As the Russia–Ukraine conflict continues well into its third year, we naturally focus on the military struggle. A less visible but equally important battle is being waged within Ukraine’s religious communities. This conflict reveals the complex interplay between faith, nationalism, state power, and the ongoing war.
Ukraine has historically been at the center of the Eastern European Orthodox world. It is on the banks of the Dnieper River in Kyiv that Eastern European Orthodoxy was born in 988 as a Slavic offshoot of Byzantium’s Greek Orthodoxy. It adopted Slavonic, a proto-Slavic tongue, as its liturgical language—a language the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the largest religious organization in the country, still uses.
In 2019, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) was founded in accordance with then President Petro Poroshenko’s “one nation, one church” vision. Poroshenko believed that an independent, national church was essential for national security, as opposed to the traditional UOC church, which was independent in governance but retained its legacy ecclesiastic connection with the Russian Orthodox Church based in Moscow. One way that the OCU displayed its nationalism was by replacing Slavonic with Ukrainian as its liturgical language.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the Ukrainian government announced a series of measures identifying the UOC with the Russian Orthodox Church and seeking repressive measures against it. On December 2, 2022, during his nightly address President Volodymyr Zelensky announced a decree that banned the activities of religious organizations “affiliated with centers of influence” in Russia and said that state services would examine the links between the UOC and the Russian church.
If you were a Ukrainian patriot, President Zelensky signaled, the UOC could not possibly be your spiritual home.
Shortly after Zelensky’s speech, I attended liturgy at the Russian church in Geneva, where I was visiting, hoping to better understand the overlay of the war and religious identity. There, I met both Russians and Ukrainians, including Ukrainians from the Russian-speaking east and ethnic Ukrainians from the west. I met a veteran of the Ukrainian special forces, the SBU, who shared that he fought in the Donbas in 2014 and later went to Russia on a spiritual visit. He was highly critical of what he claimed was the persecution by the Ukrainian government of his church at home, the UOC. Clearly, there was more to it than President Zelensky’s narrative portraying the UOC as a political fifth column—a narrative echoed by the media in Europe and the United States.
Hellbound and Down 