On Aug. 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law that aims to deny Russia one of its major avenues of influence. It explicitly bans the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long been entangled with the Russian security state, in Ukraine. But in a more contentious move, the law also bans religious entities “affiliated” with Moscow. This will mainly affect parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the nominally independent Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church that, despite various name and governance changes, is still formally subservient to the patriarch in Moscow. The UOC’s parishes and priests could be deemed insufficiently disentangled from Moscow by an expert commission that will be appointed by the government to implement the new law.
On Aug. 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law that aims to deny Russia one of its major avenues of influence. It explicitly bans the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long been entangled with the Russian security state, in Ukraine. But in a more contentious move, the law also bans religious entities “affiliated” with Moscow. This will mainly affect parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the nominally independent Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church that, despite various name and governance changes, is still formally subservient to the patriarch in Moscow. The UOC’s parishes and priests could be deemed insufficiently disentangled from Moscow by an expert commission that will be appointed by the government to implement the new law.
Determining the degree of any such affiliation will surely be a messy business—in line with the messy history of Orthodoxy in Ukraine since the Russian conquest that began in the 17th century. Until 2019, there were three separate Orthodox church organizations in Ukraine, which had emerged from a long series of repressions, schisms, and refoundings: the Moscow-aligned UOC; the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, founded and dissolved three times between 1921 and 2019; and a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine directly subordinate to the patriarch of Constantinople, established in 1992 after Ukraine restored its independence. It’s all rather ironic considering that what later became Russian Orthodoxy first emerged in 10th-century Kyiv, when Moscow was nothing but a swamp and a state named Russia still centuries away.
In 2019, largely thanks to the efforts of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, the autocephalous church and the new Orthodox Church merged. To break with Moscow, some UOC parishes switched to the newly merged Ukrainian church. Numbers are hard to come by—not least because of the Russian occupation of many parishes—but the two churches are estimated to be roughly equal in the number of adherents today.
In May 2022, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UOC publicly condemned the invasion, dropped “Moscow Patriarchate” from its official name as an outward symbol of its independence, and claimed to have cleansed its charter of mentions of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, the updated charter has not been made public—much to the outrage of the UOC’s many critics in Ukraine. Some of its priests also reportedly switched to sermons in Ukrainian and stopped saying the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s name in prayer. However, the true extent of these changes in liturgical practice is hard to quantify while the church is undergoing its difficult, wrenching transition. In any case, the UOC never made a formal ecclesiastical break from the Russian Orthodox Church, which the latter would have to approve. On paper, if perhaps less so in practice, its 8,000 or so remaining parishes are still subordinate to the patriarch in Moscow. (Meanwhile, all Orthodox parishes in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine have been fully integrated into the Russian Orthodox Church; other denominations are either suppressed or outright persecuted.)
But churches are more than a name and language, and it’s those other ties that worry Ukrainian authorities. The Russian Orthodox Church and its Ukrainian branch have a long, deep history of entanglement with the Soviet and Russian security states. Some UOC priests have been charged with treason and spying on Russia’s behalf. Previously, some parishes, priests, and believers left the UOC for the new Ukrainian churches, and there are residual suspicions toward those who remained in the Moscow-tainted church. These include thousands or parishes and priests, as well as several million believers, each with their own reasons for not leaving their old church. In these tightly knit church communities, force of habit, peer pressure, and local allegiances don’t always fit into a simple Russia-vs.-Ukraine dichotomy. To many UOC believers, disconnecting themselves from Moscow would also mean losing a source of spiritual legitimacy, since the Moscow Patriarchate claims direct apostolic succession from Jesus’s disciples.
All this is bound to cause tensions. Even more complexity will result from the legal and financial difficulties of disentangling churches and parishes. Thousands of parishes lease their church buildings from the government, including some of the oldest cathedrals and monasteries. When the transition period for designated organizations to comply with the new legal requirements ends, some will inevitably fall short and face eviction. As it has done in similar cases in the past, the Kremlin will trump up these cases for domestic and international propaganda purposes, including through the United Nations and other avenues where Russia still commands substantial influence. Exiled Russian religion scholar Ksenia Luchenko noted that the UOC has managed to enlist the support of a high-profile American lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, whose advocacy on the UOC’s behalf is making swift inroads with conservatives aligned with former U.S. President Donald Trump.
Religious freedom watchdogs will also keep a close eye on the law’s implementation. The case of each individual parish will have to be weighed against the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states that limitations on religious freedom are only justified if they are “necessary to protect public safety [and] order.” That could be a low bar to clear if church officials actively help the enemy in times of war—but so far, out of approximately 10,000 UOC priests, only a few dozen have been criminally charged, according to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group.
That said, it’s abundantly clear that the UOC’s biggest liability is its mother organization in Moscow. As the Russian establishment increasingly lines up behind President Vladimir Putin’s imperial, militarized, and fully totalitarian vision of Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church is leading the charge. Having silenced all vocal dissidents in its ranks, the church, just like the Kremlin, now demands an explicit test of loyalty from the rest. An obligatory part of every liturgy in every Russian Orthodox church—whether in Russia or abroad, including hundreds of parishes in North America and Europe—is a special prayer written by Patriarch Kirill himself. It reads like a Putin speech in Old Church Slavonic. “[T]hose desiring to wage war have arrayed themselves against Holy Rus’, seeking to divide and destroy her united people,” the prayer laments before beseeching God to “aid Thy people and grant us victory.” In one breath, the prayer both rejects Ukrainian nationhood and casts Russia as the victim of foreign perfidy. This is music to the ears of the Russian leadership, whose top figures reportedly subscribe to an arcane religious doomsday cult centered on one of Russia’s most revered monasteries.
Russian Orthodox priests who refused to accept the new dogma quickly faced the consequences. One of the most prominent Russian victims, Archpriest Alexey Uminsky, was chosen by church authorities for a ritualistic denunciation and public shaming. Not only was he prohibited from serving his parish, but he was also defrocked for the grave sin of “oath-breaking”—that is, not expressly acknowledging his allegiance to the new wartime church doctrine. To add insult to injury, Uminsky’s parish, which worships in a late 17th-century church in a historic part of Moscow, is now headed by a vocally pro-war, anti-Ukraine zealot. Uminsky, whose rank has been restored by the patriarch in Constantinople, now serves Russian émigré believers in exile.
The Russian Orthodox Church has a long history of adapting to a powerful state. It closely aligned with various regimes, which guaranteed its survival as an organization but undermined its independence from the state. It also led to major religious schisms that lasted centuries. In the Soviet era, patriarchs allowed the KGB to infiltrate both the laity and the clergy; Patriarch Kirill is alleged to have been an agent. Today, the Faustian deal between Kirill and Putin may be destructive for the church in Russia and worldwide.
By rigidly trying to hold on to its churches in Ukraine, Russia has already alienated some of its traditional Orthodox allies, including Greece and Cyprus, and is losing control of other branches of the Russian Orthodox Church. In Estonia last month, the local Moscow Patriarchate-linked church unilaterally severed ties with Moscow, not least due to significant pressure from the Estonian authorities.
But because of Putin’s fixation on controlling Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine Moscow allowing UOC parishes to make a clean break to formal independence. Just like Putin, Kirill has bet his career on the war. Under the new Ukrainian law, UOC parishes likely now face the choice between dissolution by the Ukrainian state or being declared schismatic by Moscow. With a cursed parent like the Moscow Patriarchate, the UOC looks doomed to face the consequences.
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