Is Russian Orthodoxy dying in Ukraine?

Ivano-Frankivsk has just become the first city in Ukraine to have no Russian Orthodox Church, amid a mass defection of churches away from the Moscow patriarchate and towards the breakaway Orthodox Church of Ukraine. 

At the start of the invasion in February, almost two-thirds of Orthodox churches were still formally aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church whose leader – Patriarch Kirill – is a close ally of Putin. Until recently, the Russian Orthodox Church claimed dominion over Ukraine for centuries. The 2014 invasion of Crimea dampened its appeal. In 2019 a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognised by Patriarch Bartholomew – the archbishop of Constantinople and the de facto leader of Orthodoxy. The church was set up to distinguish Kyiv from Moscow: in the words of Ukraine’s then-president, it would be ‘without Putin, without Kirill’ and instead with ‘God and Ukraine’.

Kirill, the leader of the Russian church, has refused to call Putin’s actions an ‘invasion’ (he calls it a ‘special military operation’), and said that Russia ‘has only defended its borders’.