Including the “church issue” in a potential “Great Deal” between Russia and Ukraine could lead to the UOC being recognized as a “Russian religious minority.” This would nullify all previous statements by the Church about its independence from Moscow and affirm it a destabilization tool in the hands of the Kremlin.
That’s according to an article by Tetiana Derkach, published by the Religion in Ukraine outlet.
As the inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump nears, the more expectations emerge that this unpredictable leader will come and bring order to the whole world. First and foremost, it is about suspending/ending the Russo-Ukrainian war. At the moment, it looks like Putin is not ready to put up with losses and make compromises, and therefore, he will cram all his conscious and subconscious desires into his project of the “Great Deal.” One of its sore points is the church, or rather, the idea of the church as an agent of influence on enemy soil.
Godless Jews against the “torn church”
On December 19, Putin held his traditional “Direct Line” press event, where he answered the question of how he feels about the Russian Orthodox Church having been “practically expelled” from Ukraine, and whether he believes that “the positions of the Russian Orthodox Church have been undermined”.
“What is happening to the Russian Orthodox Church is the grossest, most blatant violation of human rights and the rights of believers. The Church is being torn apart in front of the whole world. It’s like an execution. And everyone in the world prefers to turn a blind eye to it. Those who are doing this will suffer consequences,” answered the man who unleashed the largest war in Europe since World War 2, whose hands are drenched in blood, and in whose country large-scale religious repressions are taking place.
Many observers have noticed that Putin has recently begun to slide into a cave-era anti-Semitism. In the case of the “persecution of the UOC,” he also found a “Jewish trace”: “You see, the thing is, that after all, they are not even atheists, these people. Atheists are those who also believe in something. They believe that there is no God. This is their faith, their convictions. But these are not atheists, these are people without any faith. They are ethnic Jews, but who has seen them in a synagogue? No one has seen them in a synagogue. They are not Orthodox, they do not go to churches either. They are definitely not supporters of Islam, because they hardly appear in a mosque either.”
But no one has understood what Russia plans to do with these people: “These are people without a family, without a tribe. What is dear to them is not dear to us and the majority of the Ukrainian people. They will flee someday and go not to church, but to the beach. This is their choice. I think that someday they will remember this. And the people of Ukraine, the vast majority of the people of Ukraine are related to Orthodoxy, will assess their actions.
But let’s not cherish the illusion that Russia will give up on the church crisis in Ukraine – that’s not in what it has been investing for 30 years.
The “Great Deal”, the salvation of the “Russian religious minority”?
According to the sources of “Religion in Ukraine”, this speech caused discontent within the UOC. By and large, the very idea of being included as a bargaining chip in the “Great Deal” sparks no enthusiasm, to put it mildly, among many believers of this church (at all hierarchical levels). In private conversations, some say that then they will have to leave the waiting room and unleash overt pressure on the church leadership with the demand to sever canonical ties with the ROC. Nobody wants to look like prisoners of war who were publicly listed for exchange and left as a symbol of the enemy’s presence.
However, Putin’s threat to the “godless Jews” that they will “suffer consequences” still looks rather vague, but we will assume that he insists on resuscitating the so-called “Istanbul agreements” taking into account “realities on the ground”. At the moment, no one knows whether the “UOC case” will be included in the “Great Deal”, and if so, in what wording. There are many speculations on this subject, one of which is as follows: “Ukraine must ensure the protection of all constitutional rights (including property rights) of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate as a Russian religious minority”.
This conclusion is based on several versions of draft agreements on the settlement in Ukraine that were allegedly on the table of the Russo-Ukrainian negotiating group in early 2022. For example, in the draft deal of March 7, 2022, the UOC is directly identified as a component of the MP (after all, it is impossible to protect the rights of an organization whose formal public status cannot be clearly identified):
“1. All persons on the territory of Ukraine shall enjoy the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other relevant international documents relating to human rights.
- To this end
- a) Ukraine undertakes:
– to guarantee freedom of conscience and religion, to abolish and prevent restrictions and discrimination against the canonical Orthodox Church (the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate), to restore all its rights, including property rights;”
But the Ukrainian side then reportedly tried to clean out from the agreement everything that did not relate to its direct subject. Then Russia approached the issue more creatively and already in the draft of the “Istanbul Agreement” of March 27, 2022, it directly tied the rights of the largest jurisdiction in Ukraine to the protection of the rights of Russian religious minorities.
“Article 9
(Position and rights of persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities)
Ukraine shall guarantee to persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities, individually or together with other persons, the right to freely express, preserve and develop their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or religious identity and to maintain and develop their culture, without being exposed to any attempts at assimilation against their will. (Article 12 of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine of 1999)
- a) Ukraine shall abolish the restrictions and discrimination imposed on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, introduced up to the moment of the signing of this document, shall not allow any restrictions or discrimination in the future, and shall restore all its rights, including property rights”.
