The roots of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine are tangled and complex; this is deeper and personal than most Americans realize. But how much of it is a war of religion?
In times long past, wars were fought over religious differences — disagreements that would rupture kingdoms and empires. Heresies and schisms launched military offensives. These days, disputes that are religious in nature often arise from hot-button political issues, like abortion. But a millennia and more ago the conflicts spawned from issues we might see today as theological hairsplitting.
It was a similar dispute in 2019 that I suspect helped instigate the current phase of the Russo-Ukrainian War, that of the Russian invasion into Ukraine in 2022.
On January 5, 2019, the eve of the Orthodox Christmas feast day, Ukrainian Orthodox Christians formally split from the Russia Orthodox Church when the patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, granted the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine autocephaly.
For over 400 years the Ukrainian church fell under the patriarchate of Moscow when it broke from Constantinople.
The separation was long coming; the fissure between Russia and Ukraine only grew in the decades after Ukraine declared independence in 1991. Of course, animosity and distrust went further back — Stalin planned to liquidate 15 million Ukrainians, as documented in Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow.
In December 2018, weeks before the formal approval of the new church, the matter was shown to have far-reaching implications beyond religious worship: Ukraine’s then-president, P. Poroshenko, joined bishops at St. Sophia in Kiev to select a primate for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (Epiphanius I).
The January 2019 split followed a major schism in Orthodoxy, the Moscow-Constantinople Schism. In October 2018, the Russian Orthodox Church severed full communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople precisely over the issue of an autocephalous Ukraine. This schism was widely covered in religion news but little appreciated beyond that niche. Hence the location of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) as the place the Ukraine Orthodox Church was formally recognized.
Perhaps if the world paid closer attention then it might have seen the vestiges of increased Russian aggression that would explode with the military invasion of 2022.
Indeed, as reported by The New York Times, “Vasyl Hrytsak, chief of the Security Service of Ukraine, warned in December that the rift ‘may become a pretext for open military invasion by the Russian Federation’s armed forces of our country” (see Andrew Higgins, “As Ukraine and Russia Battle Over Orthodoxy, Schism Looms,” Dec. 31, 2018).
In exact response to the rupture between the Ukraine and Russian churches, Vladimir Putin himself warned that the issue “could turn into a heavy dispute, if not bloodshed.”
Putin has long displayed his affinity for the Russian Orthodox Church and advocated both its spiritual and temporal authority.
As if on cue, Russia mobilized, seizing three Ukrainian naval vessels while Putin denied Ukraine’s right to exist.
And in the two years of war, the religious nature of the conflict has not gone unnoticed. While Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has supported the war effort, the Institute of Religious Freedom in Kiev noted that in the war’s first year, “the Russian military had destroyed, damaged, or looted at least 494 religious buildings, theological institutions, and sacred sites, with the figure estimated to be higher today” (February 2023), according to Newsweek’s Brendan Cole (“Ukraine’s Top Catholic Piles Pressure on GOP Over Russia’s Church Attacks,” Mar. 9, 2024).
Religious imagery and references have dominated the war. Kirill himself saw nuclear weapons as “divine providence,” claiming Soviet scientists “created weapons under the protection of St. Seraphim of Sarov because, by the ineffable providence of God, these weapons were created in the monastery of St. Seraphim. Thanks to that power, Russia has remained independent and free, and, of course, we must all cherish this remarkable feat of our scientists, who practically saved the country, in our hearts and memories.”
“The war we’re currently waging in Ukraine, and many people don’t want to understand this, in reality, for Russia, this is a holy war and nothing else.”
“[W]e’re defending the interests of our people in terms of spirituality, morality, divine values, universal human values.”
“There, we became a buffer from Satanism that was moving closer and closer to our borders. Basically, it completely surrounded Russia. This Satanism was going to destroy our country, to consume it and break it up in small parts. This war will be the starting point.”
- Russian commander Apti Alaudinov
Further spiritual-political tensions were escalated when Ukraine president Zelenskyy, who defeated Poroshenko in the 2019 elections, signed a bill in August 2024 banning religious groups affiliated with Russia — namely, the Ukraine Orthodox Church, not to be confused with the one we have been discussing here, the autocephalus Orthodox Church of Ukraine.
Ukraine’s secret intelligence agency believed spies had infiltrated the Ukraine Orthodox Church. This would seem outrageous…if such a tactic wasn’t a common practice among charlatans and racketeers.
Metropolitan Epiphanius praised the bill, claiming it paved way “to protect the Ukrainian spiritual space from the yoke of the Russian world.” Epiphanius went on:
“Everyone can see that in Russia, religious centers, not only the Moscow Patriarchate, but also the centers of Muslims, Protestants, and Buddhists, are under the full control of the Kremlin. They spread the ideology of the Russian world, justify the war against Ukraine, and say that it is a so-called holy war. That the destruction of Ukraine is a morally justified goal and even a duty of Russian troops.”
Pope Francis did not see eye-to-eye with these conclusions. Speaking after the recitation of the Angelus on Sunday, August 25, the pontiff argued:
“In thinking about the laws recently adopted in Ukraine, I fear for the freedom of those who pray, because those who truly pray always pray for all.
“Please, let no Christian church be abolished directly or indirectly. Churches are not to be touched!”
The overwhelming majority of Ukrainian Christians are Orthodox. Just over 8% are Greek Catholic and 1% are Roman Catholic.
According to a Wall Street Journal report from September 2024, roughly one million Ukrainians and Russians have died since the 2022 invasion.