A UOC priest was mobilized in Odessa; he complains of abuse in his unit.

In Odesa, employees of the Territorial Recruitment Center (TRC) mobilized Archdeacon Oleksiy Degaluk, a cleric of the Odesa Diocese of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The incident occurred on February 9, 2026—the priest was detained and soon sent to a training center.

According to the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ), the archdeacon's relatives report harsh conditions, moral pressure, and ridicule from fellow officers due to his religious beliefs.

This detention continues a pattern of forced mobilization of UOC clergy, which is taking place amid the selective application of the reservation mechanism. Although the Ukrainian government authorized the reservation of priests of "critically important religious organizations" in late 2024, the list published in June 2025 by the State Service for Ethnopolicy and Freedom of Conscience included more than 7,700 organizations, but communities of the canonical UOC were virtually absent from it.

According to the Ukrainian Association for the Defense of Religious Freedom, 9,222 religious structures of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were removed from the list. The formal basis for this was the application of the so-called "renaming law" of December 20, 2018, which required the removal of references to ties with the Russian Orthodox Church from their statutes, despite the fact that many communities initially made no such references.

At the same time, communities of the schismatic Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and a number of other organizations were added to the critical list.