Serhiy Yushchyk proudly holds a certificate with the “Cross of Honor” into the camera. The cleric recently received it from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense for his work in a volunteer-run mobile hospital. His church prominently announces this award on its website. Such events serve the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOK) to present itself as a solidarity and patriotic institution.
Since the beginning of the Russian full-scale invasion, the largest church in Ukraine in terms of the number of congregations, monasteries and priests has had a difficult time. In May 2022, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church declared “complete autonomy and independence” from Moscow Patriarch Kirill, who calls the invasion a “holy war”. However, the Ukrainian state continues to assume that UOK clerics have not broken away from Russian Orthodoxy.
A law passed two years ago prohibits religious communities from being run from enemy territory. On this basis, the Ukrainian religious authority is bringing one case after another. Last week the authority opened an investigation into the diocese of Zaporizhzhia. Metropolitan Luka there is one of the clergy who continue to include the Moscow Patriarch in their prayers. At the same time, the former opponent of the Euromaidan movement emphasizes that he has no longer communicated with Kyrill since the full invasion began.
The religious authorities have long been taking action against the Kiev metropolis, whose head Onufriy is at the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Almost two years after the Ukrainian parliament passed the law targeting the UOK in the name of “spiritual independence,” criticism is growing in Ukraine that none of the units allegedly linked to Moscow have been disbanded. The head of the religious authority, Viktor Jelenskyj, recently defended the approach by saying that the approach was “democratic” and “civilized”. “We are not in North Korea,” Yelenskyy told the Hromadske portal.
But there is also another version circulating among those who know the religious situation in Ukraine. Namely that the state is afraid of actually dissolving church units. He had the impression that the courts were delaying the proceedings in accordance with political guidelines, said Münster Eastern Church expert Thomas Bremer, who is well connected in the Ukrainian churches, to the F.A.Z. The desire to break with the “Moscow patriarchy” once and for all collides with the foreign policy risk of appearing as oppressors of religious communities.
This appears to be a danger, especially in view of the USA's changeable Ukraine policy. Jelenskyj himself mentioned to “Hromadske” the American lawyer Robert Amsterdam hired by the UOK. After the confrontation between Volodymyr Zelenskyj and Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the beginning of last year, Amsterdam attacked the Ukrainian president as a persecutor of the church in the broadcast of then MAGA whisperer Tucker Carlson.
The UN also expressed criticism of the law, which could lead to the dissolution of church units. Ukraine has “not demonstrated the necessity and proportionality of this measure,” said the High Commission for Human Rights. Kyiv was unable to explain why steps against erring individuals were not enough.
Jelenskyj recently emphasized once again that his authority is neither demanding that the UOK celebrate its liturgy in Ukrainian instead of Church Slavonic, nor that it celebrate Christmas on December 25th instead of January 7th. There is also no expectation of a conversion to the competing Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OKU). It was created in 2018 as an earlier “spiritual independence” project by Moscow during the term of President Petro Poroshenko. The current head of the religious authority, Jelenskyj, was at that time a member of a government faction who was active in church politics.
The hostility between the two Orthodox churches in Ukraine is so deep that even critics of the church leadership in the UOK reject a conversion to the OKU. The core of their criticism within the church is that the UOK's declared independence from the Moscow Patriarch in 2022 has stopped halfway. The term “autocephaly”, which in Orthodoxy means the complete self-sufficiency of a national church, was missing from the explanation.
“There is a strong current in the UOK episcopate that is striving for a final move away from Moscow,” says church expert Bremer. However, this is not yet capable of gaining a majority due to a negative wing and a wait-and-see wing. Russian air strikes on UOK churches are making advocates for a hard break grow louder.
The Kiev Pechersk Lavra, Ukraine's most important spiritual center, was also attacked by Russia this summer. A bizarre juxtaposition of the two Orthodox churches can be observed there. The cave monastery was withdrawn from the UOK in 2023 by termination of the usage agreement.
The head of the OKU, Metropolitan Epiphanius, is now celebrating services in the main churches. The UOK Metropolitan Onufrij and dozens of UOK monks continue to go in and out of the neighboring churches. This also supports the assumption that the Ukrainian state is shying away from evicting places of worship.
