The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Millennium of Contested Identity
© 2026 Natalie Ross. All rights reserved.
Abstract
This text examines the millennium-long relationship between Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine and the Russian Orthodox Church, from the baptism of Kyivan Rus’ in 988 to the religious dimension of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It argues that Ukrainian Orthodoxy has constituted a distinct institutional and spiritual tradition rooted in the Kyiv Metropolitanate, periodically absorbed by but never permanently subordinated to Moscow. Three dynamics structure the analysis: the recurrent instrumentalisation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction by imperial and state power, from Prince Volodymyr’s marriage bargain with Byzantium to Patriarch Kirill’s theological justification for war; the creative synthesis of Eastern and Western Christian traditions exemplified by Metropolitan Petro Mohyla’s seventeenth-century academy; and the persistent linkage between ecclesiastical and national identity, visible from the seventeenth-century Cossack defence of Orthodox hierarchy to the founding of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019. Particular attention is paid to the disputed 1686 transfer of the Kyiv Metropolitanate to Moscow, whose contested legal status — illuminated by independently corroborating Ottoman-archival and Constantinopolitan-Greek source scholarship — underlies nearly every subsequent jurisdictional dispute examined, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 2018 grant of autocephaly. Drawing primarily on peer-reviewed scholarship in Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Canadian Slavonic Papers, the Journal of Early Modern History, Scrinium, the Scottish Journal of Theology, and East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, alongside primary chronicle sources and the standard reference scholarship of the field, the text demonstrates that the entanglement of religious institutions with political power in Ukraine is not a contemporary aberration but the oldest and most persistent feature of its ecclesiastical history. By tracing precisely where rival historical narratives diverge, and on what evidence each side relies, the text aims to supply the kind of granular, source-grounded clarity on which any durable settlement of Ukraine’s ecclesiastical disputes — and, by extension, any wider peace process addressing the religious dimension of the present conflict — would necessarily have to be built.
Table of Contents
I. The Kyivan Origins and Byzantine Foundation, 988–1240
II. Fragmentation, the Polish-Lithuanian Context, and the Union of Brest, 1240–1620
III. The Mohyla Synthesis and the Annexation by Moscow, 1620–1722
IV. Imperial Suppression, the Short-Lived Autocephalous Church, and Soviet “Ethnic Ecclesicide,” 1722–1988
A Note on Terminology: Four Institutions Named “Ukrainian Orthodox”
V. The Fragmented Three-Church Landscape, 1989–2018
VI. The 2019 Tomos, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and the Religious Dimension of the 2022 Invasion
Bibliography
Introduction
Few questions in contemporary European geopolitics are at once so consequential and so widely misunderstood as the relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and the churches of Ukraine. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched on 24 February 2022, lent this question an unmistakable urgency: a war framed by its instigators in explicitly religious terms could hardly be explained by reference to the contemporary moment alone. Yet the roots of the dispute extend more than a millennium into the past, to a single event on the banks of the River Dnipro: the mass baptism of the inhabitants of Kyiv on 1 August 988.[1]
The contested memory of that baptism is nowhere better illustrated than in the events of 1988, when the Soviet Union marked the millennium of what it called the “Baptism of Rus’.” In Moscow, the state apparatus staged an elaborate official commemoration, presenting the anniversary as belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church and, by extension, to the Russian nation. Simultaneously, and at considerable risk to those involved, unofficial celebrations took place in Kyiv that advanced a rival claim: that the events of 988 constituted the baptism of Ukraine, not of Russia, and that the millennium therefore belonged first to the Dnipro and only secondarily to the Moskva.[2] This single year, in which two mutually exclusive commemorations of the same event were staged a few hundred miles apart, encapsulates in miniature the entire millennium of dispute that this text sets out to analyse. As Serhii Plokhy has argued, Ukraine has long occupied a civilisational borderland between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West, a position that has made its religious configuration perennially, and often violently, political.[3] The 1988 millennium was not an aberration but a structural recurrence of a pattern as old as the conversion itself.
This text argues that the Orthodox Church in Ukraine has, across more than ten centuries, constituted a distinct institutional and spiritual tradition rooted in the Kyiv Metropolitanate — a tradition periodically absorbed by, but never permanently subordinated to, the Russian Orthodox Church. Three recurring dynamics structure this history. The first is the instrumentalisation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction by imperial powers, whereby control of the church has repeatedly served as an instrument of state power rather than purely as a matter of doctrine or pastoral care. The second is the creative synthesis of Eastern Orthodox theology with Western intellectual currents, a fusion that produced a distinctively Ukrainian theological culture most fully realised in the seventeenth-century achievements of Metropolitan Petro Mohyla. The third is the persistent linkage between ecclesiastical identity and national consciousness, a linkage most acutely expressed in twentieth-century Soviet persecution and, most recently, in the 2019 Tomos of Autocephaly granted to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
It should be acknowledged at the outset that this subject is an active scholarly and political battlefield, and that no historian writing on it can claim perfect neutrality. Russian Orthodox apologetics treat the 1686 transfer of the Kyiv Metropolitanate to Moscow as a valid and permanent settlement; Ukrainian Orthodox scholarship tends to treat the period from 988 to 1685 as a distinct Kyivan tradition subsequently and illegally annexed; Western academic historians occupy a range of positions between these poles, generally sympathetic to the latter reading but attentive to its complexities. This text follows the broad scholarly consensus represented by Nicholas Denysenko, Frank E. Sysyn, Serhii Plokhy, Bohdan Bociurkiw, José Casanova, and Cyril Hovorun, while remaining attentive to the dissenting perspectives — including the Moscow Patriarchate’s own published positions — that any honest treatment of this history must engage.
The text is organised around six thematic sections, each treating a discrete period while contributing to a single cumulative argument. The first examines the Kyivan origins and Byzantine foundation of Ukrainian Orthodoxy between 988 and 1240. The second addresses the fragmentation of the metropolitanate under Polish-Lithuanian rule and the Union of Brest of 1595–96. The third considers the intellectual flowering associated with Metropolitan Mohyla and the subsequent annexation of the Kyiv Metropolitanate by the Moscow Patriarchate between 1620 and 1722. The fourth traces imperial suppression, the short-lived Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and the Soviet policy that Bociurkiw has termed “ethnic ecclesicide,” from 1722 to 1988. The fifth examines the fragmented three-church landscape of the post-Soviet period, from 1989 to 2018. The sixth and final thematic section addresses the 2019 Tomos of Autocephaly, the establishment of the OCU, and the religious dimension of Russia’s 2022 invasion. A concluding section synthesises these arguments and assesses the current status of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
I. The Kyivan Origins and Byzantine Foundation, 988–1240
The Christianisation of Kyivan Rus’ in 988 established a church that was simultaneously embedded in Byzantine theological tradition and shaped by the specific political and cultural conditions of the East Slavic world — a combination that generated a Kyivan ecclesiastical identity distinct from, and prior to, the church that would later develop in Muscovy. This section examines four moments within this period — the baptism itself, the appointment of the first native metropolitan, the institutional apex achieved under Yaroslav the Wise, and the catastrophic Mongol sack of Kyiv — to establish the foundational claim on which the rest of the text builds: that Kyivan Orthodoxy was, from its inception, a self-theorising and politically instrumentalised tradition, not a passive recipient of Byzantine or, still less, Muscovite authority.
The conventional date of 988 marks Prince Volodymyr’s mass baptism of the population of Kyiv in the River Dnipro, but modern scholarship — following the Primary Chronicle itself — treats this as the culmination of a longer process rather than a sudden rupture. Christianity had already penetrated Kyivan society well before Volodymyr’s reign: a Church of Saint Elias is recorded as existing in Kyiv during the reign of Prince Igor, and Volodymyr’s grandmother, Princess Olha, had been baptised individually as early as 957.[4] The immediate context of Volodymyr’s own baptism was unambiguously geopolitical rather than purely spiritual. Volodymyr provided military assistance — a force of some six thousand Varangian warriors — to the Byzantine emperor Basil II at a moment of acute crisis for the latter, securing in exchange the hand of the emperor’s sister, Princess Anna, and with it the prestige of dynastic and religious legitimacy that only a Byzantine marriage alliance could confer.[5] This was not a minor diplomatic footnote: no Byzantine “born-in-the-purple” princess had previously been married to a ruler outside the Christian world, and the negotiation by which Volodymyr secured Anna’s hand, reinforced by his seizure of the Byzantine city of Chersonesos in the Crimea, marks the conversion of Rus’ as fundamentally a transaction of state.[6] This foundational instrumentalisation of faith for state-building purposes — religion as the currency of a political bargain rather than, or at least as much as, a matter of individual conviction — recurs throughout the subsequent history examined in this text, finding its most recent and most violent echo in the Russkiy Mir doctrine deployed to justify the 2022 invasion.
