The Deputy Minister of Culture Serhiy Belyaev forced the head of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra reserve Maksym Ostapenko to resign of his own free will.
Ostapenko spoke about this in an interview with Babel.
He said that the Ministry has been attacking the reserve in the media for the past six months.
“No matter what happened in the reserve, they turn everything upside down. The Ministry’s commission walked around the reserve, checked the technical condition of the premises and wrote down: here is a crack, here is a leaking toilet. Who is to blame? Ostapenko. It put forward 4 points that they didn’t like: the coffee shop is working, the parking lot is working, and two more points, I can’t remember which ones now. I answered them on each point and waiting for a reaction,” he recalls.
However, instead of a response, the director of the Ministry of Cultureʼs Department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage Volodymyr Shornikov brought him a reprimand — it said that it was drawn up on the basis of Belyaevʼs working note.
"In April or May [of this year], the minister showed me a folder with the results of the inspection. It was about the breadth of two fingers. He said: ʼthey dig up dirt on you, youʼre doing everything wrong, youʼre not doing well in management, but keep workingʼ. He asked me to write a strategy for how to live in the next year or three. It looked like in Soviet times — ʼwe need a person, then we make a case on he [she]ʼ. I replied to Tochytsky that we are not omnipotent. There are issues that cannot be solved without capital expenditures — restoration, infrastructure maintenance and much more. We have chronic underfunding," Ostapenko said.
In May, according to him, Belyaev summoned him to a meeting, where he presented Ostapenko with two applications — they had already been drawn up in his name for the minister.
The first indicated that Ostapenko was requesting to be granted leave from May 19 with subsequent dismissal from June 2, 2025. During the leave, his deputy for the provision of paid services Svitlana Kotlyarevska was to be appointed acting director of the Lavra.
The second statement said that Ostapenko was asking to be appointed director of scientific work of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra National Reserve. There is currently no such directorate in the structure of the reserve.
"I said Iʼd think about it, but Iʼm not going to destroy the reserve with my own hands or change its structure — itʼs better to fire me," he noted.
- In March 2023, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra National Reserve terminated its lease agreement with the UOC MP. A month later, the then Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko appointed a new Director General Maksym Ostapenko, who served in the position for two years. In May 2025, he was dismissed by the new Minister of Culture Mykola Tochytsky. This sparked a public controversy on social media.
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