Christianity Today reports
Threatened amid accusations of collaboration with an enemy state, implementation awaits more votes, presidential signature, and judicial review. UOC leader calls it “a struggle against God.”
Ukraine’s parliament overwhelmingly passed a preliminary vote last Thursday for a bill that could ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, from operating within Ukraine’s borders.
Law 8371 would give Ukrainian authorities power to examine the connection of religious groups in Ukraine to the Russian Federation and to ban those whose leadership is outside of Ukraine. The draft law, approved by a tally of 267–15, with two abstentions, still needs to undergo a second vote, where it may be amended. It would then move to President Volodymyr Zelensky for his approval before it becomes law.
Since the outbreak of full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine, Russian Orthodox priests in Ukraine and around the world have faced accusations of spying and otherwise working to advance Russia’s political interests. Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, a close ally of the Putin regime, has provided religious justification for the conflict in sermons and public appearances.
“The Russian Orthodox Church’s connection to the Russian Special Services has a very long history,” Oleksandr Kyrylenko, a scholar of religion and Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine, told Religion News Service.
Last month, Bulgaria expelled three of the highest-ranking Russian Orthodox priests in the country. At the same time, the FBI warned Orthodox communities in the US that Russian intelligence services may be using their churches to recruit assets.
Since the 10th century, Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians had been part of one church. The Moscow Patriarchate itself began as the Metropolis of Kiev and all Rus, the people who formed the first Russian nation.
The relationship between the Russian church and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians began to sour almost a decade ago after Russia’s support for separatist insurgents in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region and Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014.
In 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, considered “first among equals” in the Orthodox Christian world and a customary mediator among its many patriarchates, granted a “Tomos of Autocephaly” to Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, allowing them to come under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople rather than Kirill.
The move caused the Russian church to break communion with Constantinople and patriarchates that recognized the ruling. In Ukraine, the Orthodox community also divided, with those who embraced autocephaly and styled themselves as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and those who kept the name Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC).
The latter, while not accepting Constantinople’s declaration, says it is independent of the Russian Orthodox Church and has publicly criticized Russia—and Patriarch Kirill’s support of the invasion.
The OCU has formally adopted Ukrainian as its liturgical language, ditching Old Church Slavonic, still used by the Russian Orthodox Church. This summer, the OCU also dropped the Julian calendar and adopted a newly revised one, which, among other changes, moved the date of Christmas from January 7, as it is celebrated in Russia, to December 25.
Thousands of parishes in Ukraine have re-registered themselves as part of the OCU, particularly since the 2022 invasion by Russia.
Since the outbreak of the war, 68 UOC priests have been accused of collaboration, treason, and other offenses, according to the SBU, while this year alone, nearly 20 of the church’s leaders have been stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship.
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