After more than two years since the start Russian-Ukrainian warThe two countries exchange accusations of a special kind. On the one hand, it is considered Russia rapprochement Ukraine With the West, it is apostasy from Orthodox traditions and blasphemy against them, and on the other hand, Kiev accuses Moscow of exploiting Orthodox Church To achieve its imperialist expansionist ambitions.
In his quest to remove Moscow's spiritual influence in Ukraine, Sadiq Volodymyr ZelenskyOn August 24, 2024, a law was passed banning religious groups linked to Russia, specifically the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” which considers itself a branch of the Russian Church, and all its dioceses.
The new law gives Moscow-linked churches in Ukraine nine months to prove they have severed ties with the Russian Church, or face closure and property confiscation. This paves the way for a historic split in the Orthodox Church, coming after nearly four centuries of Kievan churches being subordinate to Moscow churches.
After ratifying the law, Zelensky considered that this step would strengthen his country's independence, saying that “Ukrainian Orthodoxy is today taking a step towards liberation from Moscow's demons.”
The Ukrainian president chose a symbolic and significant timing to ratify the law, as he signed it coinciding with the anniversary of Ukraine's independence from soviet union On August 24, 1991, in order to achieve the greatest possible enthusiasm and support for the decision among Ukrainian patriots who had recently received a strong boost from the successful invasion of the Russian Kursk region.
Observers believe that Zelensky has become interested in the religious issue as a useful tool to motivate Ukrainians to adopt his policies, even though the Russians accuse him of being a Jew who defends Nazism.
Spiritual independence
The decision to ban churches associated with Russia has wide popular support. According to a survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in April 2024, 83% of Ukrainians believe that the state should interfere in the activities of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and in particular, 63% believe that the Russian Orthodox Church should be completely banned in Ukraine.
For Ukrainians, the decision to ban religious institutions linked to Russia represents the end of a different kind of dependency, and the achievement of spiritual independence from Moscow, the steps of which began in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea, when some Orthodox churches in Ukraine announced their secession from the Russian Church.
In 2019, the most important step towards achieving religious independence for Ukraine was when the spiritual leader of the Orthodox world, Patriarch Bartholomew I, based in Istanbul, announced his official recognition of an independent Orthodox Church based in Kiev, Ukraine.
According to a report in the French newspaper Le Monde on August 20, the leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Autocephalous Church, Metropolitan Epiphanius, believes that the new law provides an opportunity to “protect the Ukrainian spiritual space from the yoke of the Russian world.”
Epiphanius believes that “all religious centers in Russia are under the complete control of the Kremlin, which spreads the ideology of the Russian world, which considers the war against Ukraine a holy war, so the destruction of Ukraine is a morally justified goal, even a duty for the Russian forces.”
Religious persecutions
Although the Orthodox churches targeted by the law had announced their separation from the Moscow Patriarchate at the start of the Russian war on Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian officials often accuse the clergy in those churches of remaining loyal to Russia.
Ukrainians' suspicions were reinforced by the fact that many members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the Russian-occupied territories had joined the Russian side.
Journalist Daria Tarasova reported in an article for CNN published on August 25, 2024, that the Ukrainian Security Service believes that the Orthodox Church is still in Moscow's orbit and spreading propaganda in its favor.
Since the beginning of the war, the Security Service of Ukraine has opened criminal investigations against more than 100 clergymen of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. About 50 people have already been charged and 26 have been sentenced.
According to those investigations, the convicted clerics defended the Russian war and the seizure of parts of Ukraine in their sermons, and tried to convince their followers to go to the battlefield to help the Russians.
Observers believe that the new decision will give the Ukrainian authorities a legal pretext to “torture the priests and priests of the banned church, confiscate their properties and monasteries, and throw them in prison on charges of espionage and communicating with the enemy.”
destroy orthodoxy
Despite the strong domestic support for the law, there are Russian speakers in Ukraine, who represent a fifth of the country's population, who refuse to give up their religious allegiance to Moscow. They want to continue worshipping in Russian, while the Ukrainian Church, which broke away from Moscow, worships in Ukrainian.
CNN quoted a follower of the targeted Orthodox Church in Kiev as saying that he was upset about the recent moves against his church, saying, “The government is now creeping into my soul, and it is right that it is up to me to decide how I pray. They have gone completely crazy.”
In contrast, analysts believe that the law will give the Russian president Vladimir Putin And his bishops have added arguments to make their war against Ukraine a war of faith and a crusade to “save their brothers in faith from the injustice that has befallen them.”
