KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Since 2014, Ukraine has been trying to repel escalating Russian aggression. But while Russia is a much larger country, with far more weaponry and manpower, their efforts to undermine Ukrainian state sovereignty extend far beyond armed combat. The Kremlin has used its close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) to weaponize religion in favor of Russian interests.
But in recent years, Ukraine has used cultural and legislative means to respond this weaponization of institutional religion as part of a broader push to make Ukrainian society less susceptible to Russian manipulation and domination. This August, the Ukrainian government stepped up these efforts by passing a law that bans the ROC from Ukraine and, by extension, regulates religious organizations affiliated with it. While the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) — which remains institutionally subordinate to the ROC — is never directly named, the law is clearly aimed at redefining its presence in Ukrainian society.
The law enjoys broad political and popular support and has received the endorsement of nearly all other religious organizations in Ukraine. However, it’s also raised serious questions about how to balance state security and religious freedom amid war — especially when the weaponization of religion plays such a prominent role.
In most predominantly Orthodox societies in Eastern Europe and Eurasia, church-state relations favor a single church serving a single people as an institutional model. The resulting fusion of religion and politics informs fundamental cultural and political understandings of nationhood.
Consequently, the Russian Orthodox Church claims that the contours of the former Russian Empire — which united Russia with Ukraine and Belarus — are its rightful canonical territory. The ROC and the leadership of the Russian government now refer to this region as the "Russian World."
Such a neo-imperial political vision posits that Orthodox Christianity constitutes a unique spiritual-political space, with ruling centers that work together both located in Moscow. Under this view, Ukraine as a state, Ukrainians as a people and an independent Orthodox church serving Ukrainians all have no right to exist — and the imperative to forcibly reconstitute the Russian World therefore justifies the invasion of Ukraine.
Putin has used this vision on numerous occasions to rationalize his aggression and convince believers to support the war effort. In turn, the ROC lauds Putin’s continued pursuit of Russian regional hegemony because of the central role the ROC would play in cultural and political governance. As a result, the ROC has quickly become one of the many hybrid means used by the Russian state to curry influence, justify its interventions and reassert its regional dominance. Russia has used Moscow-backed churches as a cover for its intelligence agents and influence campaigns throughout Europe and the Balkans. For this and other reasons, several European states consider Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the ROC, an agent of Russian state power, and advocate for personally sanctioning him.
The ROC’s claim to dominion over the “Russian World” is not just an abstract notion. While Ukraine has been an independent state since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — which until 2019 was the country’s main Orthodox church — has remained institutionally subordinate to the ROC under the Moscow Patriarchate.
So, when Putin seized Crimea and began supporting an armed insurgency to undermine Ukraine in 2014, many Ukrainians quickly recognized that the ROC’s influence and oversight of the UOC offered a potential inroad for a different kind of aggression.
Ukrainians quickly recognized that the ROC’s influence and oversight of the UOC offered a potential inroad for a different kind of aggression.
Then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko led the effort to create an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) to dislodge the prominence and privilege that the ROC enjoyed in Ukraine through its relationship to the UOC.
In 2019, the campaign proved successful when the OCU was formally granted autocephaly — a status of independence and self-governance within the Orthodox faith — by Bartholomew I, the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople.
However, the decision was not recognized by the ROC. Nor did the OCU bring all Ukrainian Orthodox churches under its wing, meaning both the UOC and OCU continued to operate in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s rejection of Russian influence had been building for decades. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — which was justified in part by Russian claims of cultural, historical and religious domination over the country — prompted an outpouring of public calls to fully “decolonize” Ukraine of links to Russia.
Speaking Ukrainian in public became a norm. Religious calendars were changed to align major Christian holidays with the West rather than Russia. And virtually all cooperative networks among religious institutions linking Ukraine and Russia were quickly severed — with the UOC as the notable exception.
As the war grinds on, the Ukrainian state has accelerated its efforts to address the UOC’s continued affiliation with ROC.
For its part, the UOC has tried to maintain broad autonomy in its internal affairs. Its leaders even held a council in May 2022 to declare the UOC’s independence from the ROC and to condemn the ROC’s actions and rhetoric in support of war.
However, the UOC hasn’t fully severed ties with the ROC and remains institutionally subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate because the ROC refuses to grant the UOC an independent status. As a result, the Ukrainian government now faces the thorny question of how to approach a domestic church that is connected to a foreign religious organization that enthusiastically supports, aids and abets aggression against Ukraine.
In December 2022, Ukrainian President Zelensky’s proclaimed Ukraine’s “spiritual independence.” In the same speech, he floated the idea of banning the ROC and potentially denying registration to religious communities that continued to maintain an affiliation with the ROC as a means of accomplishing that goal.
However, it wasn’t until this past August that Ukraine’s parliament passed a law to that effect. The new law bars the ROC from operating in Ukraine and gives religious communities nine months to fully sever their relations with the ROC, after which time they will be assessed by an appointed expert panel on whether they have met the law’s requirements for demonstrated de-affiliation. If they have not, they risk having their registration denied.
In other words, any religious organization that continues to cooperate with the ROC after the nine-month period will be restricted.
Not surprisingly, this law instantly drew criticism. Some argued it was a constitutional violation, an infringement on religious freedom and state interference in internal religious affairs.
The Pope and the World Council of Churches (WCC) were two of the most vocal critics, with the head of the WCC cautioning that this law could potentially lead to “unjustified collective punishment of an entire religious community and violation of the principles of freedom of religion.”
Meanwhile, others noted that an investigation of each individual community will take time and significant resources, as the UOC alone has between 8,000-10,000 parishes in Ukraine. Therefore, although the law makes a strong symbolic statement, it will be difficult to implement, vastly diminishing any threat to religious freedom it poses but also undermining its effectiveness in accomplishing its stated security goal.
Notably, some even argue the law is designed not to “ban” the UOC, but to provoke the UOC to more substantively break with Moscow — a goal that is already supported among many UOC clergy and believers.
Prior to the full-scale invasion, Ukraine had earned exceptionally high marks for assuring religious pluralism and religious freedom. And, given the country’s dependence on Western military aid, there is a need to safeguard civil liberties, religious freedoms and democratic reform in Ukraine now more than ever.
Moreover, legislative and other means that risk destabilizing the religious landscape in Ukraine affect the ability of religious institutions — which are some of the best resourced of all non-state actors — to deliver humanitarian, mental health and other services now and in the war’s aftermath.
In view of the highly critical Western reaction to this law, one must ask if there is a place in a modern secular democracy for state regulation of religious affairs, even under the draconian conditions of war and highly vocal calls to do so.
What would constitute an acceptable response to the Russian state’s weaponization of religion, among its other hybrid means of warfare?
But alongside this question, there is another: What would constitute an acceptable response to the Russian state’s weaponization of religion, among its other hybrid means of warfare? Ukraine is not unique. The Baltic states, Moldova and other countries in the near abroad where the ROC claims jurisdiction are also concerned for their sovereignty as Russia looks to regain its former standing on the world geopolitical stage.
Religious freedom is often perceived in absolute terms: It either exists or it doesn’t. The ideals of religious freedom discourage state intervention in the internal affairs of religious communities. But the line between religious and political is oftentimes difficult to discern in the kind of church-state partnerships that are common in Orthodox societies. And when those partnerships are weaponized for aggressive political aims, as they have been in Russia, our response to them will prove crucial not only for the protection of sovereign states, but also for Western understandings of what constitutes religious freedom in the first place.
Catherine Wanner is a senior advisor for the religion and inclusive societies team at USIP.