The new church established after 988 was organised as a suffragan see of the Patriarchate of Constantinople and was initially staffed by Greek metropolitans sent from Byzantium. The appointment of Ilarion as the first native Rus’ metropolitan in 1051, by Yaroslav the Wise and without prior sanction from Constantinople, therefore represents the first significant assertion of a distinctively Kyivan ecclesiastical identity — a church beginning to claim authority over its own hierarchy rather than accepting it as a function of Byzantine appointment.[7] Ilarion’s principal surviving work, generally known in English as the “Sermon on Law and Grace,” is of particular significance in this regard. Composed in Kyiv between 1037 and 1050, the sermon develops a theology in which the Christianisation of Rus’ is presented not as a belated and derivative adoption of an older faith but as the culmination of salvation history: a new people called into grace, equal in spiritual standing to the older Christian nations of Byzantium.[8] The text affirms the political and ecclesiastical independence of Kyivan Rus’ and implicitly resists the assumption, current at Constantinople, that the new church owed permanent subordination to the see from which its faith had originally come. This motif — the church as the bearer of a chosen people’s distinctive identity — would later be appropriated by both Russian and Ukrainian ecclesiastical nationalism, but its first articulation belongs unambiguously to Kyiv, and to a metropolitan installed in defiance of, rather than at the instruction of, the Byzantine hierarchy. The significance of Ilarion’s sermon for this text’s argument is considerable: the first substantial literary work produced by East Slavic Christianity already constitutes a claim to distinctive ecclesiastical and national status. This is not, even at its origin, a derivative church awaiting definition by an external authority, but one already engaged in theorising its own place within Christian history.
The institutional apex of Kyivan ecclesiastical culture was reached during the reign of Yaroslav the Wise (1036–54). Yaroslav’s rule saw the construction of Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, a building deliberately conceived to echo the Hagia Sophia of Constantinople and thereby to assert Kyiv’s claim to a comparable ecclesiastical and civilisational standing.[9] More than four hundred churches are recorded as having been built during this period, and a library — among the first in the East Slavic world — was established, signalling an ecclesiastical culture that by the mid-eleventh century rivalled the most developed centres of Christian Europe.[10] Of particular importance for the longer history of Ukrainian Orthodoxy was the founding of the Kyivan Cave Monastery (Kyievo-Pecherska Lavra) in the mid-eleventh century, which rapidly became the principal centre of chronicle writing, icon painting, and theological scholarship in Kyivan Rus’, and which would remain a focal point of Ukrainian religious and cultural life for the better part of a millennium.[11] The richness and relative independence of Kyivan ecclesiastical culture during the Yaroslavian period establishes the essential baseline against which the subsequent appropriation of this heritage by Muscovy must be measured: whatever claims Moscow would later make to be the natural heir of the Kyivan church, the church it claimed to inherit was, in this formative period, an autonomous and self-confident institution in its own right, not a provincial outpost awaiting its true centre of gravity further north and east.
This formative period was brought to a violent close by the Mongol invasion. The sack of Kyiv in 1240 devastated the city and, with it, the institutional infrastructure of the metropolitan see.[12] In the decades that followed, the metropolitanate itself became geographically unstable, its seat relocating first to Halych, then to Vladimir, and ultimately — by the early fourteenth century — to Moscow, even as the title “Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Rus’” was retained. This displacement is best understood not as a natural or inevitable consequence of political change but as the structural rupture that opened the space within which Muscovite ecclesiastical and political authority could subsequently construct its claim to the Kyivan inheritance. The transfer of the metropolitan’s seat northward, while the title remained tied to a now-devastated Kyiv, set in motion a centuries-long process in which Moscow would present itself as the rightful successor to a Kyivan tradition it had, in institutional terms, largely absorbed by default rather than by sustained continuity. What was at stake, in other words, was not merely a canonical or administrative reorganisation but, in embryonic form, an appropriation of institutional identity — a pattern that would recur, in far more deliberate and contested form, in the annexation of 1686 examined later in this text.
The displacement of the metropolitanate westward into territories under Lithuanian and, subsequently, Polish control set the stage for the most consequential ecclesiastical event of the early modern period in this region: the Union of Brest of 1595–96, and the centuries of theological controversy and institutional fracture that preceded and followed it.
II. Fragmentation, the Polish-Lithuanian Context, and the Union of Brest, 1240–1620
The centuries of foreign rule over Ukrainian territories between the Mongol sack of Kyiv and the Cossack uprising of 1648 were not, as is sometimes assumed, a period of ecclesiastical dormancy. They were, on the contrary, a period of intense theological controversy, institutional creativity, and ultimately institutional fracture — the fracture in question being the Union of Brest of 1595–96, whose contested legacy continues to shape Ukrainian religious identity to the present day. This section traces that fracture through four stages: the formal division of the metropolitanate in 1458, the intensification of confessional pressure under Polish-Lithuanian rule, the Union of Brest itself and the historiographical controversy surrounding it, and the Cossack-led restoration of an Orthodox hierarchy in 1620 that set the stage for the Mohyla generation examined in the following section.
From 1458, the Kyiv metropolitanate that had nominally survived the post-1240 displacement traced in the previous section was formally divided into two: one metropolitan resident in Moscow, and one — retaining the historic title of Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Rus’ — resident in the Lithuanian- and, later, Polish-controlled territories that today constitute Ukraine and Belarus.[13] Both metropolitans retained, at least in principle, a nominal subordination to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. In practice, however, the structural divergence between an eastern, Muscovite ecclesiastical tradition and a western, Ukrainian-Belarusian one was now institutionalised rather than merely incidental. This moment deserves more analytical weight than it is sometimes given: it marks the de facto origin of what might be called the “two Kyivan churches” problem — the persistent difficulty, recurring throughout the subsequent history examined in this text, of determining which institution legitimately inherits the Kyivan ecclesiastical patrimony — a difficulty that would resurface in starkly modern form in the three-church landscape of the 1990s and 2000s.
The Union of Lublin in 1569 placed the Ukrainian lands of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania directly under the Polish Crown, and with this transfer came a marked intensification of Counter-Reformation Catholic and Jesuit missionary pressure on the Orthodox population.[14] This external pressure coincided with, and was compounded by, an internal institutional decline within the Orthodox church of the Commonwealth. Contemporary accounts — including those compiled within the Catholic Church’s own polemical literature of the period, which must be read with appropriate caution given their confessional bias but which nonetheless corroborate independent later scholarship — describe a clergy whose educational standards had fallen markedly behind those of the rival Jesuit network, and an episcopate weakened by the loss of its traditional aristocratic patrons to Catholicism and, in some cases, Protestantism.[15] Modern reference scholarship concurs that the Orthodox church of this period faced discrimination and active proselytisation, was losing the magnate and princely families who had historically served as its essential protectors, and confronted in the Jesuit colleges a model of education and social advancement to which it had, for the time being, no adequate Orthodox equivalent.[16] It is important to stress that this internal weakness was as consequential as the external pressure in producing the events of 1595–96: a church confident in its institutional standing and resources would have been far better placed to resist incorporation than one already haemorrhaging its lay protectors and struggling to match the educational appeal of its Catholic rivals.
The Union of Brest of 1595–96, by which the greater part of the Orthodox hierarchy of the Kyiv Metropolitanate accepted the authority of the Roman pontiff while retaining the Eastern Byzantine liturgical rite — forming what became known as the Ruthenian Uniate Church, the institutional ancestor of today’s Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) — remains the single most interpretively contested event in the religious history of Ukraine. Led by bishops Ipatii Potii of Volodymyr and Kyrylo Terletsky of Lutsk, the Ruthenian hierarchy negotiated terms directly with Pope Clement VIII, securing papal recognition in the bull Magnus Dominus of December 1595 and the confirming bull Decet Romanum Pontificem of February 1596, on the understanding that Slavonic liturgical language, a married parish clergy, and the local election of bishops would all be preserved.[17] The episcopate’s own stated rationale — set out in the “Thirty-Three Articles of Union” submitted to Rome — emphasised the desire to overcome the scandal of Christian schism, to resist the spread of Protestant heresies in the Commonwealth, and to free the Ruthenian church from a Constantinopolitan patriarchate that was, at this date, operating under Ottoman suzerainty and was therefore poorly placed to support its distant Ukrainian and Belarusian dioceses.[18] Frank E. Sysyn has approached the controversy that followed through an instructive counterfactual method, asking what the prospects for ecclesiastical union would have been had the same proposal been advanced thirty years earlier or thirty years later; his analysis demonstrates that the Union’s reception was profoundly shaped by the specific and contingent confessional environment of the 1590s, in which Catholic and Orthodox identity were only then hardening into the mutually exclusive categories that later generations would take for granted.[19] This text does not attempt to adjudicate between the competing historiographical traditions that have grown up around the Union — an ecumenical and Uniate Catholic tradition that presents it as a legitimate restoration of the unity broken at the Great Schism and reaffirmed at the Council of Florence in 1439; a Ukrainian Orthodox tradition that regards it as an illegitimate rupture imposed on, or at best improvidently accepted by, a weakened hierarchy; and a Ukrainian Greek Catholic tradition that defends it as having preserved a distinctively Eastern Christian identity within the universal church at a moment when the alternative was likely absorption into Polish Latin-rite Catholicism. The coexistence, and continuing vitality, of these three readings is itself the analytically significant fact: it demonstrates that the Union still divides Ukrainian religious memory along lines that long predate, but were sharply reactivated by, the ecclesiastical crisis following the 2022 invasion.
