Ukraine’s Religious Identity Crisis

Hello and happy Sunday. One of the enduring lessons you learn early as a journalist is that whatever the big story of the day is, there’s almost always much, much more to it beneath the surface (insert iceberg cliche here).

That’s never more true than when it comes to millenia-old institutions and sometimes centuries-old disputes. Such is the case with a story that has gotten a lot of attention in the last month: a new law in Ukraine seeking to split the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—the largest Orthodox body in Ukraine—from its historic ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In one sense, such a law makes sense given Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to throw off its Russian invaders.

But the law itself—and the fact that church leadership has condemned Russia’s invasion and the Russian Orthodox Church’s support of the invasion—raises religious liberty concerns. It also may further pit Christian against Christian, beyond what the war already has done.

In today’s Dispatch Faith, Matthew Namee explores the underlying conflicts within the world of Orthodoxy that in part precipitated this situation and asks valid questions about the law’s ultimate effect on Orthodox Christians.

Matthew Namee: Ukraine’s Religious Identity Crisis

It may seem ironic, but a recent statement from the head of the Roman Catholic Church shows how sensitive the current moment is for Orthodox Christians in Ukraine. “Please, let no Christian church be abolished directly or indirectly. Churches are not to be touched!” Pope Francis protested in response to a bill passed last month by the Ukrainian parliament, and which went into effect this week. It is intended to ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—the largest church in the country before Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Though Ukraine’s effort to defend itself from Russia is just, the new law raises questions about Ukraine’s commitment to some democratic values in the face of longstanding, internal religious conflicts. But this is Orthodox Christianity on the border of East and West. To understand the current situation for Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, we must understand its complex history.

Orthodoxy in Ukraine.

The Orthodox Church—with some 200 million members worldwide—holds itself to be the original Christian Church, tracing an unbroken continuity back to the apostles of Jesus Christ. Unlike Roman Catholicism, which makes a similar claim, Orthodoxy lacks a centralized governing structure. Instead, it is organized into a federation of “autocephalous” (self-governing) churches, each of which is overseen by its own synod of bishops. (There are 14 universally recognized autocephalous churches, with several more claiming autocephaly but lacking universal recognition.) The patriarch of Constantinople (also known as the “ecumenical patriarch”) enjoys a primacy of honor as the “first among equals,” but he and his synod cannot interfere in the internal affairs of another autocephalous church. Some Orthodox churches date to apostolic times (such as Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria) while others are organized along national lines and attained independence in the past two centuries (Greece, Romania, Serbia, Bulgaria, for example). Numerically, the Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, is the largest Orthodox body in the world, with roughly half of the world’s Orthodox Christians.

Ukrainian Orthodoxy and Russian Orthodoxy are historically intertwined—both have their origins in the medieval Rus’ civilization, which was originally centered in Kyiv and adopted Christianity from the Byzantine Empire at the end of the first millennium. After Kyiv was sacked and depopulated in the 13th century, the center of Rus’ moved to Moscow, and after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Muscovite rulers adopted the title “tsar”—a Slavic transliteration of “Caesar.”

For hundreds of years, the territory of modern Ukraine was divided between various European powers—primarily the Russian and Habsburg empires—with all Orthodox Christians in the Russian Empire subordinate to the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 transformed the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. Life under the Soviets was bad for everyone, but particularly for Ukrainians. The Bolsheviks crushed the short-lived Ukrainian People’s Republic and forcibly incorporated it into the Soviet Union. Later, the Soviet authorities inflicted a man-made famine, Holodomor (“murder by hunger”), on Ukraine by forcibly collectivizing agriculture and confiscating food reserves, causing millions of Ukrainians to starve to death.

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, the Russian Orthodox leadership granted a large measure of autonomy to its dioceses in Ukraine, creating the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), but stopped short of granting full autocephaly. Two other churches splintered off, claiming total independence, but these were unrecognized by any of the world’s Orthodox churches. Meanwhile, the UOC was technically subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate (the governing structure of the Russian Orthodox Church): Moscow had the right to confirm or veto the UOC’s election of bishops and provided sacramental Holy Chrism (special oil) to the UOC for baptisms; for its part, the UOC’s top hierarch held an ex-officio seat on Moscow’s synod and commemorated the patriarch of Moscow as his ecclesiastical superior in traditional liturgical prayers. Otherwise, the UOC governed its own affairs independently and enjoyed universal recognition in the Orthodox world as Ukraine’s only legitimate Orthodox church.

