing, called the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), autocephaly – religious independence – from the Moscow Patriarchate in 2019.

In the OCU-affiliated part of the Lavra monastery, 21-year-old Igor told the AFP news agency he supported the ban.

He accused the Russian Orthodox Church of being a Kremlin agent that “has metastasized so much that we will be fighting it for decades”.