When Russian president Vladimir Putin celebrated the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, he claimed the disputed peninsula was “spiritually” inseparable from Moscow.
But Mr Putin’s military intervention is now threatening to undermine the “Russian world” beyond Moscow’s borders that he sought to promote.
An arcane canonical dispute has become a geopolitical flashpoint after Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of Orthodox Christianity, said on Thursday that he intended to grant full recognition to a breakaway church in Ukraine that split from the Russian patriarchate in the early 1990s.
The Russian church has warned it may refuse to recognise Bartholomew’s authority, creating the greatest schism in Orthodoxy in almost a thousand years.
But both sides acknowledge the canonical dispute is a proxy for a wider battle over Kiev’s independence from Moscow.
“If Putin decided to call it the Russian empire, it wouldn’t change anything. It’s just the same system with a different name,” a person close to the Russian church said. “We — the Russian people — can’t accept Ukraine as a separate state and they know it.”
Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, seeking to boost single-digit poll numbers ahead of his re-election attempt next year, has cast the issue as a matter of national sovereignty at a time of war in the country’s east.
Speaking in front of Kiev’s oldest church on Sunday, Mr Poroshenko cast “autocephaly”, or autonomy for the Ukrainian church, as part of Kiev’s broader push for integration with the west through EU and Nato membership while withdrawing from agreements with Russia.
“Nobody can stop the Ukrainian people. And we won’t ask permission from anyone, because it’s the right of Ukraine and her people, who are fighting for our freedom and our future,” he said.
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