... Verkhovna Rada, on August 20, 2024, marks a key milestone in the church-state crisis. The legislation outlaws religious groups affiliated with foreign religious associations based in countries recognized as having committed armed aggression against Ukraine. This creates legal grounds to prosecute and dissolve parishes and dioceses of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate solely because of their canonical communion with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), even though the Council of the UOC proclaimed the “full autonomy and independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church” on May 27, 2022. The law does not directly mandate the dissolution of the UOC, but only because it does ...
... Setting eyes on the example of Western denominations as its diplomatic partners in the second half of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church embarked upon a similar path, opening its representative offices at European international organizations ... ... Russia’s hope for partnership relations with Europe in the 1990s-2000s (with the approval of the United States). It would seem that Ukraine is promised European integration, but then why did the appeals of Ukrainian Orthodox Christians to the OSCE bring no result?...
... mention. The Patriarchs of Constantinople cannot afford the role of leaders of a national church, the role most Orthodox leaders assume, because they do not have a national church.
Moscow’s stance is based on an entirely different logic. Even without Ukraine, the ROC’s parishioners account for
over a half
of all Orthodox believers. The Russian Orthodox Church also inherited from the Russian and Soviet empires the largest and most well-developed infrastructure and an established system of relations with today’s Russian authorities: these are resources that other churches lack. The ...
