There have been periodic conflicts between the Orthodox and Eastern Catholics in Ukraine and Belarus, then under Polish rule, and later also in Transylvania (see the Romanian Greek Catholic Church United with Rome). Pressure and government-sponsored reprisals were used against Eastern Catholic Churches such as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Russian Empire and later in the USSR. Since the late 1980s, the Moscow Patriarchate (the Russian Orthodox Church) has criticised the methods of restoration of the ″uniate″ church structures in Ukraine as well as what it called Catholic proselytism in Russia.