Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople
The concept of the separation of church and state is not something the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate believes in.
While not an official state church, under its current patriarch, Kirill, the church has enthusiastically endorsed the policies of the regime of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, including emphasis of “family values” over individual freedoms. It also preaches homophobia, and the restriction of women’s rights. Kirill has described the reign of the sinister tyrant Putin as “a miracle of God.”
The church, which still claims 150 million adherents (out of perhaps 270 million Eastern Orthodox believers worldwide), is widely seen among progressives in Russia and beyond as having been heavily penetrated by the KGB, the Soviet secret police, and to have been complicit in that murderous organization’s crimes. At the same time, the church and its believers were themselves persecuted by the Soviet authorities, with priests and believers being jailed and executed in their thousands.
Today, the church’s influence still stretches beyond Russia’s borders, into Russia’s former imperial possessions, colonies, and Soviet subject states. In Ukraine, the church claims authority over, by some estimates, 7 million of the country’s 26 million Orthodox believers.
Most of the other 19 million Orthodox Christians in Ukraine are not under the authority of the Moscow Patriarchate, but a rival church – the Kyiv Patriarchate – set up after the fall of the Soviet Union to provide Ukraine with its own independent Orthodox church. However, the Kyiv Patriarchate has never been granted official recognition by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the mother church of Eastern Orthodoxy.
That, however, is probably about to change, with the announcement on Sept. 7 that Bartholomew I, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, was to send two representatives to the Kyiv Patriarchate. This measure is the first step in granting autocephaly – church language for independence – to the Kyiv Patriarchate.
And here is where matters of religion collide with geopolitics. The Moscow Patriarchate is incensed at the prospect of losing part of its worldly empire – if the Kyiv Patriarchate were to be granted autocephaly, it would be able to claim authority over all of the parishes on Ukrainian territory.
The Moscow Patriarchate has been losing ground in Ukraine, particularly since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas in 2014, in which the Russian church has supported the Kremlin. This naturally alienated many Ukrainians, who in response have petitioned their priests to switch their parishes’ allegiance to the Kyiv Patriarchate.
The granting of autocephaly to the Kyiv Patriarchate would accelerate the Moscow church’s retreat in Ukraine, reducing its influence here and among the Orthodox community of churches worldwide, though it would still remain the largest single Orthodox church. The Moscow Patriarchate has even threatened to reject the authority of the mother church in Constantinople, which would produce the biggest shakeup in Eastern Orthodoxy since certain eastern-rite churches, including the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (Byzantine Rite) again accepted the authority of the Vatican in the 16th century.
That Bartholomew would take such a risk of schism shows how the high the stakes are in this matter of religious politics. If the Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate were to lose a large number of believers in Ukraine, and at the same time the Kyiv Patriarchate were to enter full communion with the other non-Russian Orthodox churches, there would be a significant shift in the balance of power in Eastern Orthodoxy away from Moscow and towards Constantinople.
Bartholomew I is thus Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise for supporting Ukraine’s efforts to establish a national church free of Moscow’s malign influence. It makes far greater sense for the country to have its own church, in brotherly communion with friendly Orthodox churches, than to continue to be officially ruled over in religious matters by the Moscow Patriarchate, a church closely aligned with the Kremlin, Ukraine’s deadliest foe.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Gennady Zyuganov
Gennady Zyuganov, the leader of Russia’s Communist Party, comes from a political tradition that advocates taking people’s property by force and giving it to someone else.
So it’s not surprising that Zyuganov recently called for Russia to annex Ukraine’s Donbas – part of which the Kremlin has occupied since 2014, when it launched its war of aggression on Ukraine.
“If I were in the place of the president, I would immediately accept the Donbas (into Russia),” the state-run RIA Novosti news agency quoted Zyuganov as saying on Sept. 10.
However, Zyuganov is a communist in name only: the party was long ago co-opted by the Kremlin to be a “pocket opposition” in Moscow’s “managed democracy.” While presenting themselves as a bona fide alternative to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, Zyuganov and his fellow Communist Party deputies in the State Duma, the lower chamber of Russia’s rubberstamp parliament, line up to support the Kremlin on every issue of importance.
It could be, therefore, that Zyuganov was being used by the Kremlin to voice an opinion in order to gauge public reaction to an initiative. While Russia is effectively an authoritarian, fascist police state, complete with a budding personality cult for its leader Putin, it still has to pay some attention to public sentiment – what the Kremlin fears most is a Maidan-style popular uprising against the authorities.
This is one of the reasons why the Kremlin still bothers to hold elections – they are designed to confer a sheen of legitimacy on Russia’s fake democracy, but also serve as a means of gauging the true level of support for the government, although the official results are of course falsified in the president’s or Kremlin’s favor.
Using a surrogate to voice an initiative also allows the Kremlin to distance itself from the idea should it prove unpopular, or, vice versa, to later claim it for itself should it be a hit.
So while it is not known whether Zyuganov, in calling for the Kremlin to annex the Donbas, was voicing his own opinion or that of some Kremlin mandarin, it is worth watching how this suggestion goes down with Ivan public, and whether it continues to be propagated on Kremlin-controlled television.
That’s because there have been some changes going on in the Russian-occupied part of the Donbas recently: Since November, both of the Russian proxy leaders in the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts have been replaced (Igor Plotnisky of Luhansk by a “coup,” and Oleksandr Zakharchenko of Donetsk by assassination with a bomb).
The new leaders in the Russian-occupied areas of the Donbas are much more closely aligned with the Kremlin, in a way that the former “local” leaders were not. Zakharchenko in particular was a problem for the Kremlin – essentially a crime lord, he had monopolized large parts of the economy of the Russian-occupied areas, and was rumored to be coming into conflict with powerful interests among Kremlin figures and the entourage of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Under the rule of the Kremlin’s former proxies, the Russian-occupied part of the Donbas has become a swamp of crime, ruled by gangsters. The lawlessness has spilled over into Russia’s neighboring Rostov Oblast, which has seen its own crime rate soar. Zyuganov, in his comments to RIA Novosti, noted that annexing the Donbas would be a way to combat the region’s “banditry.”
Might the Kremlin, which has hitherto officially called for the Russian-occupied parts of the Donbas to remain part of Ukraine, be considering a change in policy? Watch this space.
Meanwhile, Zyuganov is Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and a winner of the Order of Lenin for proposing the theft by the Kremlin of more of Ukraine’s territory. While complaining about banditry in the Donbas, which the Kremlin is responsible for unleashing, he proposes state-level banditry in response, akin to the imperialism and colonialism of the past two centuries. Such policies belong in the dumpster of history, along with the failed ideology of the dying party Zyuganov leads.
