The Long War #16
(This take on the religious situation in Ukraine ended up being far, far longer than I initially planned. I’m not fully satisfied with it but thought it’d be better to get it out there while there is some attention on the topic. I’ll be happy to discuss it further in the comments)
KYIV—I was on Wednesday among the many, many journalists roaming the paved paths of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, one of the oldest and most sacred religious sites in Eastern Orthodoxy, as believers and monks gathered for what they feared could be their last mass there. The Lavra houses a monastery as well as the seat of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (an appellation that the Church itself now rejects, but which I’ll use for the sake of clarity—the other main religious organization in Ukraine is the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which was founded in 2019).
A few weeks ago, the state agency in charge of managing the site claimed the Church had violated the terms of the lease that allowed them to freely use the lower part of the Lavra, and ordered the clerics to vacate the site by March 29. The head of the monastery, Metropolitan Pavel, declared that day the monks would stay until the matter was settled in court. But I’ve seen those same clerics loading trucks and vans with tables, chairs and books for at least a week now, hinting that the institution has already started preparing for a possible eviction (the trucks are systematically searched by police officers when exiting the monastery, reportedly because of fears the Church could illegally remove relics from the Lavra).
Tensions between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Ukrainian state have been very common in the past few years, and, on the surface, what happened yesterday didn’t feel out of the ordinary. There were interviews during which some believers, surrounded by a dozen cameras, loudly called out Zelensky, there were prayers, accusations of supporting Moscow, claims that believers of the Moscow Patriarchate were being oppressed… nothing that I haven’t heard or seen time and time again in my previous years covering Ukraine.
But of course, things changed with Russia’s open invasion of Ukraine. In the first days of the war, Metropolitan Onufriy, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, condemned the invasion and called on believers to support the Ukrainian military. This might seem like a painfully obvious thing to do. But it was a huge shift for a Church that, in the past 8 years, oscillated between careful neutrality and (in some parishes and monasteries) outright support for the Kremlin.
Was that shift sincere? Well, maybe for a very select few. I think it’s safe to say that, for the majority of the leadership, it was much more of a pragmatic move, born out of the (correct) assessment that, with Russian missiles falling on Ukrainian cities, there was really no other choice.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate supported the Ukrainian military, its parishes collecting money and sending cars, food and equipment to frontline units. In May 2022, the Church leadership also declared it had cut all links with the Russian church during a special council, though there’s still some heavy, legislative-spiritual debate on whether that is actually the case.
Whether or not this shift is sincere, it had effects—there’s no way such an unprecedented change in tone doesn’t. And because people in Ukraine have tended to dismiss out of hand the Church’s new rhetoric, I feel most have failed to appreciate the tension this has created in the Church itself. To be clear, this isn’t something where I have inside information. But it can be felt quite clearly when talking to believers of the Moscow Patriarchate, and especially when you ask them what they think about Metropolitan Onufriy’s injunction to support the Ukrainian military.
Some will nod and say yes, absolutely, of course we need to support our soldiers defending the Motherland. But many will shift uncomfortably and hesitate. “I’m not political” one woman simply evaded when I asked her about it last week. Another woman I talked to at the Lavra implied Onufry, the head of the Church in Ukraine, had had no choice but to make that statement, but said it would be “impossible” to cut links to the Russian Church “because these are spiritual links”. Others would outright deny Onufry called to support the Ukrainian military. As for the situation inside the Church, a monk at the Lavra admitted to me that the order to stop mentioning Patriarch Kirill in their sermons (the head of the Russian Church is an unapologetic supporter of the invasion) had been, in many cases, fairly difficult to enforce (though he assured most clerics had complied by now).
This is interesting because it seemed to provide the Ukrainian government with an opportunity. Rather than framing the entire Church as an anti-Ukrainian organization, Kyiv could have tried to encourage the moderate/pragmatic wing against its more radical, pro-Russian elements. This could have had the effect of helping the “pragmatics” secure more influence inside the Church or, much more cynically, drive a wedge between those two wings and weaken the Church as a whole. My point isn’t that this is what I think Kyiv should have done, but that it was definitely a possible strategy.
