The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy

By Nicholas Denysenko

How did religion contribute to Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Heated disputes and alienation among Orthodox Christians in Ukraine and Russia contributed to Russian aggression in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This book examines attempts from the early twentieth century to the present day to liberate the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russian control. It explores the causes of bitter alienation, Russia's use of soft power to maintain control, the development of hate speech used to discriminate against independent-minded Ukrainians, and the transition from soft to hard power from 2014 to the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666748178

Nicholas Denysenko

Nicholas Denysenko is the Emil and Elfriede Jochum Professor and Chair at Valparaiso University. He is the author of Theology and Form: Contemporary Orthodox Architecture in America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017).

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Introduction

On February 24 , 2022 , President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation announced a special military operation in Ukraine. The purpose of the operation was to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.

Putin’s announcement took much of the world by surprise, and what ensued was not a small-scale military operation designed to liberate Donbas but a full-scale invasion. Russia destroyed Ukrainian cities and towns with missiles and shelling. Russian soldiers committed war crimes in towns like Bucha and Irpin, murdering civilians and raping women. As the war dragged on into the summer months, Ukrainian sacred sites were damaged, and images of families mourning fallen soldiers as they were buried appeared in the news and on social media sites.

Experts, analysts, and journalists have worked feverishly in identifying the triggers that caused Putin to launch a full-scale assault on Ukraine. Ukraine’s desire to join the European Union and distance itself from Russia is one reason. NATO’s alleged encroachment on Russia is another. Many say that Putin was saturated with irredentism—a desire to restore the fallen empire of his youth. Others argue that Putin’s desire to monopolize a certain part of the energy market needs more attention.

The ROC and the two Orthodox Churches in Ukraine are important actors in the environment that led to Russia’s invasion. A majority of citizens of both countries are nominally Orthodox. Russia and Ukraine have long and rich histories of Orthodox tradition and piety. They claim to be the successors to the city-states of Kyivan Rus’, and the Orthodox Church has championed the historical heritage of the medieval civilizations more than any other organization.

Russia and Ukraine disagree on the role of the ancient city of Kyiv. Ukrainians claim Kyiv as their own because it is the capital of Ukraine and has been on Ukrainian territory for most of its history. Russians claim that Kyiv is the mother of all Russian cities, despite its location outside of the borders of the Russian Federation.

The dispute is a historical one. A prominent Russian school of thought believes that Rus’ (tenth century) was originally one united people dispersed in multiple medieval city-states with Kyiv as the most prominent.¹ Historical circumstances separated the people from one another, beginning with the Mongolian destruction of Kyiv in 1240 and continuing with the rise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When Bohdan Khmelnitsky, the hetman (leader) of the Zaporizhian Cossacks in Ukraine, made a treaty with Russia at Pereiaslav in 1654, Russians interpreted the event as the reunion of people originally belonging to one nation. According to this perspective, Kyiv returned home to Russia.

Ukrainian historiographers viewed the situation differently. They described Kyiv as distinct from its neighbors long before the Treaty of Pereiaslav. They claimed that there was never a real or lasting unity among the medieval city-states, especially when Vladimir rose to power in northeastern Rus’ in the thirteenth century.² Kyiv became an authentic Ukrainian city through the course of organic historical development, a process that included important encounters with the West and the Catholic Church. Ukrainians argue that Kyiv evolved independently of Moscow. Kyiv certainly had encounters with Moscow, but it was influenced by its long engagement with Central European peoples, especially those of Lithuania and Poland.³

The Role of the Church in the Myth of a United Rus’

What do debates on the origins of Ukraine as a nation-state have to do with the role of the Orthodox Church in the war? In the medieval period, up until 1240, Kyiv was the primary center of the Orthodox Church among the city-states of Rus’. The respect and prestige that Kyiv attained during this formative period has lasted up until this day. After the Mongols ruined Kyiv in 1240, Vladimir became the primary seat of Orthodoxy among the peoples of Rus’ by 1299. The leader of the Church still retained the title of metropolitan of Kyiv (not of Vladimir), because of the prestige held by Kyiv during the formative period.

