On top of the 2014 seizure of Crimea and years of infiltration in eastern borderlands, Russia now poses a more severe threat to neighboring Ukraine.
Whether the nation faces a military invasion, or even a World War 2.5, or less bloody subversion and hoped-for domination, journalists these next few years will need to understand and depict the religious aspect of Ukraine's rising nationalism and resistance against Russian expansionism.
Here are some basics. Russia and Ukraine contain by far the two largest national populations in Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The new World Christian Encyclopedia edition (which belongs in every media and academic library) counts 114 million Orthodox in Russia for 79% of the population, and 32 million in Ukraine for 73%.
Terminology note for writers: "Eastern Orthodox" is the precise designation for such churches, related historically to the Ecumenical Patriarchate based in Turkey, that affirm the definition of Jesus Christ's divinity by the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451). The separate branch of so-called "Oriental Orthodox" is non-Chalcedonian; its largest national church is in Ethiopia.
Ukraine's ecclesiastical history, like its political history, is highly complex. The saga began with the A.D. 988 "baptism of Rus" in Kyiv (Russians prefer "Kiev") when Prince Vladimir proclaimed Orthodoxy the religion of his realm and urged the masses to join him in conversion and baptism.
Russians see Christendom's entry into Eastern Europe as the origin of their homeland and the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian President Vladimir Putin cites this history to support his claim for Ukraine as a client area within greater Russia instead of a validly independent nation. His post-Soviet Kremlin maintains close bonds with the Russian Church's Moscow Patriarchate, which in turn has centuries of ecclesiastical authority within Ukraine.
Orthodoxy in Ukraine was seriously weakened during prior puppet control by the atheistic Communist regime in Moscow. This is reflected in a 2017 Pew Research survey of world Orthodoxy. Among Ukrainians, only 12% said they attended worship weekly, 20% said the faith was important to them, 29% observed the fast during Lent and a mere 32% were even certain that God exists. However, the importance of Orthodox identity in the wider cultural heritage was shown in the popularity of wearing religious symbols (by 66%), lighting candles in church (88%) and keeping icons in the home (91%).
Ukraine has two large rival Orthodox church bodies that broadly reflect the nation's internal division — affecting culture and language — between the more European west and the highly Russian east.
Numbers are debatable, but the World Christian Encycopedia puts the Orthodox church historically under jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, which predominates in eastern areas, at 13.5 million members. It figures a newer Independent Orthodox denomination based in Kiev has 16 million members. This second, rival church arose when Ukraine declared national independence in 1991. It grew alongside the nationalism sparked by Russia's inroads from 2014 onward.
A signal moment occurred in Istanbul in 2019 when the 81-year-old Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew formally bestowed a "tomos" recognizing the "autocephaly" (full independent, self-governing status) of the new Kyiv-based church on the basis of Orthodoxy's "one country, one church" principle.
This provoked a severe global split in Orthodoxy between churches that accept Bartholomew's claim to have a universal authority to decide this issue versus those who support conciliar Orthodox traditions backed by the mighty Russian church, which has temporarily severed its already tenuous bonds with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. This intricate squabble, complete with accusations of sizable bribes by U.S. President Donald Trump's State Department to foil Russia, gets reasonably even-handed treatment here.
The Kyiv-based church was reconfigured at a 2018 unity council in Ukraine that elected a new young leader to succeed the problematic founder and incorporated a small circle of clerics that quit the Moscow-linked church and members from a third Orthodox denomination that had broken from Moscow in 1918 after the Communist takeover. Ukraine's then-President Petro Poroshenko called the 2018 actions "the final acquisition of independence from Russia," adding, "Ukraine will no longer drink Moscow poison."
Significantly, the Moscow Patriarchate's ongoing parishes in Ukraine — considered a "fifth column" by ardent nationalists — retain the traditional Old Slavonic liturgy while the Kyiv church uses the Ukrainian language in worship. This difference suggests the cultural dynamics that would emerge during a potential civil war.
Another crucial point of tension: The Moscow patriarch retains the loyalty of the monks in the highly symbolic Kiev Pechersk Lavra (the Monastery of the Kiev Caves, founded in 1051), a strong monastic community that is at the core of Slavic Orthodox identity.
If anything, hostility toward Russia runs even stronger among Ukraine's minority of Catholics, although most live in western areas distant from Putin's vast military buildup. There's a small contingent of "Latin Rite" Catholics, but 9% or more of the population belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, a "Byzantine Rite" or "Uniate" body built on Eastern rites and traditions that closely resemble rival Orthodoxy (for instance allowing married priests) but is united with global Catholicism under the papacy.
The Soviets manipulated a fraudulent 1946 council that liquidated this Greek Catholic church and forced its parishes into Russian Orthodoxy. That created the Soviet era's largest "underground church," which retained the loyalty of millions. Its legal existence was restored in 1989 as Soviet hegemony collapsed. Ukraine also has a small but growing movement of western-oriented Protestants.
Sources: For the New Jersey-based Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the U.S.A., public relations director the Rev. Ivan Synevskyy (732-356-0090 or fr.i.synevskyy@uocofusa.org). For military and political news, there's the English site of America's Ukrainian-language weekly "Svoboda," published by the Ukrainian National Association (973-292-9800 or info@unainc.org). Cultural historians of the region include Kate Brown at M.I.T. (brownkl@mit.edu or 617-253-4056). The U.S. Department of State posted this religious freedom briefing on Ukraine last May.
FIRST IMAGE: Screenshot from a documentary on the history of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra.