Russian officials have denounced the Ukrainian government as “enemies of Christ and the Orthodox faith” over security service raids on churches accused of links to Moscow.
Eastern Orthodox Church politics in Ukraine is fiendishly complicated, with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople (New Rome), Bartholomew I, having backed the establishment of an autocephalous (self-governing, in layman’s terms) Ukrainian church, where it was formerly under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Moscow, in 2019.
The Ukrainian government-backed new church, known as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), was not recognised by the Russian Orthodox Church — by far the largest Eastern Orthodox church — which regarded the Ecumenical Patriarch as attempting to exercise Pope-like powers beyond his jurisdiction, with other Orthodox churches in Serbia, Romania, and Poland either backing outright the Russian position of withholding recognition of the OCA more diplomatically, while others, such as the Greek Orthodox Church, supported Batholomew, causing several breaks in communion.
The church the Russian Orthodox Church continued to recognise was the slightly differently styled Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC, sometimes UOC-MP for ‘Moscow Patriarchate’) which chose to remain subject to the Moscow Patriarchate — to the chagrin of the Ukrainian authorities, who were already carrying out raids against its churches and monasteries years ago.
Nevertheless, the Russia-linked UOC remained a major religious force in Ukraine right up until February 2022, with thousands more parishes and clergy than the autocephalous OCU — but after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of the country its position became increasingly untenable, with its members frequently accused of collaborating with the invaders by the Ukrainian authorities.
These accusations have continued despite the UOC declaring independence from Moscow due to the Russian patriarch’s apparent support for the war, and have now culminated in President Zelensky announcing a crackdown on the church as the security services execute a fresh series of raids on some of the holiest sites in Orthodoxy, including the famous Holy Dormition Kiev-Caves Lavra, and the homes of various priests.
President Zelensky announced in a video address on December 1st that “[t]he National Security and Defence Council instructed the Government to submit to the Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian Parliament] a draft law on making it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centres of influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine” — a move that seems aimed at shutting down the UOC altogether and which would certainly ban any church with links to the Russian Orthodox Church as a “centre of influence” within Russia.
The scope of the crackdown seems very broad, with Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, having previously described one of the goals of a raid on the Kiev-Caves monastery as “preventing the use of the Lavra as a centre of the ‘Russian world'”.
President Zelensky said the moves were necessary to “guarantee Ukraine’s spiritual independence” and “counter the subversive activities of Russian special services in the religious environment of Ukraine” — indeed, he said there would be “personal sanctions” against some clergy, whose names would be made public “soon”.
On December 3rd, the SBU published on social media the full names of a number of clergymen “who are representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) or are closely related to this organization” which they described as the “church list”, noting that most were “currently in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine or abroad” and accusing them of such actions as “agree[ing] to cooperate with the occupation authorities” and “prompt[ing] pro-Russian narratives”.
“The current Ukrainian authorities have openly become enemies of Christ and the Orthodox faith,” declared Dmitry Medvedev, who had previously served as President of Russia, with Putin as Prime Minister, and then as Prime Minister of Russia, with Putin having returned as President.
The SBU has claimed that its raids uncovered “[w]arehouses with pro-Kremlin literature, Nazi symbols, ‘teachings about Satanism’ and texts of prayers for Moscow Patriarch Kirill”, “brochures with calls for peace with the ‘fraternal Russian people”‘ glorification of the ‘Russian land’ and ‘Russian soldiers'”, and material that “questioned Ukrainian statehood”, among other things.
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