The war in Ukraine, which was until 7 October the only foreign news we could think about, is no longer centre stage but is continuing in an increasingly attritional way. And Ukrainian politics continue, inevitably, to be dominated by the war with the result that fundamental freedoms are now a casualty of the conflict. Specifically, there is a bill before the Ukrainian parliament, which has already passed its first reading, that would ban the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. This historically has been located within the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader, Patriarch Kirill, is notoriously invested in the war, on the Russian side. He is, moreover, close to Vladimir Putin. The bill would ban the activities of religious organisations affiliated with centres of influence ‘in a state that carries out armed aggression against Ukraine’. I think we know who they have in mind.
But even if the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were under Russian control, it would not warrant the state seeking to replace it with a more congenial institution, the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, founded in 2019 (which confusingly, has been given independent status by the Patriarch in Constantinople).
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