The situation changed dramatically in 2018 when the Istanbul-based, ethnically Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate (EP) unilaterally reversed a 300-year-long status quo and declared that it had ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Ukraine. (Long ago, most of the territory of modern Ukraine was under the EP’s jurisdiction. In 1686, the EP transferred that territory to the Moscow Patriarchate, and the EP’s 2018 decree rescinded that transfer.) Simultaneously, the EP decreed that the Ukrainian splinter groups were now legitimized. Late in the year, the EP, with the direct participation of then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, convened a “unification council,” inviting both UOC bishops and hierarchs from the splinter groups. But these plans hit a snag: All but two of the UOC’s hundred bishops ignored the invitation, viewing the EP’s actions as interference in their ecclesiastical territory. The council still took place, but far from unifying all of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, it merely brought together the splinter groups into a new entity, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Then, in early 2019, the new church structure was granted autocephaly by the EP.

In response to these developments, the Moscow Patriarchate severed ties with the EP—a move that surprised no one. For the past six years, the global Orthodox Church has been in a state of semi-schism. Three other churches—all led by ethnically Greek leaders—eventually joined the EP in accepting the newly formed OCU. The other 10 of the world’s Orthodox churches have maintained an uneasy neutrality, retaining their diplomatic ties to the EP but rejecting the OCU as illegitimate.

Russia’s invasion creates another wedge.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 exacerbated this global Orthodox crisis. The UOC—at that time still subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate—responded decisively. Three days after Russia invaded, the UOC’s leader, Metropolitan Onuphry, openly condemned the invasion as a “fratricidal war,” comparing it to Cain’s murder of Abel (he had likewise condemned the original Russian occupation of Ukrainian Crimea back in 2014). In contrast, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow quickly came out in support of the invasion, putting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in an uncomfortable and precarious position. 

The Ukrainian government had already shown favor to the rival OCU from its creation in 2018-19. But now, with the Russian invasion and the bellicosity of Patriarch Kirill, Ukraine’s wartime government began to suspect the UOC even more as a kind of “fifth column.”

The UOC held a landmark council in May 2022, declaring itself independent of the Russian Orthodox Church. It stopped short of using the word “autocephaly,” but it abolished all features of subordination to Moscow, establishing itself as a fully self-governing Ukrainian church. The Moscow Patriarchate, however, has not accepted this new reality and still considers the UOC as its own subsidiary. 

While the UOC condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in March 2024, a meeting chaired by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow issued a controversial document declaring the invasion to be a “holy war in which Russia and its people defend the single spiritual space of Holy Rus’ and fulfill the mission of the ‘Restrainer’ [cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:7], protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.”

The UOC fired back the next day, reiterating its 2022 declaration of independence and rejecting Patriarch Kirill’s “Russian World” ideology that sees Ukraine as part of Russia’s geopolitical space. “We do not build any Russian world, we build God’s world,” Metropolitan Onuphry said in the UOC statement. “This means that the Church should care about the proper preaching of the Gospel, which Christ commanded her to do, and not of the formation of geopolitical and geospiritual concepts.” The UOC condemned the concept of “holy war” as incompatible with Christianity and defended Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Even so, the Ukrainian government has continued to treat the UOC as if it is an arm of the Moscow Patriarchate, and, by extension, the Putin regime. The government seems to be basing this conclusion in part on its interpretation of Orthodox canon law. The logic seems to be that all Orthodox churches must either be autocephalous themselves, or part of an autocephalous church. The UOC hasn’t declared itself autocephalous or joined another autocephalous church; ergo, the UOC remains part of the Russian Orthodox Church. DESS, Ukraine’s agency overseeing religion, comes to this conclusion based on its reading not of the UOC’s own documents and practices, but on the governing Statute of the Russian Orthodox Church—a document over which the UOC has no control. 

In a painfully ironic twist, the Ukrainian government shares Moscow’s interpretation and rejects the UOC’s own claim of independence.

‘Spiritual independence.’

This culminated in the passage of Bill 8371, which bans religious organizations affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church if they don’t break that affiliation within nine months. The bill doesn’t directly reference the UOC itself, but based on the interpretation of DESS, despite all of the UOC’s efforts to distance itself from Moscow, it remains a branch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Because each of the UOC’s 8,000 parishes is a separate legal entity, bans will be imposed on a parish-by-parish basis.

Following the adoption of the bill, one member of Ukraine’s parliament, Iryna Herashchenko, posted on Telegram, “This is a historic vote. Parliament approved a legislation which bans a branch of the aggressor country in Ukraine.” Mykyta Poturaiev, one of the bill’s sponsors, said that the purpose of the law is to ban the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, “which is an instrument of Russian influence and propaganda.” President Zelensky has repeatedly asserted that Ukraine must secure not only its territorial integrity, but also its “spiritual independence.”