That did not happen. In the first months of the invasion, the Ukrainian state was careful in its handling of the religious issue, with head of the president’s office Andriy Yermak even calling out in March 2022 “ideas of a religious conflict due to the presence of the "Russian Church" in Ukraine” as a Russian “information and psychological operation aiming to deepen internal conflicts”. But it changed course a few months later, launching a string of searches in churches and monasteries all over Ukraine, while the country’s security council called on the parliament to vote a bill to ban the Moscow Patriarchate in the country.
This approach seems, on the surface, riskier, carrying the risk of triggering an actual religious conflict that Ukraine absolutely does not need right now. Actually banning the Church would be a whole other can of worms. There’s the obvious issue that it is very hard to see how Kyiv could move forward with this plan in a way that would respect the Constitution. It’s even harder to fathom how such a ban would go down in practice as it applies to a Church with more than 200 monasteries, thousands of parishes and hundreds of thousands of believers.
But positions have hardened to the point where there is seemingly little way to reach a compromise. The country’s civil society has been largely dismissive of the Church’s official stance on the war, not just because it believes that the Church isn’t being sincere (though it does believe that), but more importantly because it is not the Church’s actions that are considered pro-Russian, but the Church itself. The Moscow Patriarchate isn’t a loudspeaker for the “Russian world”, it *is* the Russian world. There’s quite literally nothing the Church can do, save for self-destruction, that will convince them otherwise. And the position now seems prevalent in the government as well.
Cases of collaboration or pro-Russian statements among clerics of the Moscow Patriarchate have only reinforced this view. To quote a recent and excellent report by the British think tank RISU, “the one body of ideologically committed agents supporting the invasion was the Russian Orthodox Church. Beyond its efforts to support Russian information operations, its priests were widely recruited and run by the Russian special services and their monasteries and churches used as safe houses for equipment and personnel.” The risk for Ukraine is that this focus on the tactical-military aspect overshadows the broader political and societal issues at play here.
Meanwhile, the clerics as well as a sizeable part of Moscow Patriarchate believers are now firmly entrenched in a martyrdom narrative in which they’re being oppressed by state authorities working in tandem with the competing, schismatic Orthodox Church. It’s a narrative that has been cultivated since the new Church emerged in 2019, which means it had time to become a broad consensus fueled by powerful historical analogies—I cannot count the number of times believers or clerics of the Church told me their current situation was similar to the repression of the Church during the Soviet Union. At the Lavra, as a group of men was taking out liturgical robes from a church to load them into a truck, I asked a nearby believer if she thought there could be any reconciliation with believers of the other Orthodox Church. “No,” she said. “Those people… they’re evil. They say ‘Slava Ukrainia’ (‘Glory to Ukraine’), but there can only be glory in God”.
Something to read
Civicmonitoring / Developments in eastern Ukraine: 22 December 2022 – 23 March 2023 (Newsletter 109) (Nikolaus von Twickel’s newsletter has been featured many times on this newsletter, and it remains the best English-language recap of the situation in Russian-occupied Donbas. In this issue, Russian authorities attempt to accelerate the distribution of Russian passports and increase pressure on those looking to keep their Ukrainian passports)
German Economic Team / A survey of Ukrainian refugees (some interesting data on Ukrainian refugees living in the West. The most striking data point is that “around 69% of Ukrainian refugees surveyed have higher education […] compared to 29% in the total Ukrainian workforce”.)
Something else worth checking out
Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining / Explosive Ordnance Guide for Ukraine Second Edition (this guide was made for “qualified EOD operators in Ukraine conducting mine action activities”, which I doubt many of you are. It is nevertheless a very extensive look at the type of explosives used in Ukraine which I think can be useful for many people, particularly journalists.)