Ukrainians were able to resume Church life under Lithuanian and Polish rule in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the patriarch of Constantinople restored the Church center (metropolia) of Kyiv in 1438. This restoration of Kyiv as a Church center was important. There were two Church centers connected to medieval Kyivan Rus’ by the mid-fifteenth century. One main center was located in Moscow, the city that became the new capital of the young Russian state. The other was in Kyiv, in the Poland-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This Church center is known as the Kyivan Metropolia.

The Council of Florence in 1438–39 complicated relations among Orthodox Christians. The EP initially agreed to the new union with the Roman Church. The Orthodox people in Moscow, however, rejected the union when their bishop attempted to impose it. In 1448, in the aftermath of Moscow’s rejection, the Orthodox Church in Moscow embarked on the path of complete autocephaly (independence).⁴ The rejection was key here. Moscow’s declaration of independence went hand in hand with its enmity toward Constantinople for entering into union with the Roman Catholic Church. This fifteenth-century event—one influenced by the pressures placed on Constantinople by Ottoman encroachment—began the slow alienation between the Churches of Moscow and Constantinople. With Constantinople’s fall and Moscow’s rise, the Church of Moscow began to assert its power within the larger network of Orthodox Churches.

The renewed Kyivan Metropolia was particularly vulnerable to Russian pressure because of its minority status within the Catholic Polish kingdom. The Ukrainian minority found it difficult to maintain footing within the Polish aristocratic establishment because of its confessional fidelity to Orthodoxy.⁵ These pressures led to the decision of the bishops of the Kyivan Metropolia to unify with the Roman Church in Brest in 1596.⁶ The Orthodox people, however, were opposed to this union, and some of the more influential Orthodox aristocrats invested in education to sustain Orthodox Church life at all levels—communal, intellectual, and liturgical.

In 1620, Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem restored the Orthodox Episcopate, but the people of Ukraine remained susceptible to Polish exploitation. In 1648, the Ukrainian Cossacks revolted against Polish oppression and delivered an unexpected victory to their leader, Khmelnitsky. He agreed to the Treaty of Pereiaslav with Russia in 1654, believing that their shared Orthodox faith would preserve the autonomy of the Ukrainian Cossacks and their people.

The decision to make the Treaty of Pereiaslav was fateful, and the event has multiple interpretations.⁷ Ukrainians prefer to view it as a military agreement. Russians view it as the reunion of the separated peoples of Rus’. The divergent perspectives have implications for the authority of the Church. The interpretation of Pereiaslav as a treaty that reunited Ukraine and Russia in a new version of Rus’ is compatible with the argument that the ROC can accommodate both Russians and Ukrainians. The view of Pereiaslav as a treaty of equal but distinct people respects Ukraine’s identity as a distinct nation with its own Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church became a space where these opposing views were debated and weaponized in the post-Soviet period.

The Subordination of the Kyivan Metropolia to the Moscow Patriarchate

In the 1680s, the Russian imperial regime and the patriarch of the ROC pressured the patriarch of Constantinople to transfer the jurisdiction of the Kyivan Metropolia to Moscow.⁸ It is essential to emphasize that the clergy of the Kyivan Metropolia were opposed to such a transfer—they enjoyed freedom under Constantinople and wanted to preserve their traditions.

In 1686, the EP issued a patriarchal and synodal act that permitted the patriarch of Moscow to ordain the metropolitan of Kyiv. The collection of documents includes letters from the EP to the patriarch of Moscow and the royal family. The documents send mixed messages.⁹ On the one hand, the EP’s letters to the royal family of the Russian Empire indicate a transfer of jurisdiction of Kyiv to Moscow’s authority. On the other hand, the letter from the EP to the patriarch of Moscow emphasizes the right to ordain with no reference to jurisdiction. The ROC interpreted the documents as a transfer of jurisdiction and absorbed the Kyivan Metropolia into the ROC. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Russification of the Kyivan Metropolia was well underway.

