Religious Dimension of Russian-Ukranian Conflict

By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The war between Russia and Ukraine has claimed more than 10,300 lives, and Moscow in 2014 annexed Crimea from Ukraine in a move that brought international denunciations.

But the military and political conflict between Russia and Ukraine also has an important religious dimension.

The Russian Orthodox Church on Oct. 15 moved to sever all ties with the Constantinople Patriarchate, the Eastern Orthodox mother church in Istanbul.

It is currently led by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians.

Russia’s move was taken to protest Bartholomew’s steps towards creating a single, self-governing Church in Ukraine, led by its own patriarch. 

More than two-thirds of Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians. But the country’s main religious body falls under the authority of Moscow, not Kyiv. 

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is part of the Russian church. This degree of supervision over Ukraine was originally granted to the Moscow patriarchate in 1686.

Ukraine currently has three Orthodox bodies: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyiv Patriarchate) created in 1991, and the small Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, born early in the 20th century.

In April Ukraine’s lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of President Petro Poroshenko’s appeal to Patriarch Bartholomew to recognize an independent and inclusive Ukrainian church. Poroshenko called it part of Ukraine’s westward integration.

Ukraine’s political leaders want the main Ukrainian Orthodox Church to be fully free of Russia’s oversight. 

An independent Ukrainian church -- or “autocephalous” in ecclesiastical terms -- would mark another important symbolic break from Russia and would rupture the last significant Russian imperial link to Ukraine.

The Moscow Patriarchate announced that its believers would face punishment for praying in churches belonging to Constantinople.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, declared that Russia would “protect the interests of Orthodox Christians” just as it had always protected the interests of Russian speakers.

Moscow’s move stopped short of a complete break, however, with the Russian church calling on the leaders of the other 13 independent Orthodox churches, which largely conform to national borders. to press Constantinople rather than demand that they break with it as well.

The Eastern Orthodox Church lacks an all-powerful central authority figure like the Pope. Instead, the Patriarch in Constantinople is considered a “first among equals” among the other Orthodox patriarchs. 

A newly independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate would most likely seek to take over houses of worship and other property from the church under Moscow’s jurisdiction, which, until now, is the largest in Ukraine and the only one recognized by other churches.

The roughly 12,000 parishes in Ukraine constitute about one-third of all parishes in the Russian Orthodox Church, so an independent church there would drastically shrink the Russian church.

The Russian Orthodox Church claims 150 million followers, or half the estimated 300 million Orthodox worldwide.

A smaller church would undermine Moscow’s effort to call itself the protector of all Orthodox Christians and the so-called Third Rome, after the loss of Rome in the original Christian schism and then Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453.

The control of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine has buttressed Putin’s claim that they were still one people, one church and one culture. They all belonged to the “Russian World,” a concept promoted by both the Kremlin and Patriarch Kirill I, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Kiril has made no public effort to halt the bloodshed in eastern Ukraine. “There was no condemnation of the war on the part of the church leadership in Moscow,” Vyacheslav Gorshkov, who teaches the catechism at a Kyiv cathedral, remarked. “The church conducted itself in a way that showed it is not on the side of the people.”

The Russian patriarch has been unwelcome in Ukraine since 2014 despite being the nominal head of the church.