The fact that this does not concern all religious minorities, but rather those associated with Russia, is indicated by the reference to Article 12 of the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine of 1999 (terminated in 2018):
“The High Contracting Parties shall ensure the protection of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious identity of national minorities on their territory and create conditions for the promotion of this identity”.
In practice, this means a banal reception of the already repealed “Law on Renaming” No. 2662-VIII, with which the UOC fought so desperately for the past years, involving all the media resources of the ROC in this fight, especially the All-Union Central Committee of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (which oversaw the “UOC” project). Let us recall that after the adoption of the “Law on Renaming”, Patriarch Kirill was indignant that the forced re-registration of the UOC would lead to “bloody conflicts” over churches, and the then head of the All-Union Central Committee, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), was concerned that in this way “the authorities would force parishes, and possibly entire dioceses, to enter a schism”. But then the idea of resistance to renaming was based not so much on discontent over the Moscow Patriarchate, but on the fact that re-registration was forced by the Ukrainian government: “you won’t bring us to our knees”. Now the renaming will become a condition for protecting rights, but the coercion will come from Russia. Even if the UOC is not forced to become the ROC in Ukraine “by passport”, any option for its inclusion in the “Great Deal” will result in a “black mark” – affiliation with the ROC (and in the worst case scenario – inclusion in the Russian religious minority). This would automatically entail the annulment of the decisions of the Feofania Council of 2022. It is difficult to even imagine how the leaders of the UOC will explain such a stunning shift to their flock, which, like in a nursery rhyme, has learned by heart its “symbol of faith”: “we are not MP, we are independent.” The Ukrainian state “did not bring it to its knees,” but the Russian one will do it easily – the main thing is what marketing concept to apply. In any case, such an indication of a centralized structure should be there to distinguish it from the OCU, the official name of which, let us recall, is the UOC (OCU). So, the UOC should also have its own brackets.
By the way, speaking about “taking into account the realities on the ground”: “protection” of the UOC in the “Great Deal” would also require it to “pay” by officially abandoning all dioceses in the territories that, as a result of the negotiations, would remain under Russian occupation…
Media paralysis
Confusion with the abbreviation also occurred amid the media coverage of Putin’s threats to “godless Jews”. The Russian media seems to have been disoriented: some of them wrote about the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church”, some – about the “Orthodox Church in Ukraine”, some – about the ROC, but almost all of them took Putin’s quotes out of context.
Cleric News: “Persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) is not carried out by atheists, but by real godless people”. “Religion Today” ignored this. “Chrysma Center”: “Russian President V. Putin commented on the persecution of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine during a Direct Line. Pravblog reposted “Chrisma” without comments. Volodymyr Legoyda ignored this. Metropolitan Leonid (Gorbachev) used the abbreviation “UOC”: “The president, not shying away from expressions, called the persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church ‘torture and execution’, which the world fails to notice. And the Ukrainian authorities, who are to blame for this, are ‘people without family and tribe’”. Patriarchy.ru ignored this. Hierarchs close to the patriarchate also pretended that nothing had happened: Savva (Tutunov)’s Telegram channel “Cogito ergo sum” ignored this, and Tikhon (Shevkunov) did, too. Paradoxically, all Ukrainian media platforms that are directly or indirectly related to the UOC also ignored this news bit almost in full. Only the Telegram channel “Raskolam.net” fell out of the main line as its admins got confused and reposted without comment a Russian-language report from the Telegram channel “Chrisma” affiliated with the ROC. But there is also silence on the website of the same platform. “Raskolam.net” is associated with the former cleric of the UOC, Oleksiy Zoshchuk, who fled Ukraine back in 2018 and instructed the teams of his sponsored media outlets, “Raskolam.net” and “SPZh”, to sign up for the “Limassol Battalion”. It is convenient to push your native church into a meat grinder from Cyprus, but this time the entire Cypriot team of believers for some reason did no PR job for Putin.
