On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a long-anticipated bill that may ban the activities of churches deemed to be affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church or supporting the Russian invasion.
The laws, expected to be signed into law soon by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, explicitly bans religious institutions subordinate to leaders based in Russia and is seen even by some supporters of Ukraine as an overstep within the name of national security, a violation of spiritual freedom and a possible risk to continued foreign military aid.
The clear goal of the law is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with its historical ties to Moscow. The church declared itself independent of the Moscow Patriarchate three months after the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022 but many still suspect a minimum of among the church leadership has loyalties to Russia.
“The government in Kyiv desires to see the conduits of Russian influence in Ukrainian society totally minimized,” said Andreja Bogdanovski, an creator, scholar and analyst of Orthodox Christianity.
Ahead of the vote, Zelenskyy said the law would “guarantee that there will probably be no manipulation of the Ukrainian Church from Moscow.”
“This draft law must work and must add to Ukraine the unity of the cathedral, our real spiritual unity,” he added.
Historically, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been the most important faith group in Ukraine, however the country’s Orthodox Christians found themselves split in 2019, when a more moderen religious body, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, was recognized as canonical and fully independent of Moscow under the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
The OCU, which now represents nearly all of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, formed partly from parishes resisting Russian control during Ukraine’s independence movements originally and end of the twentieth century. In the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support of separatist militias within the Donbas region, the OCU was bolstered by Ukrainian clergymen who felt that Ukrainian Orthodox Christians needed a spiritual body divorced from Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, who has long been a detailed ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and has justified Russia’s aggression in spiritual terms.
The law, once signed, would equip the Ukrainian government to establish a commission to research religious institutions across the country. The commission would then have nine months to supply an inventory of those deemed subordinate to Russian institutions.
Ukraine’s largest organization of spiritual bodies, the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, which represents Christian, Jewish and Muslim groups, endorsed the draft law in an Aug. 17 statement, praising the trouble “to make it unattainable for such organizations to operate in our country.”
Those that sever their ties to Russia during that period will probably be allowed to proceed to operate. What constitutes a tie and an appropriate level of separation haven’t yet been specified. These details are what partly delayed the laws’s approval for greater than a 12 months and a half after Zelenskyy first endorsed its draft.
Iryna Herashchenko, the primary deputy chairwoman of the Ukrainian Parliament, hailed the bill’s passing as a “historic vote.”
Parliament “has passed a bill banning the aggressor country’s branch in Ukraine. 265 MPs voted FOR! This is a matter of national security, not religion,” she announced on X.
Despite the broad support inside Ukraine, the bill has been strongly criticized by some Orthodox leaders, including those from populaces that support Ukraine against Russian aggression.
Bulgaria’s newly elected Patriarch Daniil sent a letter of support to Metropolitan Onufriy, the primate of the UOC. The Bulgarian church doesn’t recognize the OCU as canonical, however the church and government have expressed support for Ukraine within the war.
“You have resisted and proceed, with God’s help, to withstand all attempts to create disunity, preserving the unity, integrity, and canonicity of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” Patriarch Daniill wrote.
Onufriy also received letters of support from the heads of the Antiochian and Georgian Orthodox churches. Both jurisdictions have issued statements shy of condemning Patriarch Kirill’s role in Russian aggression.
But the bill has also been blasted on religious freedom grounds by many observers and is anticipated to be challenged as Ukraine moves closer to joining the European Union.
“It’s very hard diplomatically to reconcile this law with Ukraine’s European ambitions,” said Samuel Noble, a scholar of Orthodox Christianity at Aga Khan University in London. “This is the form of thing that may wind up being delivered to Strasbourg, that’s, the European Court of Human Rights.
“It’s not normally the form of thing that one does in a rustic aspiring to hitch the European Union. On the opposite hand, Ukraine just isn’t in a standard situation,” he added.
Smilen Markov, a Bulgarian scholar of Orthodox Christianity, put it more bluntly: “The Ukrainian state is violating religious freedom. It declares a spiritual community pro-Russian, which is legally problematic, divisive and ruinous.”
Regina Elsner, the chair of Eastern churches and ecumenism on the University of Muenster’s Ecumenical Institute, posted on Twitter that the laws’s approval is “deeply disturbing.”
“This law opens a door to serious violations of spiritual freedom and recent fragmentation inside Ukraine,” she said. “The amendments of the last months didn’t improve anything. Hate and violence against UOC believers get public approval. Sad.”
Since the outbreak of full-scale war, Ukraine has jailed greater than 100 UOC priests over charges of espionage and anti-Ukrainian speech, including posting opinions on social media and speaking from the pulpit.
The Russian Orthodox Church specifically has sought to make use of such religious freedom concerns to garner sympathy for the UOC and forged doubt on Western aid to Ukraine, which has been crucial for the Ukrainian defense.
“The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is being subjected to reprisals for its refusal to hitch the organization of schismatics and self-ordained peoples, created as a political project geared toward destroying the common spiritual heritage of Russian and Ukrainian peoples,” said Vladimir Lagoida, a spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church, on Telegram. “There is little doubt that the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church will eventually receive a good assessment, just because the godless regimes of the past received it, destroying the human right to faith and to belong to their Church.”
The UOC has ceased to commemorate Patriarch Kirill in prayers and has said it just isn’t certain by the selections of the Holy Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate.
“In Orthodox Church logic, that is effectively a declaration of independence,” Noble said. “Even from the Russians’ perspective, officially on paper, the UOC is autonomous in all things, aside from Onufriy’s seat on the Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate, which he has kind of disowned.”
Still, many Ukrainians remain deeply suspicious of the UOC. In 2021, 18% of spiritual Ukrainians identified as members of the UOC, but months after Russia’s full-scale invasion, that dropped to simply 4%, in accordance with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. The same poll found OCU membership increased from 34% to 54%. In addition, lots of of Orthodox congregations have switched allegiance from the UOC to the OCU, in accordance with church records, but few monks, traditionally seen as sources of authority within the church, have followed.
“Of course, it’s true that the hierarchy of the UOC is partly pro-Russian,” Markov noted. “The allegations about ties with Moscow are sometimes factually correct.
“However, these perpetrations are personal they usually needs to be proved case by case,” he added. “They can’t be blamed on a spiritual community of thousands and thousands of Ukrainians.”
