Alexey Kovalev
On Aug. 24, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law that aims to deny Russia one of its major avenues of influence. It explicitly bans the Russian Orthodox Church, which has long been entangled with the Russian security state, in Ukraine. But in a more contentious move, the law also bans religious entities “affiliated” with Moscow. This will mainly affect parishes of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the nominally independent Ukrainian branch of the Russian Orthodox Church that, despite various name and governance changes, is still formally subservient to the patriarch in Moscow. The UOC’s parishes and priests could be deemed insufficiently disentangled from Moscow by an expert commission that will be appointed by the government to implement the new law.
Determining the degree of any such affiliation will surely be a messy business—in line with the messy history of Orthodoxy in Ukraine since the Russian conquest that began in the 17th century. Until 2019, there were three separate Orthodox church organizations in Ukraine, which had emerged from a long series of repressions, schisms, and refoundings: the Moscow-aligned UOC; the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, founded and dissolved three times between 1921 and 2019; and a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine directly subordinate to the patriarch of Constantinople, established in 1992 after Ukraine restored its independence. It’s all rather ironic considering that what later became Russian Orthodoxy first emerged in 10th-century Kyiv, when Moscow was nothing but a swamp and a state named Russia still centuries away.
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