The Union did not, in any event, produce the ecclesiastical unity its architects had hoped for; it produced instead a militant and increasingly organised resistance. By the early 1620s, the formerly Orthodox episcopate of the Commonwealth had passed almost entirely into union with Rome, leaving Orthodox believers in Ukraine and Belarus without a single canonically recognised bishop save one, in Lviv.[20] It was in this context that the Cossack hetman Petro Konashevych-Sahaidachny intervened decisively. In 1620, Sahaidachny secured safe passage for Patriarch Theophanes III of Jerusalem — then travelling through Commonwealth territory on his return from Moscow — and provided him with armed protection sufficient to deter the Polish authorities, who would otherwise almost certainly have prevented or punished the act that followed.[21] Under this Cossack protection, Theophanes consecrated Yov Boretsky as Metropolitan of Kyiv and ordained a full slate of Orthodox bishops, restoring at a stroke the hierarchy that the Union had displaced.[22] The Polish Crown refused to recognise the new hierarchy, which survived its first uncertain years only because the Cossacks were prepared to defend it militarily. The significance of this episode for the argument of this text can hardly be overstated: it establishes, in concrete institutional form, the alliance between Orthodoxy and an emergent Cossack — and, in embryo, Ukrainian national — political identity that would define Ukrainian ecclesiology for the following three centuries. The church, from this point forward, functioned not merely as a spiritual institution but as a national one, sustained by, and in turn lending legitimacy to, a distinctively Ukrainian political community.
The re-establishment of the Orthodox hierarchy in 1620 inaugurated a remarkable generation of ecclesiastical and intellectual renaissance, whose central figure — Metropolitan Petro Mohyla — embodied a creative synthesis of Western and Eastern Christian traditions that would come to define Ukrainian Orthodoxy’s distinctive character for the remainder of the early modern period.
III. The Mohyla Synthesis and the Annexation by Moscow, 1620–1722
The seventeenth century produced the most intellectually creative period in the history of Ukrainian Orthodoxy — a period this text terms the Mohyla synthesis — and then, within little more than a generation of its flowering, its systematic dismantling through the forcible annexation of the Kyiv Metropolitanate by the Moscow Patriarchate. The canonical legitimacy of that annexation remains disputed to this day, and it forms, as later sections of this text will demonstrate, the direct legal foundation upon which the 2019 Tomos of Autocephaly was subsequently constructed. This section examines, in turn, the achievement of Petro Mohyla and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy; the ambiguous ecclesiastical consequences of the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement; the disputed annexation of 1685–86; and the completion of that process of absorption by 1722.
Metropolitan Petro Mohyla (1596–1647) is the pivotal figure of early modern Ukrainian Orthodoxy. Born into the Moldavian noble house of Movilă — a family that had itself supplied several princes (hospodars) of Moldavia and Wallachia — Mohyla received an education shaped by the Jesuit-influenced pedagogical methods then dominant in the Commonwealth’s leading schools before entering monastic life at the Kyivan Cave Monastery in 1625, becoming its archimandrite in 1627 and, in 1633, Metropolitan of Kyiv.[23] Mohyla’s enduring achievement was a synthesis that combined Western scholastic method with Orthodox theological substance, transforming the intellectual landscape not merely of Ukraine but of the wider Orthodox world. In 1632 he united the Kyiv Brotherhood School with a school he had himself founded at the Cave Monastery to create the Kyiv-Mohyla Collegium, deliberately modelled on the structure and curriculum of the Jesuit colleges with which it was designed to compete on equal terms; the institution was formally recognised as an Academy by Tsar Peter I in 1701.[24] The Collegium’s curriculum prioritised Latin and Polish over Church Slavonic and Greek, a pragmatic and, in its context, counter-competitive strategy: only by arming the Orthodox elite of the Commonwealth with the same linguistic and intellectual tools as their Catholic rivals could the Academy hope to retain Ukraine’s aristocratic and burgher classes within the Orthodox fold.[25] The strategy succeeded to a degree that had lasting consequences far beyond Ukraine itself. Graduates of Mohyla’s Academy went on to dominate the senior hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church for the better part of a century after the institution’s founding: figures such as Stefan Yavorsky, locum tenens of the Moscow patriarchal throne from 1700, and Teofan Prokopovych, the principal architect of Peter the Great’s ecclesiastical reforms, were both products of Kyiv’s Mohylan education, and the majority of the Russian church’s eighteenth-century bishops had likewise trained there.[26] Mohyla’s own most significant theological work, the Orthodox Confession of Faith, composed in 1640 and subsequently ratified by the four Eastern patriarchs at the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, set doctrinal standards for the Orthodox world that endured into the nineteenth century; he also undertook the restoration of the long-neglected Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, materially reasserting the historic centrality of the Kyivan see.[27] The Academy’s Western-inflected pedagogy illustrates a theme that recurs throughout this text: Ukrainian Orthodoxy as a conduit through which Western intellectual currents entered, and substantially reshaped, the wider Orthodox world — a dual inheritance, simultaneously Eastern in faith and Western in method, that Russian ecclesiastical nationalism would subsequently work, with very considerable success, to suppress and to erase from historical memory.
The political context within which Mohyla’s successors operated was transformed by the Khmelnytsky Uprising of 1648–54, which produced the Cossack Hetman State and, through the Pereiaslav Agreement concluded in January 1654, a military and political alliance between that state and the Tsardom of Muscovy. It is essential to the argument of this text to register precisely what this agreement did, and did not, accomplish in ecclesiastical terms. Metropolitan Sylvestr Kosiv of Kyiv (1647–57) explicitly and consistently refused to accept that Pereiaslav entailed any ecclesiastical subordination of the Kyiv Metropolitanate to the Moscow Patriarchate: the agreement, in his reading and in that of the Kyivan church more broadly, was a political and military arrangement, not a canonical one.[28] Soviet and earlier Russian imperial historiography characterised Pereiaslav as a “voluntary reunification” of two branches of a single Russian people; Ukrainian historians, and Western scholars including Serhii Plokhy, treat it rather as a contingent and limited military alliance, undertaken by a Cossack leadership with few other strategic options, that implied nothing whatsoever about ecclesiastical jurisdiction.[29] The gap between the political fact of Pereiaslav and the canonical claims that Moscow would subsequently derive from it is, for this text’s purposes, the crucial point. Moscow’s later transformation of a strictly political and military arrangement into a claimed canonical jurisdiction over the Kyiv Metropolitanate is precisely the kind of instrumentalisation of religious authority for state purposes that this text’s thesis identifies as the structurally recurrent pattern in this history — the same pattern visible in Volodymyr’s bargain with Basil II in 988, and one that would recur with even starker clarity three decades later.