Punishment of Ukrainian Leaders and Russification Policies

The interpretation of these documents became important in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For our purposes, what’s significant is how the ROC and the Russian imperial regime used them to gradually absorb the Kyivan Metropolia into the ROC. The key element to this process was Russification. By the mid-eighteenth century, Russian became the only language permitted for instruction in the academies, and the pronunciation of Church Slavonic with a Russian accent replaced local Ukrainian pronunciation.

An important political event took place in the early eighteenth century that became part of the Ukrainian religious historical memory. The leader of the Ukrainian Cossacks, Hetman Ivan Mazepa, joined Sweden in the war against Russia in 1708.¹⁰ Mazepa was unhappy with Russia’s wartime scorched-earth strategy that devastated Ukrainian lands. When Russia defeated Sweden at the Battle of Poltava in 1709, Tsar Peter I made an example of Mazepa and punished him for his alliance with Sweden. The punishment set the tone for the Russian dominance of Ukrainians in both political and ecclesiastical matters. Peter’s punishment of Mazepa was another step toward limiting Ukrainian autonomy. Empress Catherine II completed that process when she integrated the Cossacks into the imperial administrative system.¹¹

The ROC used the nuclear option in dealing with Mazepa. They anathematized him from the Church, issuing a scathing text accusing him of betraying both the Russian people and the Orthodox faith for siding with the Swedes. Anathematization is the most severe penalty of the Orthodox Church. The accused are deprived of Holy Communion, and—technically—denied entry into the Church itself until they have repented. An anathematization is a curse, and, in this case, it was an ecclesial version of political exile.

The anathematization of Mazepa, the subjugation of the Kyivan Metropolia to the ROC, and the Russification of the educational systems and liturgical life of the Church in Ukraine were all measures designed to establish Russian control over the Church of Ukraine and to make its people ideal citizens of the Russian Empire. The events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began that process with the 1654 Treaty of Pereiaslav and the 1686 transfer of the Church to Moscow. The nationalist initiatives of Tsar Nicholas I in the nineteenth century sought to homogenize Russian identity throughout the empire, even as new nation-states began to emerge from the rubble of fallen empires.¹² Imperial officials silenced members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia that promoted the Ukrainian language and dreamed of the possibilities for Ukraine.

This situation endured through the beginning of the twentieth century, even as the Russian Empire declined and Ukrainians began to dream of post-imperial possibilities. For the purposes of this book, this introduction to key events and to particular Ukrainian and Russian historical perspectives establishes the framework for the sequence of events that begins in the twentieth century. These events include the revolution, multiple attempts to create a sovereign Ukrainian state, the Soviet era, and the fall of the Soviet Union. Significant Russian leaders continued to yearn for the reunion of Russia and Ukraine even after Russia, Ukraine, and numerous other Soviet republics became independent in 1991 and afterward.

Objective: Explaining the Religious Dimension of Russia’s War on Ukraine

The fundamental premise of the book is that Russia maintained a strong presence in Ukraine through the Orthodox Church. When Orthodox Ukrainians began to seek separation from Russian control by pushing for autocephaly (complete Church independence), the movement posed a serious threat to Russian control. Russia exercised soft power in Ukraine by attacking the credibility of the rebellious Orthodox Churches, and defending only the one loyal to Moscow—the UOC-MP.

Russian control through the Church began to weaken after the Maidan Revolution of Dignity (2013), when ordinary Ukrainians lost confidence in the ROC and the UOC-MP. The proverbial dam was broken when an external party—the EP—intervened and oversaw the creation of the OCU. The creation of the OCU was a crucial victory—a symbol of Ukrainian liberation from Russia, along with the creation of a Church that other Orthodox in the world began to view as legitimate. The formation of the OCU was by no means the only factor leading to a full-scale attack on Ukraine, but it was an important one. Russia exacted revenge on Ukraine for charting its own course—and the OCU was one example of Ukrainians embarking on their own path.

This book explains the religious dimension of Russia’s war by surveying the following issues. This first chapter surveys Ukrainian-Russian encounters in the Russian imperial period, showing how Ukrainians resisted Russian power and how Ukrainian resistance elicited Russian polemical attacks. The presentation continues with the origins of Ukrainian Church independence, the first attempts to break free of Russian hegemony during the revolutionary and early Soviet periods. The next three chapters examine Russian tactics used to maintain control over the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches. These sections discuss the emergence of violence during the Revolution of Dignity, the consistent use of soft power throughout the modern era, and the employment of hate speech in media campaigns.

