As the evening service in St. George’s Church comes to an end and the eleven visitors rise from their kneeling prayer position on the stone floor, Deacon Michael wants to say something about the war. He clears his throat, the epitrachelion, a sort of stole, flutters around his torso.
The cleric is in a complicated position. His church, like most Eastern Orthodox places of worship in Ukraine, belongs to the Moscow Church. At the same time, his country has been under attack for eight days by a president who has close ties to the same Moscow church.
Deacon Michael keeps it short. “May all Ukrainians and the Ukrainian state live in peace.”
It is an appeal that is insufficient for many Ukrainian believers. After all, a call for peace is different from a call to victory or a call to Russia to end the invasion.
Russia’s war in Ukraine is also a war of faith. If Russia wins, Moscow will ensure hegemony in the Eastern Orthodox world. If Russia loses, there is a good chance that Ukraine will definitely turn away from the patriarch in Moscow.
Approval of Constantinople
That process has been going on for some time now. In 2019, bishops in Kyiv founded the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Its foundation was approved by the Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople. As a result, a new Orthodox Church with international recognition came into being, which does not come under Moscow, but under Kyiv.
Putin spoke of the new church with horror. He said in 2018 that the church split could lead to “bloodshed.”
Hundreds of parishes in Ukraine have switched to Kyiv Church in recent years. But most parishes, including the world-famous Cave Monastery on the Dnieper River in Kyiv, have not broken with their church’s leader: Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and a close ally of President Putin.
The Russian president awarded Kirill in November with the Order of Saint Andrew the First Called, the highest possible decoration in Russia, which dates back to the Tsar’s era. Despite appeals from Russian believers and a group of more than 100 clerics, Kirill refuses to pray for the war to end.
The fact that the Moscow Church does not condemn the war and continues to hold services in Ukraine has sparked anger among Ukrainian clerics. Like Yuri Fedyv, the deacon of the Church of the Dormition, the largest Ukrainian Orthodox church in Lviv. He holds his services around the corner from Moscow’s Saint George Church.
Freedom of religion
“We have freedom of religion in Ukraine, of course,” Fedyv said on Thursday evening. “But if a church openly encourages aggression against Ukraine, then this church in Ukraine has no right to exist. I think the Ukrainian security service should close the Moscow churches.’
Some priests from the Moscow Church have already distanced themselves from the Russian patriarch. In Sumy, a city in northeastern Ukraine under heavy fire from the Russian army, the leader of the Orthodox Church ordered clerics not to mention Kirill’s name during the liturgy. He was immediately banned by the Russian Orthodox Church.
Other Ukrainian clerics within the Moscow Church are being pressured by Ukrainians. Residents of Tsenjava, a village in southwestern Ukraine, expelled a priest from the Moscow Church last week. The police did not intervene. In Lviv, opponents of the Moscow Church hung protest posters on the door of St. George’s Church.
Fedyv, the deacon of the Church of the Dormition, hopes that priests from the Moscow Church will switch to the Kyiv church because of the war. “In our province, twelve priests of the Moscow Church no longer call Kirill. But there are a total of seventy priests. Most ignore the war.’
His own church supports the Ukrainian army. Last Sunday the Dormition Church collected money, food and 40 pairs of padded army boots. Priests of the Church are constantly traveling to the front.
A defeat in the war almost certainly means the end of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, according to Ukrainian clerics. Fedyv has already covered the windows of the Dormition Church with wooden plates against possible air raids.
Other faith communities also fear the worst. The Church of St. Casimir, a Ukrainian-Greek Catholic house of worship, makes an empty impression. Crosses and icons from the 14th century have been evacuated as a precaution.
Bandera Smoothies
Inside, the priest of the church, Father Sebastian, is praying alone. The treasures of his church were hidden once before, in Soviet times. Clergy of the Church were persecuted. In a museum next to the church hangs a portrait of Josyf Slipyj, the former archbishop of Lviv who was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag camp. Next to it, a painting recalls a Soviet bombing of a Catholic church during World War II.
To prevent Lviv from falling back into Moscow’s hands, Sebastian’s father helps make Molotov cocktails. “I prefer to speak of Bandera smoothies,” he says, referring to Stepan Bandera, a Ukrainian nationalist leader. A Bandera smoothie sounds better to many Ukrainians than a cocktail named after Vyacheslav Molotov, Russia’s foreign minister of the Soviet Union.
The priest found the recipe for the deadly cocktail on the internet. He collects the bottles and ingredients during car rides through the city. He does not mix in the church, but at a garage. “Some will stay here in the city, some will go to the front in Kyiv,” says the cleric. “We must do everything we can to prevent history from repeating itself.”