That instrumentalisation reached its decisive culmination in 1685–86. On 8 November 1685, Gedeon (Sviatopolk-Chetvertynsky), the newly elected Metropolitan of Kyiv, was ordained not by the Ecumenical Patriarch, to whom the Kyiv see remained canonically subject, but by Patriarch Joachim of Moscow — an act of investiture that Ukrainian historians and canonists have characterised as illegal in its own time, since the Patriarchate of Moscow possessed no recognised jurisdiction over the see of Kyiv.[30] This fait accompli was subsequently — and, crucially, only subsequently — given a veneer of canonical sanction by a Synodal Letter issued by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1686, purporting to authorise the Patriarch of Moscow to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv. The precise legal content and validity of this 1686 letter constitutes, even today, the single most contested point in contemporary Orthodox church politics, and it is the analytical hinge on which the legitimacy of every subsequent development examined in this text ultimately turns. The most significant recent scholarly intervention on this question is that of Yuriy Kovalenko, whose 2019 article in the journal Scrinium draws on Ottoman diplomatic archives — sources unavailable to, or unexamined by, earlier generations of both Russian and Ukrainian church historians — to demonstrate that the 1686 letter was procured through the bribery, by Muscovite envoys, of the Ottoman officials through whose offices Constantinople’s permission for the transaction had to pass.[31] Kovalenko’s conclusions were reached independently of, but corroborate, the Russian Byzantinist Vera Chentsova’s 2017 publication of newly recovered Greek-language copies of the 1686 charters themselves, which she likewise reads as falling short of a full territorial cession; that this reading has now been advanced from both Ottoman-archival and Constantinopolitan-Greek source bases, by scholars working independently of one another and outside any Ukrainian institutional affiliation, lends it a weight that purely partisan historiography could not supply. Properly construed, the 1686 letter, on this reading, authorised Moscow only to perform the act of ordination on Constantinople’s behalf, and did not effect a full and permanent transfer of jurisdictional authority over the Kyiv Metropolitanate from Constantinople to Moscow. This reading — that 1686 conferred a delegated and revocable liturgical function rather than a permanent cession of canonical territory — is precisely the argument subsequently invoked by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in its own 2018 decision to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian church, a decision examined in detail later in this text; it is, equally unsurprisingly, an argument that the Moscow Patriarchate rejects in its entirety, insisting instead that 1686 effected a full, final, and uncontestable transfer of the Kyiv see to Muscovite jurisdiction. This text does not propose to resolve a dispute that has eluded resolution by canonists and historians for over three centuries; it does, however, insist that the dispute itself — and not the simple fact of Moscow’s de facto control after 1686 — is the historically and canonically significant reality, and that every later claim to the contrary, on either side, must be understood as resting on this single, contested, and procedurally irregular transaction.
The process of absorption that began with Gedeon’s irregular ordination reached its institutional completion by 1722, when, under Peter the Great, the Kyiv Metropolitanate was formally downgraded from a metropolitanate possessing a degree of internal autonomy to an ordinary diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church, administratively and liturgically indistinguishable from any other Russian see.[32] The cultural consequences of this downgrading unfolded gradually but relentlessly over the following century. Ukrainian-language and Ukrainian-redaction liturgical practice was progressively displaced in favour of Russian forms; the distinctive Ukrainian, or Cossack baroque, architectural style was formally prohibited for new ecclesiastical building in 1800; and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy itself — the institution that had once shaped the senior hierarchy of the Russian church — was closed by the imperial authorities in 1817, reopened two years later in much-diminished form as the Kyiv Theological Academy, an institution explicitly designed to serve, rather than to challenge, the official positions of the Russian church.[33] The Encyclopedia of Ukraine summarises the cumulative effect of this century-long process as nothing less than the “eradication of Ukrainian church autonomy and the increasing Russification of church life and practices.”[34] The closure of Mohyla’s Academy in 1817 — almost two centuries to the year after its founding — provides a concrete and measurable index of precisely what the Russian imperial church suppressed in completing the absorption begun in 1685–86: not merely an administrative jurisdiction, but an entire model of theological inquiry, intellectually engaged with both East and West, for which the Russian church of the period had no equivalent of its own, and whose loss this text treats as a cultural deprivation of the first magnitude.
The suppression of Ukrainian ecclesiastical identity that culminated in the absorption of 1722 would reach its most violent and systematic expression in the twentieth century, under Soviet rule — and the structural fragmentation produced by that later, still more comprehensive suppression continues, as the following section will demonstrate, to shape the Ukrainian ecclesiastical landscape to the present day.
IV. Imperial Suppression, the Short-Lived Autocephalous Church, and Soviet “Ethnic Ecclesicide,” 1722–1988
If the eighteenth century completed the institutional absorption of the Kyiv Metropolitanate into the Russian church, the period from the late imperial era through the high Stalinist period demonstrates with stark clarity the costs of that absorption whenever Ukrainian religious identity reasserted itself. This section examines three episodes in which that reassertion occurred, and was in each case violently suppressed: the brief flowering and rapid destruction of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) after 1921; the wartime revival and 1946 liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), the institutional heir of the Union of Brest; and the catacomb existence both traditions were forced into for the remainder of the Soviet period, down to the eve of the 1988 millennium with which this text began.
The collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 created, for the first time in over two centuries, a political opening for Ukrainian ecclesiastical self-assertion. The newly formed Ukrainian National Republic decreed the autocephaly of the Ukrainian church in January 1919, though the chaos of the ensuing Ukrainian-Soviet War prevented this declaration from being put into practice.[35] Renewed efforts culminated in May 1920, when an All-Ukrainian Orthodox Church Council proclaimed autocephaly afresh; the new church’s organisers then faced an intractable canonical problem, since no serving bishop in Ukraine was willing to join the venture or to consecrate a hierarchy for it.[36] The council’s eventual solution, adopted at a further sobor held in Kyiv from 14 to 30 October 1921, was to revive an ancient and canonically irregular practice — recorded, but rarely used, in the early Alexandrian church — by which the assembled clergy and laity themselves, through the collective laying-on of hands, consecrated Archpriest Vasyl Lypkivsky as the church’s first Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine.[37] No other Orthodox hierarchy anywhere recognised the validity of this self-consecration, and the Russian Orthodox Church derided Lypkivsky and his colleagues as samosviaty — the “self-consecrated.”[38] Yet whatever its canonical irregularity, the UAOC proved a genuine popular movement rather than a merely formal exercise: by 1924 it counted some thirty bishops, 1,500 priests, and 1,100 parishes, and it introduced reforms — vernacular Ukrainian in place of Church Slavonic in the liturgy, an unusually prominent role for the laity in church governance, and an emphatically conciliar style of decision-making — that marked it as a deliberate and considered departure from Russian ecclesiastical practice, not merely a nationalist relabelling of it.[39] The Moscow Patriarchate’s particular alarm at the UAOC’s success in acquiring Kyiv’s Saint Sophia Cathedral — the very building that had once embodied Yaroslav the Wise’s eleventh-century assertion of Kyivan ecclesiastical standing, as discussed in the first section of this text — is itself a measure of how directly the UAOC’s claims threatened Moscow’s own claim to inherit the Kyivan patrimony.[40]
The Soviet state’s response to the UAOC illustrates, in miniature, the pattern that would recur on a far larger scale against the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church two decades later: a calculated exploitation of internal church divisions, combined with the cultivation of rival, more pliable religious bodies, as instruments of state policy. Soviet authorities worked throughout the 1920s to weaken the UAOC by encouraging schismatic factions within it and by favouring competing, more accommodating church bodies such as the so-called Living Church.[41] The decisive blow fell in 1926, when the GPU secret police arrested Metropolitan Lypkivsky himself; he was replaced as head of the church but never again permitted to exercise free ministry, and he was ultimately shot by Soviet authorities in 1937 during the Great Terror.[42] The UAOC as an institution was formally liquidated in 1930, its remaining structures dissolved under direct state pressure, bringing to an end, within less than a decade, the first sustained attempt since 1686 to reconstitute an independent Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchy.[43] The UAOC briefly returned to legal existence a second time during the German occupation of Ukraine after 1941, when Archbishop Polikarp (Sikorsky), a canonically consecrated hierarch of the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church, was authorised to revive the UAOC on Ukrainian soil; new bishops were consecrated in Kyiv in February and May 1942, the latter group including a young hierarch, Mstyslav Skrypnyk, whose own role in re-establishing the UAOC after the collapse of the Soviet Union half a century later this text’s fifth section will examine.[44] This wartime UAOC operated under conditions of German occupation that placed severe limits on its independence, and it dissolved once again with the Soviet reoccupation of Ukraine in 1944, its surviving hierarchy fleeing into Western European and North American emigration. The fate of the UAOC in the 1920s and again in the 1940s thus stands as a grim preview of the more comprehensive destruction that would be visited upon the rival tradition descended from the Union of Brest once Soviet power extended, after 1939 and definitively after 1944, into the historically Greek Catholic territories of Galicia.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had survived, and indeed flourished culturally, under the comparatively tolerant conditions of interwar Polish rule in Galicia, emerging as one of the principal institutional carriers of Ukrainian national identity in the region. Soviet plans for its destruction were drawn up as early as January 1941, when Stalin and the NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria approved a proposal to liquidate the church outright, though the German invasion of the Soviet Union later that year forced these plans to be shelved indefinitely.[45] They were revived as soon as the Red Army recaptured Galicia in 1944. In April 1945 the Soviet authorities arrested Metropolitan Yosyf Slipyi, head of the UGCC, together with the remaining Greek Catholic hierarchy still on Soviet territory, and launched a sustained propaganda campaign against the church.[46] The architect of the church’s formal liquidation was a Greek Catholic priest, Havryil Kostelnyk, a long-standing critic of papal authority who, in close cooperation with Soviet state security organs, headed an “Initiative Group for the Reunification of the Greek Catholic Church with the Russian Orthodox Church” and used both persuasion and coercion to compel parish clergy to join it.[47] This campaign culminated in the so-called Synod (or Sobor) of Lviv, convened on 8–10 March 1946 under direct supervision of the Soviet security apparatus and conducted in the complete absence of the church’s own legitimate, but by then imprisoned, hierarchy. The synod formally — and, in the unanimous judgment of Western and post-Soviet Ukrainian scholarship, illegitimately — declared the nullification of the 1596 Union of Brest and the “reunification” of the Greek Catholic faithful with the state-controlled Russian Orthodox Church.[48] The clergy who refused to comply shared the fate of roughly half a million western Ukrainians forcibly deported from Galicia into the Soviet Gulag system, while the UGCC itself was driven entirely underground, surviving for more than four decades as a clandestine “catacomb church” whose adherents faced continual surveillance, interrogation, and periodic violence at the hands of Soviet security forces.[49]
The historian Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, whose archival research drawing on previously sealed Soviet records remains the foundational scholarly account of these events, coined the term “ethnic ecclesicide” to describe the Soviet state’s campaign against the UGCC — a formulation that captures precisely what distinguished this episode from generic Soviet anti-religious policy.[50] Bociurkiw’s own analysis is worth dwelling on here, since it bears directly on the structural argument advanced throughout this text: he observed that even where Stalin’s tactical alliance with a captured Orthodox hierarchy might be read as a pragmatic departure from strict Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy on religion, the episode nonetheless exposed an underlying logic common to all the instrumentalisations of church authority traced in this text — the practical subordination of religious belief to political utility, achieved here by compelling one Christian body, under explicit state direction, to participate in the destruction of another.[51] The 1946 Lviv Sobor was not, in other words, simply religious persecution in the conventional sense; it was the deliberate conscription of ecclesiastical machinery — bishops, synods, the language of canonical procedure itself — into an act of state-directed institutional annihilation, conducted in the name of Christian “reunification.”
