Selenskyj declares war on the traditionally pro-Russian church

WIf there is another bastion of Russian influence in Ukraine, it is widely believed to be the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Until the spring of this year it acted as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, this should soon be over. In a speech on Friday night, he announced that his country’s “spiritual independence” would be secured. “We will never allow anyone to build an empire in the Ukrainian soul,” said Zelenskyy.

The Ukrainian President outlined several approaches to create conditions “under which the actors dependent on the aggressor state have no opportunity to manipulate the Ukrainians and weaken Ukraine from within”. Most specifically, he formulated the mandate to the government to submit a bill to parliament that would make it impossible for Russian-influenced religious organizations to operate in Ukraine. A state authority has been commissioned to check whether there are still “ecclesiastical-canonical connections to the Moscow Patriarchate” – and thus to the Moscow Patriarch Kirill, who supports Russia’s imperial war against Ukraine.

How independent is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church?

Zelenskyi questioned the credibility of a move by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In May, after a national council, she emphasized her “full autonomy and independence”, henceforth renounced the suffix Moscow Patriarchate and declared that she “does not share the position of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Kirill, on the war in Ukraine”. However, the term autocephaly was missing from the statement. In orthodox Christianity, this means complete canonical independence from national churches, which are no longer subordinate to a patriarch.

So far there has been no talk of a complete break. The website of the Russian Orthodox Church led by Kirill still lists the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a “self-governing church with extensive autonomy within the Moscow Patriarchate”. According to a survey, just over 20 percent of the Orthodox believers in Ukraine professed their allegiance before the invasion in February. It should be significantly less now.

In his speech, Zelenskyj also addressed the symbol of Russian-Church influence: the Cave Monastery in Kyiv, which is the seat of the Kiev Diocese of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – and can be recognized from a great distance by its golden domes. It should be checked whether there is still a “legal basis” for religious organizations to continue using the site. The specific reason is a raid by the domestic secret service SBU at the end of November, which searched more than 350 church buildings on suspicion of Russian sabotage. Tempers were particularly heated by a recording circulating on social media, according to which believers in the cave monastery had sung about the “awakening” of “Mother Russia”.

The spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence service said on Thursday that priests from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church arrested in the operation could be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russian-controlled areas. In the Russian-occupied city of Berdyansk, two priests of the Greek Catholic Church, which is united with Rome, were arrested at the end of last week.

Moscow Patriarch Kirill openly displayed his imperialism on Friday. Speaking at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, he said, according to the state news agency TASS: “Today, the Donbass is the first line of defense of the Russian world. And the Russian world is not just Russia, it is wherever there are people who have been brought up in the traditions of Orthodoxy and in the traditions of Russian morality.”