In the autumn of 2018 Petro Poroshenko, then president of Ukraine, announced a milestone for his country, “a meaningful step in the same category as expressing our desire to join the EU and Nato”. The historic moment was the recognition of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as a distinct religious community, separate from the Russian Church — “autocephaly”, as it is known. The decision in 2019, by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the authorities of the Eastern Orthodox world, endowed the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Church in Kyiv as the highest spiritual authority for Orthodox Ukrainians. Three years later, Ukraine’s Orthodox Church remains separate from Russia’s, but Ukraine’s existence as an independent country hangs in the balance.
That autocephaly was understood as a radical change offers an important insight into the role religion played in the lead-up to the war and continues to play now. In recognising autocephaly in 2019, Orthodox authorities, unwittingly or not, bolstered Ukraine’s claims to sovereignty in both sacred and secular politics. The destruction wrought by the Russian invasion has the potential to do the same.
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