For more than four decades following 1946, both the catacomb Greek Catholic Church in western Ukraine and the suppressed memory of the UAOC persisted only outside the boundaries of legally sanctioned religious life, while the Russian Orthodox Church’s own Ukrainian exarchate operated as the sole legally permitted Orthodox institution on Ukrainian soil, its hierarchy subject to close monitoring by Soviet state organs for religious affairs. It was against precisely this background of decades-long, state-engineered institutional erasure that the unofficial 1988 millennium commemorations in Kyiv, with which this text opened, acquired their particular charge: those gathered to mark a thousand years since the baptism of Rus’ were not merely celebrating a distant medieval anniversary but implicitly asserting the continued existence of a Ukrainian ecclesiastical tradition that the Soviet state had spent the better part of the twentieth century attempting to eradicate. The partial loosening of restrictions on religious life under Gorbachev’s perestroika, beginning in the late 1980s, would shortly allow both the Greek Catholic and the autocephalous Orthodox traditions to re-emerge from the catacombs into legal existence — but into a religious landscape that Soviet policy had left fractured into competing and mutually hostile jurisdictions, a fragmentation whose unresolved legacy is the subject of the following section.
A Note on Terminology: Four Institutions Named “Ukrainian Orthodox”
The post-Soviet sections of this text (V and VI) refer to four distinct institutions whose similar names are a frequent source of confusion. Each is introduced fully in the text at the point it first appears; the table below is offered as a standing reference rather than a substitute for that discussion.
| Institution | Acronym | Founded / formed | Relationship to Moscow |
| Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church | UAOC | 1921 (self-consecrated); revived 1942 and 1990 | Independent of Moscow from its founding; never recognised by any other Orthodox church until its 2018 merger into the OCU. |
| Ukrainian Orthodox Church | UOC | 1990, as the renamed Moscow Patriarchate Exarchate in Ukraine | Canonically part of the Moscow Patriarchate from 1990. On 27 May 2022, its council resolved on “full self-sufficiency and independence,” removing references to Moscow from its statutes; Moscow has never recognised this declaration, and other Orthodox churches still treat the UOC as part of the Russian Church. Subject to restrictive Ukrainian legislation from 2024. |
| Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate | UOC-KP | 1992, by Metropolitan Filaret’s breakaway from the UOC | Independent of Moscow from its founding; recognised by no other Orthodox church; dissolved into the OCU in December 2018. |
| Orthodox Church of Ukraine | OCU | December 2018, by union of the UOC-KP, the UAOC, and breakaway UOC bishops | Independent of Moscow; granted autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in January 2019. Recognised by a minority of world Orthodox churches. |
Note: “Ukrainian Orthodox Church” is also used informally throughout this text, including in its introduction, simply to mean Orthodox Christianity as practised in Ukraine across the centuries — a usage distinct from the specific post-1990 institution of the same name. Context should make clear which sense is intended at each point.
V. The Fragmented Three-Church Landscape, 1989–2018
The legal toleration of religious life that accompanied Gorbachev’s perestroika, and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union itself, did not restore the Ukrainian church to the unity it had possessed before 1686, still less before 1946. It produced instead, within barely two years, a fragmentation into three rival and mutually non-recognising Orthodox jurisdictions, compounded by the simultaneous legal re-emergence of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. This section traces that fragmentation from its origins in the dying days of the USSR through to the eve of the 2018 Unification Council, with particular attention to the way each successive geopolitical shock — Ukrainian independence in 1991, the Orange Revolution, and above all the Maidan Revolution and Russian aggression after 2014 — reshaped the balance between the rival churches.
The first crack in the Soviet-era monopoly of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Ukrainian Exarchate appeared even before the Union’s formal dissolution. A 1990 sobor in Kyiv elected the émigré hierarch Mstyslav Skrypnyk — primate of the diaspora Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the United States and a direct heir to the consecrating lineage of the 1921 and 1942 autocephalous movements discussed in the previous section — as Patriarch of a revived Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC), re-establishing for a third time the line of self-assertion that Soviet power had twice already crushed.[52] The Moscow Patriarchate, alarmed by this development, granted its own Ukrainian Exarchate a degree of self-governance in October 1990, renaming it the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) and placing it under the long-serving Metropolitan Filaret Denysenko, who had headed the Kyiv see since 1966 — though this grant deliberately avoided the canonical terms “autonomy” or “autocephaly.”[53] Ukraine’s declaration of independence on 24 August 1991 transformed what had been an internal Soviet ecclesiastical compromise into an urgent and unavoidable political question: could a newly sovereign state tolerate a national church still subordinate to the patriarchate of the country from which it had just separated? Filaret’s own answer was to convene a sobor in November 1991 that voted to request full autocephaly from Moscow.[54]
Moscow’s refusal, and the manner of that refusal, produced the second great schism of the post-Soviet period. The Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, meeting in Moscow in spring 1992, not only rejected the request but moved to remove Filaret from the Kyiv see altogether, replacing him with Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan.[55] Filaret refused to accept his removal. With the political backing of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet president, Leonid Kravchuk — who calculated that an independent state required an independent church — Filaret led a faction of the UOC into union with Mstyslav’s UAOC in June 1992, forming the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP).[56] The union proved immediately fractious: most of the consecrated UAOC hierarchy refused to recognise the merger, and Patriarch Mstyslav himself, before his death in 1993, publicly repudiated the validity of the unification council that had nominally placed him at the new church’s head.[57] Ukraine was left, by the end of 1992, with three distinct and mutually non-recognising Orthodox jurisdictions — the canonical UOC (Moscow Patriarchate), recognised by world Orthodoxy but viewed by many Ukrainians as an instrument of continued Russian influence; the UOC-KP, led by Filaret and enjoying significant popular and governmental sympathy but recognised by no other Orthodox church in the world; and a residual UAOC that had declined to join the 1992 merger — alongside a re-legalised UGCC reasserting its historic strength in Galicia.[58] The Russian Orthodox Church’s response to Filaret personally was severe: he was defrocked by a Moscow council in 1992 and formally excommunicated, or anathematised, in February 1997, sanctions that the UOC-KP’s own synod simply refused to recognise as valid.[59]
For more than two decades thereafter, this three-church Orthodox landscape — termed by the scholar Nicholas Denysenko a “century of separation,” in deliberate allusion to the unresolved legacy of the UAOC’s first appearance in 1921 — proved remarkably stable in its basic configuration, even as the relative strength of the rival jurisdictions shifted with the wider currents of Ukrainian politics.[60] The canonical UOC retained the largest number of parishes throughout this period, but the UOC-KP commanded disproportionate popular sympathy and identified itself consistently with Ukrainian state-building and national consciousness, a self-positioning that echoed, consciously or not, the seventeenth-century Cossack-Orthodox alliance examined in the second section of this text.
