Kiev’s Plan To Ban The Ukrainian Orthodox Church Shows How Insecure It Is About National Identity
Andrew Korybko
Andrew Korybko's Newsletter
Kiev hates that a significant share of the population refuses to conform with the “negative nationalism” that they’ve aggressively enforced upon them since 2014 by continuing to worship at the Ukrainian Orthodox Churches’ sites instead of the government-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine’s.
The Rada passed a law earlier this week for banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the middle of next year if it doesn’t sever all ties with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Kiev has accused the UOC of being under the ROC’s sway even though the UOC declared full autonomy from the ROC in early 2022. The authorities envisage replacing the UOC with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) that was controversially recognized as autocephalous by the Ecumenical Patriarchy in 2019.
Readers can learn more about this complicated subject in RT’s detailed article from last August about “The Last Crusade: How the conflict between Russia and the West has fueled a major split in the Orthodox Christian Church”. All that’s sufficient for average folks to know though, is that the OCU is part of post-2014 Ukraine’s Western-backed efforts to craft an anti-Russian national identity, which includes restricting Russian-language rights and arbitrarily persecuting those who still speak it in public.
Putin’s magnum opus from summer 2021 “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” is worth reading for those who’d like to understand how Ukraine’s separate, though originally not radically anti-Russian, identity came to be. In brief, it was largely the result of the erstwhile Kievan Rus’ collapse, after which its heartland that’s nowadays known as Ukraine fell under Lithuanian and then Polish influence. This was then followed by some Austrian, Imperial German, Nazi, and now American influences too.