Russia’s initial strike on Ukraine occurred in 2014, after the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and the military intervention in Crimea and Donbas. I show how the ROC’s responses to these events marked an escalation in Russian attitudes toward Ukraine. Everything came to a head when Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Our survey of the Orthodox Churches assesses Patriarch Kirill’s justification of the war and the varying responses of the OCU and the UOC-MP. The study concludes with a reflection on the earthquake Russia’s invasion created in the broader network of Orthodox Churches in the world.

Vocabulary: A Look around at Who’s Who, and What’s What

Readers will encounter unfamiliar terms throughout this book. The modern history of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine includes events involving patriarchs and metropolitans and issues such as autocephaly and autonomy. The following section defines these terms and explains their significance in the Ukrainian Church.¹³

The Orthodox Church uses specific words to designate various levels of leadership. The origins of these words come from the New Testament and the Apostolic Age of the Church. The New Testament introduces ministries exercised by specific leaders, including prophecy, teaching, and oversight. The highest level of Church leadership was apostolic. An apostle established a church community in a particular place by preaching the good news there. The act of preaching itself created a community that would gather in memory of Christ to give thanks for his resurrection from the dead.

Bishops

Apostles shared their ministry with bishops. The word episkopos—which means overseer—is the origin of the bishop’s role. A bishop would carry on the apostolic mandate of preaching the good news of Christ to a community. He would oversee the life of the local community by preaching the good news and teaching the faith. In the New Testament and Apostolic Era, apostles and bishops were occupied with preaching and teaching. They did not have time to attend to charity, so they appointed deacons to make sure that the needs of the people in the local community were satisfied.

Presbyters and Priests

By the third and fourth centuries, especially after the Peace of Constantine in 313, a new ministry appeared alongside bishops and deacons—that of the presbyter, which means elder. Presbyters would participate in the liturgical life of the Church by preaching and teaching. When Christianity began to expand rapidly in the fourth century and afterward, bishops began to appoint presbyters to oversee the life of smaller communities, akin to parishes or congregations. At this time, the order of presbyters became distinct from bishops because a presbyter could lead a parish community on his own. To be sure, bishops remained the overseers of faith and order, and both presbyters and deacons were accountable to bishops. By the fourth century, then, the three major ministerial orders of the Church were established—bishops, successors to the apostles; presbyters; and deacons.

The word priest was associated with the bishop, not the presbyter. The bishop, as the overseer of the life of the local church, presided at the sacrifice (oblation, or offering) presented by the church each time it gathered for the Eucharist. The bishop therefore presided at gatherings where Christ himself offered his sacrifice for the life of the world as high priest. Priesthood was associated directly with presidency at the community’s Eucharistic gathering, and presbyters were assistants to the bishops until they began to preside at Eucharists beginning in the fourth century. It was then that presbyters became known as priests, and priests were distinct from bishops. The priest became the most visible minister, because he was the leader of the local community. I will use the term priest to refer to the minister also known as presbyter in this study, keeping in mind that priests are distinct from bishops, and bishops remain the overseers of Church life, especially in sustaining faith and order.

Archbishops, Metropolitans, and Patriarchs

So where do archbishops, metropolitans, and patriarchs fit in, as if making sense of deacons, priests, and bishops weren’t complicated enough? The addition of new titles occurred as the result of two phenomena: the tendency for Church officials to follow the blueprints of imperial ranks, promotions, and dignities, and the expansion of Christianity that led to the establishment of a ranked order of the most important sees (Christian cities), often known as a taxonomy.

If Jerusalem was the most important Christian city in the New Testament, a host of other urban centers quickly overtook the holy city in importance. The most notable of these were Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria. These cities were where the apostles had established Christian life, and they played a central role in developing the intellectual Christian tradition. Saints Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome, and the bishop of Rome led Christians in the eternal city. St. Peter preached in Antioch, and the Syrian city