The decisive rupture in this long stalemate came not from any internal church development but from external geopolitical shock. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in February–March 2014 and its subsequent backing of separatist insurgency in the Donbas transformed the calculus surrounding Ukrainian church politics in two related ways. First, it discredited the canonical UOC’s continued ecclesiastical subordination to a patriarchate based in the aggressor state, even though the UOC’s own leadership publicly condemned the annexation as an “armed seizure” of Ukrainian territory.[61] Second, it inflicted direct and measurable institutional damage on the UOC-KP itself: according to data the church itself supplied to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, only nine of the fifteen Kyiv Patriarchate churches operating in Crimea at the start of 2014 remained functioning by the end of that year, the rest having been seized, deregistered, or intimidated out of existence by the new Russian administration of the peninsula; further closures over the following years reduced the number still further.[62] The death of the UOC’s relatively conciliatory Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan in July 2014, and his replacement by the considerably more pro-Moscow Metropolitan Onufriy — an outspoken supporter of the “Russian World” ideology examined in the following section — further sharpened the perception, both within Ukraine and internationally, that the canonical UOC’s continued communion with Moscow had become politically untenable in a country at war with the patriarchate’s home state.[63]
It was against this background that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, in April 2018, wrote directly to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople requesting the grant of autocephaly to a unified Ukrainian church — an appeal to the same Constantinopolitan authority whose seventeenth-century Synodal Letter, examined in the third section of this text, had first authorised Moscow’s jurisdiction over Kyiv, and whose intervention would now be invoked to reverse that very arrangement.[64] The stage was thereby set for the climactic events of 2018–19 — the Unification Council, the granting of the Tomos of Autocephaly, and the religious dimension of Russia’s full-scale invasion three years later — to which this text now turns.
VI. The 2019 Tomos, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and the Religious Dimension of the 2022 Invasion
The granting of autocephaly to a unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018–19 represents, in canonical terms, the most direct challenge to the 1686 transfer of the Kyiv Metropolitanate examined in the third section of this text; Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 represents, with equal directness, an attempt to reassert by force the unity of “Holy Rus’” that the Tomos had formally repudiated. This final substantive section traces the sequence connecting these two events: the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s decision to revisit the 1686 Synodal Letter, the Unification Council and the Tomos itself, the resulting schism between Constantinople and Moscow, and the explicit theological justification — the doctrine of the “Russian World,” or Russkiy Mir — that the Moscow Patriarchate’s leadership has supplied for the invasion.
The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s intervention began with a direct challenge to the legal foundation Moscow had relied upon for over three centuries. On 11 October 2018, the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced its decision to “proceed to the granting of autocephaly to the Church of Ukraine,” and — in an act of still greater canonical consequence — formally reaffirmed that the 1686 Synodal Letter authorising the Patriarch of Moscow to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv had never effected a permanent transfer of jurisdiction, but only a limited and revocable delegation of authority that Constantinople now exercised its prerogative to revoke.[65] This was, in other words, precisely the reading of the 1686 transaction that Yuriy Kovalenko’s Ottoman-archival research, discussed in the third section of this text, would substantiate the following year: Constantinople’s 2018 decision and Kovalenko’s 2019 scholarship arrived independently at the same conclusion regarding the limited and conditional nature of Moscow’s seventeenth-century jurisdiction. The Russian Orthodox Church’s response was immediate and severe: on 15 October 2018, the Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate voted to break full communion with Constantinople altogether, an act that initiated what is now generally termed the 2018 Moscow–Constantinople schism and that remains, at the time of writing, unresolved.[66]
The institutional unification of Ukraine’s competing Orthodox jurisdictions followed swiftly. On 15 December 2018, a Unification Council convened under the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s supervision at Kyiv’s Saint Sophia Cathedral — the very building whose construction under Yaroslav the Wise this text’s first section identified as the original architectural assertion of Kyivan ecclesiastical standing — brought together the UOC-KP, the residual UAOC, and a small number of bishops who broke away from the canonical UOC, to form a single new church, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).[67] The council elected as the new church’s primate not Filaret himself, whose decades as the personal embodiment of Ukrainian ecclesiastical independence might have made him the obvious choice, but his considerably younger protégé, Metropolitan Epifaniy (Epiphanius) Dumenko, then thirty-nine years old — a decision that may be read as a deliberate attempt to anchor the new church’s legitimacy in canonical procedure and institutional renewal rather than in the personal, and canonically still-contested, authority of a figure the wider Orthodox world had spent over two decades treating as excommunicate.[68] On 5 January 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew signed the Tomos of Autocephaly, formally constituting the OCU as the fifteenth autocephalous church of world Orthodoxy and recognising it, in the Tomos’s own language, as a “spiritual daughter” of the Mother Church of Constantinople; the document was ceremonially presented to Metropolitan Epifaniy the following day at the Patriarchal Cathedral of Saint George in Istanbul.[69]
The Tomos did not, however, produce the unified Ukrainian Orthodoxy its architects had hoped for, nor has it been universally recognised within the wider Orthodox world. The canonical UOC, still under Metropolitan Onufriy, rejected the Unification Council’s legitimacy outright and refused to participate in or recognise the OCU, retaining at the time of the Tomos’s signing a considerably larger number of registered parishes than the newly constituted church.[70] Internationally, the OCU’s autocephaly has been recognised by only a minority of the world’s autocephalous Orthodox churches — including the Ecumenical Patriarchate itself, the Patriarchate of Alexandria, and the Churches of Greece and Cyprus — while the Moscow Patriarchate and the churches that follow its lead continue to regard the OCU as a schismatic body and Metropolitan Onufriy’s UOC as the sole canonical Orthodox authority in Ukraine.[71] The result, even after 2019, has been not the resolution of Ukraine’s “century of separation” but its reconfiguration around a new, and equally contested, axis — one whose resolution the full-scale invasion of 2022 would, paradoxically, accelerate rather than settle.
That invasion, launched on 24 February 2022, was accompanied from its earliest days by an explicit and sustained religious justification supplied by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a long-standing ally of President Vladimir Putin. Addressing the Russian church only days after the invasion began, Kirill characterised the conflict not in political or territorial terms but as possessing “not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” framing it as part of a cosmic struggle between a spiritually faithful Russia and a morally corrupted West.[72] This rhetoric drew on, and gave renewed theological weight to, the doctrine of Russkiy Mir — the “Russian World” — which holds that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians together constitute a single civilisational and spiritual nation rooted in the baptism of 988 with which this text began, a nation whose artificial political division (above all, the existence of an independent Ukrainian state oriented toward the West) Kirill and Putin have together presented as both a historical aberration and a target for correction, by force if necessary.[73] The doctrine thus completes, in its own way, the structural pattern this text has traced from its opening pages: the same baptismal event in the River Dnipro that Volodymyr instrumentalised for a Byzantine marriage alliance in 988, and that the unofficial 1988 millennium commemorations in Kyiv mobilised against Soviet erasure, has been redeployed by the Moscow Patriarchate as the founding myth of a civilisational claim used to justify the invasion of a sovereign state.
The Russkiy Mir doctrine has not gone unchallenged within world Orthodoxy itself. In March 2022, more than one hundred Orthodox theologians and scholars from across the globe signed “A Declaration on the Russian World (Russkii Mir) Teaching,” explicitly condemning the doctrine as a form of religious ethno-nationalism incompatible with Orthodox Christian teaching and repudiating the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine as flowing from this “vile and indefensible teaching” with the Russian church’s connivance.[74] Even within Ukraine, the canonical UOC under Metropolitan Onufriy publicly condemned the invasion within days of its launch and explicitly rejected Patriarch Kirill’s position, declaring the war a violation of the commandment against killing; on 27 May 2022, a council of the UOC went further still, resolving on what it called “full self-sufficiency and independence” and removing references to Moscow from its governing statutes.[75] The Russian Orthodox Church has never recognised this declaration, and the great majority of other Orthodox churches continue, as a matter of canonical record, to treat the UOC as part of the Moscow Patriarchate — leaving the church’s actual status, more than four years on, genuinely unsettled rather than merely resolved. This ambiguity did not, in any event, prevent the Ukrainian state from subsequently moving against the UOC’s residual institutional links to Moscow.[76] In August 2024, the Ukrainian parliament passed legislation banning the operation in Ukraine of any religious organisation affiliated with a body based in a state engaged in armed aggression against Ukraine, a law explicitly targeting the UOC’s residual ties to the Russian Orthodox Church and giving affected organisations nine months to sever such ties or face dissolution by court order.[77] The law, signed by President Zelensky on Ukraine’s Independence Day, was framed by its proponents as an assertion of “spiritual independence,” but has drawn criticism — including from Pope Francis and international human rights organisations — as a measure whose breadth risks infringing on the religious freedom of millions of Ukrainians who remain, whatever the canonical status of their church’s hierarchy, sincere Orthodox believers rather than agents of a foreign power.[78] The dispute, as this text’s concluding section will argue, remains in this sense unresolved: it replicates, in the conditions of twenty-first-century war, the same fundamental tension between religious conviction and state instrumentalisation that has structured the entire millennium of history this text has traced.
