a war has no justification either from God or from people." He also appealed directly to Putin, asking for an immediate end to the "fratricidal war". In April 2022, after the Russian invasion, many UOC-MP parishes signaled their intention to switch allegiance to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The attitude and stance of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow to the war is one of the oft quoted reasons. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Lithuania, Metropolitan , called Patriarch Kirill's "political statements about the war" his "personal opinion." On 7 March 2022, condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On 27 February 2022, a group of Russian Orthodox priests published an open letter calling for an end to the war and criticized the suppression of non-violent anti-war protests in Russia. On 6 March 2022, Russian Orthodox priest of Moscow Patriarchate's Kostroma Diocese was fined by Russian authorities for anti-war sermon and stressing the importance of the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Structure and organization The ROC constituent parts in other than the Russian Federation countries of its exclusive jurisdiction such as Ukraine, Belarus et al., are legally registered as separate legal entities in accordance with the relevant legislation of those independent states. Ecclesiastiacally, the ROC is organized in a hierarchical structure. The lowest level of organization, which normally would be a single ROC building and its attendees, headed by a priest who acts as Father superior (, nastoyatel), constitute a parish (, prihod). All parishes in a geographical region belong to an eparchy (—equivalent to a Western diocese). Eparchies are governed by bishops (, episcop or архиерей, archiereus). There are 261 Russian Orthodox eparchies worldwide (June 2012). Further, some eparchies may be organized into exarchates (currently the Belarusian exarchate), and since 2003 into metropolitan districts (митрополичий округ), such as the ROC eparchies in Kazakhstan and the Central Asia (Среднеазиатский митрополичий округ). Since the early 1990s, the ROC eparchies in some newly independent states of the former USSR enjoy the status of self-governing Churches within the Moscow Patriarchate (which status, according to the ROC legal terminology, is distinct from the "autonomous" one): the Estonian Orthodox Church of Moscow Patriarchate, Latvian Orthodox Church, Moldovan Orthodox Church, Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) (UOC-MP), the last one being virtually fully independent in administrative matters. (Following Russia's 2014 Invasion of Ukraine, the UOC-MP—which held nearly a third of the ROC(MP)'s churches—began to fragment, particularly since