The bill is just the latest in a series of domestic difficulties facing the UOC. By some metrics, the UOC has suffered more from the Russian invasion than any other religious organization. According to independent data, 308 UOC churches have been destroyed in the war—over half of the total number of destroyed houses of worship of all faiths.

Last year, the United Nations sent human rights investigators to Ukraine. While those investigators reported on human rights concerns perpetrated by Russian forces in Ukraine, they also reported on the Ukrainian government’s searches of UOC places of worship, and on its investigations and arrests of clergymen. “During the month of April 2023,” the report states, “the city and regional councils in Khmelnytskyi, Rivne, and Volyn banned the ‘activities of the UOC’ in their respective areas, after the regional councils in Lviv, Zhytomyr, Vinnytsia and Ternopil had done the same, even though such bans were beyond their authority.” The U.N. report expressed concern “that the cumulative impact of Government actions targeting the UOC could be discriminatory.”

While comparatively few UOC churches switched allegiance to the new OCU between 2019 and 2022, since the Russian invasion began, church transfers—often accompanied by violence, according to some on-the-ground reports—have become increasingly common. UOC members assert that transfer decisions have been made by sham “votes” involving outsiders claiming to be parishioners. Churches have been raided, with OCU partisans beating their UOC counterparts. In a November 2023 open letter to G7 leaders and other international organizations, a UOC representative, Mother Superior Seraphima, wrote, “These seizures are carried out using administrative resources, sometimes with the direct involvement of officials from local executive authorities, the National Police, and territorial defense units, which is an unacceptable practice since these entities have no authority to carry out such actions. Harsh physical force is used against parishioners who are mostly elderly people, women, and children.”

Recently, The American Conservative published a report on the plight of the UOC, with numerous accounts from clergy and parishioners. Here is one example, from the western Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi:

Father Petro, who was the parish’s head priest for 14 years, also showed me videos of the event. He said the group who seized the church did not belong to the parish and came with local authorities and police, saying, “Force is on our side.” A bloody fight ensued, with children and elderly people beaten while police stood by and watched, he said. The entire parish was then forced outside, the church doors were locked, and religious and personal items were taken away, including the priest’s personal belongings.

In addition to the church seizures, numerous high-profile UOC clerics have been arrested. In April, the home of Father Mykolai Danylevych, the UOC’s deputy head of external church relations, was raided by Ukraine’s secret police, and Danylevych was subsequently charged with “incitement of religious hatred” and “justification of Russian aggression.” His crime, it seems, is that he had religious objections to the rival OCU, and had, the previous day, met with representatives of the Conference of European Churches and described the plight of the UOC at the hands of the government.

Out of more than 12,000 UOC clergymen, only 70 have been accused of treason or espionage, according to the Telegram channel of the SBU (Ukraine’s security service). Ukraine already has laws on the books against these crimes, raising the question of why a ban of the UOC as a church is necessary—especially considering the UOC’s outspoken opposition to Russian aggression. 

Supporters of the law insist that it’s necessary for Ukraine’s national security. According to Viktor Yelenskyi, the Ukrainian government official who oversees religion, “the core problem is not in this handful of collaborators” but “the whole structure, which transmits Russian ideas and Russian narratives and is a channel of Russian influence … It’s a threat to the national security of Ukraine to have ties to a body subordinated to Russia’s militaristic machine.” Yelenskyi and the law’s supporters argue that the law doesn’t violate religious freedom—and, even more, that any claim of persecution is proof of Russian collaboration. Defending the law to Christianity Today, Maksym Vasin of the Institute for Religious Freedom in Kyiv asserted, “When the UOC bishops refuse to obey the law and claim persecution, it becomes evident that its leadership wants to maintain its dependence on Moscow.” 

Ukrainian legal expert Dmytro Vovk comes to a different conclusion: 

Addressing real national security threats, such as the involvement of UOC priests and believers in collaboration with the Russian army or the dissemination of Russian propaganda—as well as the much larger number of such cases involving people not linked to the UOC—is a legitimate concern of the Ukrainian government. However, Law No 3894-IX does not help address those problems and may add to them by prosecuting people exercising their human rights and banning their religious communities. The Law will also not help preserve the religious freedom, tolerance, and pluralism championed by Ukraine since gaining independence in 1991.