Conclusion
This text set out from a single image: two rival, mutually exclusive commemorations of the same baptismal event, staged in Moscow and Kyiv in the same year, 1988. Having traced the millennium that separates that event from its commemoration, it is now possible to state with some precision why that image proved so apt a starting point, and what the history examined here suggests about the present and future of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine.
Three arguments have structured this account. The first is that the instrumentalisation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction by imperial and state power is not a modern aberration but the oldest and most persistent feature of this history, present already in Volodymyr’s 988 marriage bargain with Basil II, fully developed in the Pereiaslav-to-1686 sequence by which Moscow converted a political and military alliance into a claimed canonical jurisdiction, devastatingly realised in the Soviet state’s direction of the 1946 Lviv Sobor, and reasserted with brutal clarity in Patriarch Kirill’s theological justification for the 2022 invasion. The second is that Ukrainian Orthodoxy has, at recurring intervals, generated a creative synthesis of Eastern theological substance and Western intellectual method — visible in Ilarion’s eleventh-century assertion of Kyivan spiritual standing, and realised most fully in Petro Mohyla’s seventeenth-century Academy, whose graduates went on to reshape the Russian church even as the political independence of their own metropolitanate was being extinguished. The third is that ecclesiastical and national identity in Ukraine have been so persistently and so tightly linked — from the Cossack defence of the restored hierarchy in 1620, through the UAOC’s brief flowering after 1921 and the underground endurance of the Greek Catholic catacomb church after 1946, to the OCU’s emergence from the crucible of war after 2014 — that no purely theological or canonical account of this history can be considered complete in isolation from the political conditions that have, at every critical juncture, shaped it.
These three dynamics converge most visibly in the unresolved status of the 1686 transaction examined in this text’s third section. Every later claim to legitimacy or illegitimacy in Ukrainian Orthodox history — Moscow’s claim to canonical authority over the Kyiv Metropolitanate, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s 2018 reassertion of jurisdiction, the OCU’s claim to constitute the authentic continuation of the Kyivan tradition — rests, in the final analysis, on a single contested seventeenth-century document procured under circumstances that recent archival scholarship suggests were themselves irregular. That a dispute over a Synodal Letter signed in 1686 should remain, in 2026, directly material to the religious loyalties of millions of people in a country at war is itself the most striking demonstration available of this text’s central claim: that the instrumentalisation of Kyivan ecclesiastical identity by external powers is not a historical curiosity but a live and operative force in contemporary geopolitics.
It would be a mistake, however, to read this history as a simple narrative of Ukrainian victimhood and Russian aggression, however much the events of 2014 and 2022 might invite that reading. The Union of Brest was, on its own seventeenth-century terms, an attempt by the Ruthenian hierarchy itself to address genuine internal weaknesses; the UAOC’s canonically irregular self-consecration in 1921 generated controversies that Orthodox communities continue to navigate; and the 2024 Ukrainian law restricting the canonical UOC, whatever its strategic justification in wartime, raises the same fundamental question — whether the state’s legitimate security interests can be reconciled with its citizens’ religious freedom — that has recurred, in different forms, throughout the thousand years surveyed in this text. The history of Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine does not offer a single, settled answer to that question. What it offers, instead, is the clearest possible illustration of how long, and how consequentially, a society’s religious institutions can remain entangled with the contest for its political future — from a baptism in the River Dnipro in 988 to a war fought, in no small part, over the memory of that baptism, in the third decade of the twenty-first century.
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Kovalenko, Yuriy. “Kyiv Metropolia and Moscow Diplomacy: An Ottoman Viewpoint.” Scrinium 15, no. 1 (2019): 256–76. https://doi.org/10.1163/18177565-00150A06.
Morariu, Iuliu-Marius. “The New Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and Its Image in the Ecumenical Space.” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 76, no. 3 (2020): e1–e6. https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v76i3.6012. Open access.
“Onufriy on the Third Anniversary of the 2022 Council: We Possess All the Marks of Canonical Independence from Moscow.” Orthodox Times, 27 May 2025.
“Patriarch Bartholomew Gives Tomos of Autocephaly for So-Called Orthodox Church of Ukraine.” TASS, 6 January 2019.
Picková, Dana. “Zwischen lateinischem Westen und christlichem Osten: noch einmal zur Christianisierung der Rus.” Acta Universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et Historica 2019, no. 1 (2020): 201–19. https://doi.org/10.14712/24647055.2019.12. Open access via DOAJ.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine. New York: Basic Books, 2015; revised edition, 2021.
Poppe, Andrzej. “The Christianization and Ecclesiastical Structures of Kievan Rus’ to 1300.” In Christian Russia in the Making, study V, 311–67. Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007.
The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let). Compiled c. 1113. Translated and edited by Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953.
Ševčenko, Ihor. “The Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla.” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 1/2 (1984): 9–44. Reprinted in Ševčenko, Ukraine Between East and West, 164–86.
Ševčenko, Ihor. Ukraine Between East and West: Texts on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century. Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996.
Shkandrij, Myroslav. Review of The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939–1950, by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw. Canadian Book Review Annual Online.
Sydorenko, Alexander. The Kievan Academy in the Seventeenth Century. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1977.
Sysyn, Frank E. “Church Union: The Quandaries over Acceptance of the Union of Brest (1595–96).” Canadian Slavonic Papers 65, nos. 3–4 (2023): 468–77.
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“Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) Declares Its ‘Full Independence’.” National Catholic Register, 29 May 2022.
Vovk, Dmytro. “Between National Security and Spiritual Liberation: Ukrainian State Policies towards the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 67, nos. 1–2 (2025): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2025.2494937.
Vovk, Dmytro. “Not My Church: Ukraine’s New Draft Law Dealing with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of (Not) the Moscow Patriarchate.” Talk About: Law and Religion (blog). International Center for Law and Religion Studies. Accessed June 2026.
[1]The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest’ vremennykh let), compiled c. 1113, trans. and ed. Samuel Hazzard Cross and Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953), 111–17.
[2]Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015; rev. ed. 2021), epilogue.
[3]Plokhy, Gates of Europe, introduction and epilogue.
[4]Andrzej Poppe, “The Christianization and Ecclesiastical Structures of Kievan Rus’ to 1300,” in Christian Russia in the Making (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007), study V, 311–67; Dana Picková, “Zwischen lateinischem Westen und christlichem Osten: noch einmal zur Christianisierung der Rus,” Acta Universitatis Carolinae: Philosophica et Historica 2019, no. 1 (2020): 201–19, https://doi.org/10.14712/24647055.2019.12.
[5]Russian Primary Chronicle, trans. Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, 111–17; Poppe, “Christianization and Ecclesiastical Structures,” 316–22.
[6]Poppe, “Christianization and Ecclesiastical Structures,” 320–25; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, ed. Marko Robert Stech, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, s.v. “Volodymyr the Great,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[7]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Yaroslav the Wise,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com; Poppe, “Christianization and Ecclesiastical Structures,” 340–45.
[8]Ilarion (Metropolitan of Kyiv), “Sermon on Law and Grace” (Slovo o zakone i blagodati), c. 1050, in Simon Franklin, trans. and ed., Sermons and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 1991).
[9]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Yaroslav the Wise”; Poppe, “Christianization and Ecclesiastical Structures,” 345–50.
[10]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Yaroslav the Wise.”
[11]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Kyivan Cave Monastery,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[12]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Kyivan Rus’,” accessed June 2026, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[13]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “History of the Ukrainian Church,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[14]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Union of Lublin,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[15]Oscar Halecki, From Florence to Brest, 1439–1596 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1968), 281–312; Ihor Ševčenko, Ukraine Between East and West: Texts on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century (Edmonton and Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996), 12–20.
