The news was jarring to those who had come to regard Volodymyr Zelensky as a warrior for freedom, standing unflinchingly against a sinister, unscrupulous and powerful foe: in December, he signed a decree banning the Church to which millions of Ukrainians belong, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Last Sunday, thousands of those Ukrainians gathered outside the Church’s headquarters, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery, to pray and show their support for the monks whom Zelensky has ordered to vacate the premises. This is the new Churchill? A man who evicts monks from their monastery and closes churches? But the situation, as with all matters regarding Ukraine, is complicated.
There is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding Zelensky’s action because most Westerners aren’t aware that there is actually more than one Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This situation goes back to the period when Ukraine was a republic of the Soviet Union. When the nation won its independence in 1991, the Ukrainian Church did not, and remained under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow, which rebuffed repeated Ukrainian requests for autocephaly, or ecclesiastical independence.
However, some Ukrainian Orthodox began to operate independently of Moscow. Finally, in January 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, granted autocephaly to this Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Moscow refused to recognize this, severed relations with Constantinople, and continued its operations in Ukraine.