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Ukraine was trying to “destroy true Orthodoxy,” and the Russian Orthodox Church condemned the law, with spokesman Vladimir Legoida calling it the most egregious violation of freedom of conscience and human rights.
Legoida added that the law creates “a legal basis for the complete liquidation of the parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which unites the majority of Ukrainians.” He warned that the implementation of this law would “lead to mass violence against millions of believers.”
far-reaching consequences
In a study published on September 4, 2024 by the Carnegie Center in Berlin for Russia and Eurasia, Ukrainian political historian Konstantin Skorkin believes that the consequences of banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate may be more serious than Kiev seems to realize, considering that the decision will have far-reaching consequences for Ukraine internally and externally.
Konstantin explains that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is the largest church in the country, with 10,587 parishes, compared to 8,075 parishes of the Autocephalous Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Therefore, the implementation of the new law means that its followers will be forced to practice their religious activities in secret, and the true consequences of this are not known. In any case, Kiev will face charges of practicing religious persecution.
Konstantin notes that only 685 dioceses have switched allegiance from the Moscow-affiliated Church to the Autocephalous Church of Ukraine since the beginning of the war, most of them in the center and west of the country. On the pro-Russian side, where the war is raging, the switch has been minimal (two cases in the Odessa region, one in the Dnepropetrovsk region, and no switch in the Kharkiv region).
Konstantin believes that the legal pressures exerted on the Orthodox Church, which is accused of working for Moscow, may turn it into an organization that is strongly hostile to Kiev, which may entail some risks.
A boom in religiosity after the fall of the Soviet Union
Statistical data reveal that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which mercilessly suppressed religion, led to a widespread spread of religious practices in many of the countries that emerged from that union.
According to a Pew Research Center poll published in 2022, 71% of Russians consider themselves Orthodox, along with 78% of Ukrainians, 73% of Belarusians and 92% of Moldovans.
This expansion has given the Russian Orthodox Church great confidence and it has come to view itself as the repository of Russian national identity, and as the Moscow Church as the leader of other Orthodox churches.
This view has been reinforced by Russian President Putin’s passage of laws targeting non-Orthodox religious minorities with fines, arrests, confiscations, and criminal charges.
The so-called “Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church” includes, in addition to the bishops of Russia, the bishops of Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The doctrine of the “Russian world”
The Russian Orthodox Church has been quick to ally itself with the Putin regime, especially since Kirill was elected “Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia” in 2009.
According to a 2022 study by the European Parliament’s think tank, Putin’s regime and the Church have over the past decades developed a doctrine known as the “Russian World” that envisions a role for Russia in saving Christian civilization from the decadent West by spreading Russian language, culture and values, reasserting dominance over countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union, and exerting influence throughout the Orthodox and wider Christian world.
In 2007, Putin created the Russkiy Mir Foundation, which spreads this ideology around the world, in close cooperation with the Russian Church.
This doctrine reveals that the religious dimension is a major factor in Russia’s war on Ukraine, which also draws attention to the close relationship between Putin’s regime and the Russian Church, as the latter has strongly supported Putin’s war and has always provided theological and ideological justifications for his domestic and foreign policies.
According to the European study, the Russian Church's overtly political approach has contributed to deep divisions within the broader Orthodox world, including the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and major tensions with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, which represents the spiritual leadership of the Orthodox churches.
Great Orthodox Russia
Putin himself published a long article in July 2021 titled “The Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in which he laid out his vision of what he calls Greater Russia, claiming that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are the same people who consider Kiev “the source of their common baptism” since the conversion of Kievan Prince Volodymyr (in Ukrainian, Vladimir in Russian) from paganism to Christianity in 988.
Putin explains that Russia's enemies “are located to the West,” and just as they sought to invade Russian lands with Poles and Latins and fight Orthodoxy in the 16th century, they are doing so again by supporting the current Ukrainian regime and backing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church's secession from Russia.
For Putin, Ukrainian identity or Ukrainian statehood has “no historical basis” but is a geopolitical tool used by the West to weaken Russia, and the Russian president describes Ukraine’s current leaders as “extremists and neo-Nazis.”
In contrast, a study prepared by American researcher Michael Rubin for the Enterprise Institute last February, entitled “Russia’s War is Religious, Too,” stated that civil society organizations documented what they described as religious persecution in the areas occupied by Russia in eastern Ukraine.
We can conclude from previous studies that religion was and still is an influential factor in the current Russian-Ukrainian war, whether in terms of preparing for it, justifying it, or its continuation. This is in fact not new in internal European wars, but it confirms the falsity of many European claims related to human rights and religious freedoms and the distance from what other peoples are accused of in terms of exploiting religion for political purposes.