[16]David A. Frick, “Uses of Authority and the Authority of Use: Philological Praise and Blame in Early Modern Rus’,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 18, no. 1/2 (1994): 76–93; Ševčenko, Ukraine Between East and West, 12–20.
[17]Halecki, From Florence to Brest, 313–38.
[18]Halecki, From Florence to Brest, 339–52; David A. Frick, “Meletij Smotryc’kyj and the Ruthenian Question in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 3/4 (1984): 351–75.
[19]Frank E. Sysyn, “Church Union: The Quandaries over Acceptance of the Union of Brest (1595–96),” Canadian Slavonic Papers 65, nos. 3–4 (2023): 468–77.
[20]Halecki, From Florence to Brest, 355–70.
[21]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Kyiv Metropoly,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[22]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Kyiv Metropoly.”
[23]Ihor Ševčenko, “The Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8, no. 1/2 (1984): 9–44, reprinted in Ševčenko, Ukraine Between East and West, 164–86; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Mohyla, Petro,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[24]Alexander Sydorenko, The Kievan Academy in the Seventeenth Century (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1977), 21–45; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Kyivan Mohyla Academy,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[25]Lina Charipova, “Orthodox Reform in Seventeenth-Century Kiev: The Evidence of a Library,” Journal of Early Modern History 17, no. 3 (2013): 273–308, https://doi.org/10.1163/15700658-12342357; Sydorenko, Kievan Academy, 46–62.
[26]Ševčenko, “Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla,” 30–35; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Kyivan Mohyla Academy”; s.v. “Academy,”.
[27]Ševčenko, “Many Worlds of Peter Mohyla,” 36–40.
[28]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Pereiaslav Agreement,” ,www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[29]Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015; rev. ed. 2021), ch. 7.
[30]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “History of the Ukrainian Church.”
[31]Yuriy Kovalenko, “Kyiv Metropolia and Moscow Diplomacy: An Ottoman Viewpoint,” Scrinium 15, no. 1 (2019): 256–76, https://doi.org/10.1163/18177565-00150A06. Kovalenko’s findings independently corroborate Vera Chentsova’s analysis of newly recovered Greek-language charters: V.G. Chentsova, “Sinodal’noe reshenie 1686 g. o Kievskoi mitropolii” [“The 1686 Synodal Decision on the Kyiv Metropolia”], Drevniaia Rus’: Voprosy medievistiki [Ancient Rus’: Questions of Medieval Studies] 2, no. 68 (2017): 109–20. For the Moscow Patriarchate’s contrary position, that the 1686 transfer was full and final, see Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), remarks reported in “Constantinople’s Annulment of 1686 Decision Counter to Historic Truth — Moscow Patriarchate,” TASS, 15 October 2018.
[32]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “History of the Ukrainian Church.”
[33]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Academy,” http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com; s.v. “Russification,”.
[34]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “History of the Ukrainian Church.”
[35]Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “The Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, 1919–22,” in Religion and Nationalism in Soviet and East European Politics, ed. Dennis J. Dunn (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner / Westview, 1987), 228–30; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[36]Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 230–32.
[37]Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 233–36; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.”
[38]Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 236–38.
[39]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” accessed June 2026, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com; Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 239–42.
[40]Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 240–41.
[41]Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 242–45; Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.”
[42]“Vasyl Lypkivsky,” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com.
[43]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church”; Bociurkiw, “Rise of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church,” 245–46.
[44]Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, s.v. “Ukrainian Orthodox Church”; s.v. “Sikorsky, Polikarp,”www.encyclopediaofukraine.com; Nicholas E. Denysenko, The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), 78–82, on the 1942 UAOC as a de facto autocephalous body distinct in its canonical and ecclesiological character from the self-consecrated 1921 church.
[45]“Synod of Lviv (1946),”citing Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939–1950) (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1996).
[46]“The Life of the Ukrainian Catholic Church” (samizdat document, January 1980), discussed in Religion, State and Society, Cambridge University Press.
[47]“The Life of the Ukrainian Catholic Church,” discussed in Religion, State and Society, Cambridge University Press.
[48]“Synod of Lviv (1946), ”Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, “The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in the Contemporary USSR,” Nationalities Papers, 1988.
[49]Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, reviewed in Canadian Book Review Annual Online.
[50]Myroslav Shkandrij, review of The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 1939–1950, by Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, Canadian Book Review Annual Online, using Bociurkiw’s own coinage “ethnic ecclesicide.”
[51]Bociurkiw, The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State, 250–65; Shkandrij, review of The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State.
[52]Nicholas E. Denysenko, The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), 158–62; José Casanova, “The Three Kyivan Churches of Ukraine and the Three Romes,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 9, no. 1 (2022): 209–34, https://doi.org/10.21226/ewjus714.
[53]Denysenko, Century of Separation, 162–65.
[54]Denysenko, Century of Separation, 165–68.
[55]Denysenko, Century of Separation, 168–72; Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 215–18.
[56]Denysenko, Century of Separation, 172–75.
[57]Denysenko, Century of Separation, 175–78.
[58]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 218–20.
[59]Denysenko, Century of Separation, 178–80.
[60]Nicholas E. Denysenko, The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), title and introduction; Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 220–22.
[61]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 222–24, on the discrediting effect of the 2014 annexation on the canonical UOC’s continued communion with Moscow.
[62]U.S. Department of State, 2016 Report on International Religious Freedom: Ukraine (Crimea) (Washington, DC: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2017), citing data from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the UOC-KP’s own reporting; cf. “Crimea,” Freedom in the World 2019 (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2019), reporting fifty-two pre-annexation UOC-KP parishes reduced to eight by October 2018.
[63]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 224–26, on Metropolitan Volodymyr’s death in 2014 and the consequences of his succession by Metropolitan Onufriy.
[64]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 226–28.
[65]Nicholas E. Denysenko, “Explaining Ukrainian Autocephaly: Politics, History, Ecclesiology, and the Future,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 62, nos. 2–3 (2020): 426–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2020.1773119.
[66]Denysenko, “Explaining Ukrainian Autocephaly,” 430–33; Thomas Bremer, “Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda – Missed Opportunities, Lost Chances, Bad Options for the Moscow Patriarchate,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 62, nos. 2–3 (2020): 443–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2020.1773120.
[67]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 228–30.
[68]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 209–12, on the “three Romes” framework structuring the rival transnational allegiances of the OCU, UGCC, and UOC.
[69]Radu Bordeianu, “The Autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine: Its Impact Outside of Ukraine,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 62, nos. 2–3 (2020): 452–62, https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2020.1773121.
[70]Casanova, “Three Kyivan Churches,” 230–32.
[71]Vladimír Baar et al., “Theopolitics of the Orthodox World – Autocephaly of the Orthodox Churches as a Political, Not Theological Problem,” Religions 13, no. 2 (2022): 116, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13020116; Iuliu-Marius Morariu, “The New Ukrainian Autocephalous Church and Its Image in the Ecumenical Space,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 76, no. 3 (2020): e1–e6, https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v76i3.6012.
[72]Cyril Hovorun, “Interpreting the ‘Russian World,’” in Churches in the Ukrainian Crisis, ed. Andrii Krawchuk and Thomas Bremer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 163–71, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-34095-1_8.
[73]Viorel Coman, “Critical Analysis of the Moscow Patriarchate Vision on the Russian–Ukrainian Military Conflict: Russkiy Mir and Just War,” Scottish Journal of Theology 76, no. 4 (2023): 332–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0036930623000613, citing the Moscow Patriarchate’s own “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church” (2000) and surveying the resulting scholarly literature, including the Canadian Slavonic Papers 62/2–3 (2020) special issue and St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 66/1 (2019).
[74]Brandon Gallaher and Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “A Declaration on the ‘Russian World’ (Russkii Mir) Teaching,” Mission Studies 39, no. 2 (2022): 269–76, https://doi.org/10.1163/15733831-12341840, signed by over 1,500 Orthodox theologians and scholars; cf. Hovorun, “Interpreting the ‘Russian World,’” 166–69, for the doctrine’s pre-2022 theological genealogy.
[75]“Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) Declares Its ‘Full Independence’,” National Catholic Register, 29 May 2022.
[76]Dmytro Vovk, “Between National Security and Spiritual Liberation: Ukrainian State Policies towards the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 67, nos. 1–2 (2025): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/00085006.2025.2494937.
[77]Vovk, “Between National Security and Spiritual Liberation,” 8–14.
[78]Vovk, “Between National Security and Spiritual Liberation,” 14–20. See also Dmytro Vovk, “Not My Church: Ukraine’s New Draft Law Dealing with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of (Not) the Moscow Patriarchate,” Talk About: Law and Religion (blog), International Center for Law and Religion Studies, for the legislative background.