A fire engulfed Kyiv’s historic Pechersk Lavra monastery following a major Russian attack, with firefighters battling the blaze as Ukraine and the world monitor damage to a sacred site amid ongoing hostilities.
Ukraine has expelled pro-Russian clergy from the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, an 11th-century Orthodox cave monastery complex, amid heightened political concerns that some of them were too close to Moscow and were Russian fifth columnists. The expulsions technically come as part of the termination of a 10-year-old agreement on the free use of religious buildings and other state-owned property that the monastery signed in 2013. The matter is highly political because of anger in Ukraine that some clergy from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church collaborated with Russian invaders.