Ukrainian authorities have begun “large-scale persecutions” of Russian Orthodox clerics in the country, according to the church body’s Moscow-based leader.
“Recently, the interference of the leaders of the secular Ukrainian state in church affairs has grown into a blatant pressure on the episcopate and clerics of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, what allows us to speak of the beginning of the large-scale persecutions,” Patriarch Kirill of Moscow wrote Friday.
The patriarch addressed that message to the United Nations as well as other Western leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. They are the two western leaders working to broker an end to the crisis in eastern Ukraine through the Normandy Four, a diplomatic bloc that also includes Ukraine and Russia. Kirill anchored his complaint in part in a recent search, conducted by Ukrainian counterintelligence officials, of several Russian Orthodox facilities in the country.
“In our plain view the governmental authorities of Ukraine are blatantly interfering in church life, the fundamental human rights are being violated, and an obvious attempt is being made to use the Church for political benefits and in the election campaign,” he wrote.
The question of church-state relations in Ukraine is fraught, as both the governments in Kiev and Moscow have an interest in their relationship with the Orthodox community in the country. The typical origin story of both the Russian nation and the Russian church traces back to Kiev in the ninth and 10th centuries; the recent commemorations of the anniversary of the baptism of the Kievan leaders into Orthodox Christianity in 988 have provided the stage for jockeying between Ukrainian leaders and Russian President Vladimir Putin leaders for influence in the country.
The most recent celebration was led by Patriarch Kirill, which has led to criticism.
“There’s no doubt that even Ukrainians who were previously sympathetic to Patriarch Kirill now view him as a tool of the Russian state,” Denysenko, author of the newly released history of The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation, told the Washington Examiner.
The Moscow patriarch’s silence over the detention by Russia of Ukrainian sailors who tried to sail through contested waters to a Ukrainian port city is an example of his inability to challenge Putin, Denysenko suggested.
“There were two of those bishops of the Moscow patriarchate in Ukraine who appealed to him publicly to please do whatever is needed to be done to free the Ukrainian sailors,” Denysenko noted. “I have yet to see any action on the part of Patriarch Kirill.”
These disputes are also unfolding in the context of a split between the patriarch in Moscow and the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the Istanbul-based primate who is in the process of recognizing an official Ukrainian national church that will be independent of the Russian Orthodox Church headquartered in Moscow. That decision threatens to remove thousands of Ukrainian parishes from Russian jurisdiction. But Patriarch Kirill maintains that it is taking place at the insistence of the government in Kiev, over the objections of the clergy.
“But the numerous facts of discrimination against the Ukrainian Church that have already taken place give reason to fear even greater infringement of the rights and legitimate interests of Orthodox believers, to multiply their suffering for their loyalty to canonical Orthodoxy,” Kirill wrote.
Such allegations have fed suspicions that Putin might move deeper into Ukrainian territory in military operations justified as a protection of the church.
“There might be efforts to instigate violence,” a Baltic diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner in November. “Once you have violence, then you have something that can lead to something else more dangerous.”