Perhaps the reason for the government’s anti-UOC posture can be found in President Zelensky’s favored term, “spiritual independence.” Ukraine is positioned between Russia and the West. The cultural overlap and common history with Russia are seen by some Ukrainian leaders as incompatible with Ukraine’s sense of nationhood. Yet Ukraine is a multiethnic, multinational state. Millions of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language (but hundreds of thousands speak Romanian and other minority languages, and it does not make them any less loyal to Ukraine). It seems that the Ukrainian government is aiming, not so much to suss out traitors, but to cleanse Ukraine of any latent perceived Russianness. And eradicating the UOC, or at least coercing it into turning its back on any incidental religious commonalities with Russia, is viewed as essential not so much to national security, but to national identity.

If Ukraine is, as it claims to be, a Western-oriented democracy, seeking membership in the European Union, can it ban an entire church for cultural identity politics? And what of the other religious minorities in the country? Are they to fall under a cloud of suspicion in due time? 

Ukraine cannot help its geographical and geopolitical position, teetering on the border of East and West. The very name, “Ukraine” means “borderlands” in Old Slavonic, but it is no longer “The Ukraine,” as in a region of the Soviet or Russian empires. It is a sovereign nation which has chosen democracy. Now, Ukraine faces the question: Will it fulfill its own democratic values, even as it defends its sovereignty?

More Sunday Reads

• It’s not only Orthodox churches that have suffered due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. For The Christian Chronicle, Erik Tryggestad reports on Americans traveling to Ukraine, including Jeff Abrams, to help churches constantly bombarded there. “‘I’ve heard a lot of sirens today,’ Abrams told the Chronicle from a hotel room in Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine less than 20 miles from the Russian border, ‘You don’t know when to take the sirens seriously. I try to judge what I should do by looking at what Ukrainians are doing. And that’s probably not the best idea.’”Abrams also shared experiences visiting Christians who have had to move multiple times, fleeing fighting. When Abrams visited one woman in Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, she told him her new home was  “paradise. It’s paradise.” Another woman, a widow who is in her third home since the war began, told Abrams she is tired of moving even if fighting is nearby. “They say, ‘Well, if we go to this town, we’ll just have to leave again later. We might as well make our stand here, you know? And if something happens, it happens.’”
• Perhaps the core assumption undergirding much of modernity is the belief in autonomy over all else: that individual freedom is the highest good. In Plough, James R. Wood has an arresting essay illustrating how aversion to commitment is no freedom at all, framed by his relationship with his father.  “Over time I came to adopt a conception of freedom that had destroyed the lives of many around me, and which would threaten to destroy my own as well: the popular idea of freedom as unconstrained choice. Since this is impossible, the default was a more achievable version: the ability to drop commitments and relationships at any point when they become too complicated. Freedom as the license to leave when things get tough. Live by the mantra of Robert De Niro’s character in Heat: ‘Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.’ If complications come, don’t worry. You can always go. I eventually came to see that such freedom left me and some of those I loved unfree to love and to be known in love. Furthermore, this approach to freedom is a form of self-harm that also harms those dependent on you.”

A Different Kind of Sunday Show

Last week Pope Francis again made headlines for a pair of off-the-cuff remarks: one regarding the U.S. presidential election and another of a more theological nature. This week on the Dispatch Faith video podcast, I talked with three other fellow Dispatchers—Victoria Holmes, Charles Hilu, and Luis Parrales—about their assessments of Francis’ verbal style, particularly as young Catholics.

A Good Word

Last week New York City officially made Landing Day a city holiday. Until now celebrated mostly by the city’s Jewish community, it commemorates the 1623 arrival of 23 Sephardic Jews at what was then called New Amsterdam, and the Jewish community that would eventually spring up as a result. Writing for Religion News Service, rabbi and author Jeffrey Salkin argues Landing Day should be celebrated as a uniquely American Jewish holiday. Referring to a 17^th-century sermon from Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira on mourning, he writes: “This is the founding text of New York Jewish history. Two takeaways from this journey into an almost 400-year-old sermon. First, it places the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam into a larger historical context. The 1640s was a time of great disruption in the Jewish world — in Ukraine, the worst acts of violence against Jews until the Holocaust, and in New Amsterdam, the beginnings of what is, arguably, the greatest Jewish community of the Diaspora. Both of those events featured Jew-hatred: the first, of the most violent kind; and the second, of a more genteel variety, but nevertheless hateful.” Later, Salking writes, “the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam should remind us that American Jewish history began as the story of refugees, fleeing from hatred and persecution, and being met by an antisemite with his own agenda and his own fantasies about the Jews. Just substitute ‘immigrants’ into that story, and see what happens. For that reason, Landing Day merits becoming an American Jewish holiday.”