Beyond the cover
In the course of the struggle for its own survival, the UOC consistently sustained a myth about its own self-sufficient actorship, to the point that, according to its speakers, “there is no Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine.” And for a while this myth was forcibly supported in Moscow, “understanding” the Feofania Cathedral and the cleaning up of the charter as “an attempt to save the church from pressure”. The Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church then adopted a resolution that the decisions of the UOC Cathedral “require study in the established manner” for their compliance with the charter of Patriarch Alexy II and the statute of the Russian Orthodox Church, but up to this point it has not managed to issue its canonical verdict, only occasionally expressing concern about the prospects of the UOC falling into schism. In fact, everything is very simple: should the Russian Orthodox Church create a theological and canonical commission and stated that the UOC had fallen into schism after the Feofania Council, this would be the best confirmation of the UOC actorship. But the Russian Orthodox Church has extensive experience in adapting to war circumstances, in particular, precedents from the times after the declaration of the local vicar Sergiy about supporting the godless Soviet government in 1927. The Bolsheviks demanded that the ROC commemorate the authorities as early as Patriarch Tikhon in 1923, and even then, the Group of Non-Commemorators emerged (led by Metropolitan Feodor (Pozdeevsky)). The Bolsheviks then exerted even more pressure by banning “the commemoration in public prayers of convicts or those being tried for committing grave crimes against the state” since “such commemoration… has features of an explicit political demonstration against the workers’ and peasants’ government.” Patriarch Tikhon was imprisoned at that time, falling under precisely such definition. Moreover, the authorities demanded from Tikhon himself that he forbid his own commemoration. Neither then, nor later, after the publication of the Declaration of 1927, did the ROC consider the non-commemorators as having fallen out with the church, although it was a rather powerful movement, some representatives of which even questioned the validity of Sergiy’s sacraments.
Although the non-commemorators movement in the UOC is not something Patriarch Kirill likes, this is not yet a reason to declare a schism. But, from Kirill’s point of view, his subordinates in Kyiv have been playing their independence game a bit too much. And therefore Moscow from time to time reminds that the UOC continues to be part of the ROC.
Cannonballs in the meat grinder of Putin’s “hustle and bustle”
“And who are the judges?” a Russian literature classic once said. Perhaps only the lazy ones (primarily in Russia) never asked the question, what the goals of the so-called “SMO” are. Are these goals worth the price that has already been paid not only by Ukraine, but also by Russia itself, as well as the rest of the world? Since this war is Putin’s personal project, let’s turn to the original source: “You know, when everything is calm, routine, and stable for us – we get bored, stagnant. We want to hustle and bustle. As soon as the hustle and bustle starts, things start whistling by our temples. Seconds, bullets… Unfortunately, the bullets are whistling, too. And then we ger so scared. Terrible, terrible. Well, it’s indeed terrible. But not ‘terrible, terrible, terrible’”. No matter how much someone tries to see something truly grandiose or spiritual there, something that requires God’s sanction, in reality everything is quite simple. If we admit that “demilitarization” and “de-Nazification” are just vignettes of a false essence, the bottom line is that for Putin, the meaning of his war with Ukraine lies in the very process of bloodshed and the inhuman pleasure he gets from it. This is banal revenge for “betrayal,” and the occupied cities wiped out from the face of the Earth are evidence of this. In this sense, being under the protection of the occupation forces means only one thing: the protected one consciously admits their transition to the side of the invader and “for the purpose of protection” starts wearing a distinctive badge.
Here it is necessary to clarify how Russia sees the role of the UOC in Ukraine, and what will happen if the UOC succumbs to uncontrolled cortisol pressure and (instead of genuine, not pharisaical trust in God and wise anti-crisis policy) agrees to protect a war criminal, a clinical psychopath, who is simply “bored” without bloodshed.
In Russia’s imperialist plans to seize Ukraine, the main role assigned to the UOC is to remain a destabilizing factor. This is best explained by the famous theologian Archimandrite Kyrylo Hovorun: the goal of Russia’s “protection” of its assets outside its sphere of influence is to boost conflict and chaos. In other words, Putin and Patriarch Kirill see the UOC exclusively as cannon fodder. As a result of the “Great Deal,” it may turn out that the Ukrainian state will conspicuously protect the integrity of only the church leadership, the key “scapegoats provocateurs” – Feodosii (Snigirov), Luka (Kovalenko), Pavel (Lebid), and the man behind the “canonical resistance” – Metropolitan Antoniy (Pakanych). But no amount of government resources will be enough to prevent attacks on grassroots communities. The prospect looks very simple: from the very beginning, the UOC’s services will resemble “pride parades” surrounded by police, but sooner or later the communities will be asked to pay for their security themselves.
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The Acts of the Apostles describes a case where a possessed servant girl, whose masters profited off her “gift of clairvoyance”, saw the Apostle Paul and testified to what seemed to be the truth: “they are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim the way to salvation.” The irritated Paul had to cast out the evil spirit from the “prophetess,” because the possessed have no right to be witnesses of Christ and His truth. Today, the UOC is faced with a crucial choice more than ever – to begin the difficult work of fixing old mistakes or, having agreed to the illusion of protection from the death-obsessed leader of the aggressor state, to become a source of chaos in its own country. Unfortunately, there will be no way to skip the choice.
