Written by Nikolaus von Twickel
Summary
Donetsk separatist leader Zakharchenko ended three weeks of silence this Monday when he issued a stern warning against “religious war”. His Luhansk counterpart Pasechnik issued the same warning the same day, pointing to an orchestrated campaign directed against President Poroshenko’s church politics. Meanwhile, the separatists said almost nothing about holding another referendum, which was reportedly discussed at the US-Russian Helsinki summit.
Religious war in Ukraine?
The separatist leaders of Donetsk and Luhansk, Alexander Zakharchenko and Leonid Pasechnik, warned on July 23 that the government in Kiev is risking “religious war” by lobbying for an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko announced in April that he wants to unite two of Ukraine’s three Orthodox churches and called upon the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul to recognize them as independent (autocephalous). His initiative was subsequently backed by the parliament in Kiev.
Zakharchenko said in televised comments that such a step would incite interreligious hatred. “The Baptist Turchynov and the Greek Catholic Parubiy … hope that creating a local Church will lead to a largely zombified population,” he said, referring to National Security Council Secretary Oleksandr Turchynov and Rada Speaker Andriy Parubiy and their reputed religious affiliations. The “DNR” leader also suggested that US diplomats were meddling in Ukrainian religious affairs.
Pasechnik gave a more stern TV address, in which he accused Kiev of trying to take away the “ancestral faith” from its own people – “the fundamental basis of its existence”. The “LNR” leader claimed that a church split amounted to “religious genocide” and could provoke a much more horrible war that would “drown Ukraine in blood”. He also suggested that Kiev had been instigated by the “Catholic West” and American puppet masters.
The dramatic parallel warnings from Donetsk and Luhansk were clearly orchestrated from outside, as neither separatist leader mentioned the other one – such tandem behavior has also been conspicuous at the recent elections preparations (see Newsletter 28).
They also come somewhat unexpected at a time when a “harvest” ceasefire is relatively stable and there has been no prior warning from the separatists that they would raise this issue. And while religious divisions have riddled Ukraine in the past 25 years, these divisions have been far from pivotal in the current conflict.
Thus, Zakharchenko and Pasechnik are most likely acting on behalf of the Kremlin and/or the Russian Orthodox Church, who seemingly fear losing a significant lever of influence over Ukraine if Poroshenko’s initiative is successful.
Orthodoxy in Ukraine is divided into the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate), the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kiev Patriarchate), and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church. However, only the first is canonically recognized by other Orthodox churches.
The Moscow Patriarchate used to be the only recognized religious organization in the Soviet Union and continued to be Ukraine’s largest church after 1991, despite various schisms.
According to Oleksandr Soldatov, a leading expert on Orthodoxy, the Moscow Patriarchate Church – which enjoys a large degree of autonomy from the Russian Orthodox Church – currently controls almost 12,000 of Ukraine’s approximately 19,000 Orthodox parishes. The Kiev Patriarchate Church controls some 5,000 parishes, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church another 1,000.
Since the conflict with Russia began in 2014, however, considerable numbers of believers are believed to have switched allegiance. According to a survey by the Razumkov Centre, adherence to the Kiev Patriarchate more than doubled from 12 percent in 2000 to 25 percent in 2016.
The stakes for the Russian Church are certainly huge. Without Ukraine, it would lose much of its weight in the Orthodox world, Soldatov said in an article in Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper in May. And there already are signs of a split: At least ten of the Moscow Patriarchate’s 85 bishops in Ukraine joined the two rival Ukrainian churches’ official request to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew asking for an autocephalous Ukrainian Church.
On July 2, Bartholomew, who holds a primacy of honor among Orthodox leaders, seemingly sided with Kiev when he declared that the Ecumenical Patriarchate had never recognized Moscow’s spiritual claim over Ukraine. Furthermore, the Patriarch called for the restoration of unity for the divided ecclesiastical body in Ukraine, to which it referred to as the “Mother Church”.
Poroshenko has said that he hopes a final decision will be made by July 28, when the Orthodox churches celebrate the Christianization of the Kievan Rus (“Baptism of Rus”) of 988.
Whatever the outcome, the “People’s Republics” will hardly play a role in it. The separatists have made it clear in the past expressed little respect for confessions other than the Moscow Church. In August 2017, the “LNR” State Security “Ministry” raided the premises of Jehova’s Witnesses in Luhansk and Alchevsk, accusing them of working for Ukrainian neo-Nazi and intelligence organizations. And at a roundtable in 2016, “DNR” deputies called for strictly limiting the registration of religious organizations in order to prevent “sectarians” that present a national security threat. Earlier that year, the Donetsk Mormon temple was converted into a wedding house for the district administration (For a fuller discussion of religious rights in the “People’s Republics”, see this 2016 Special Report by Nikolay Mitrokhin, p 9).
Another referendum?
During the summit in Helsinki on July 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin apparently told US President Donald Trump that there could be another referendum to solve the conflict in Donbass. However, this was reported only three days later by the Bloomberg news agency after a meeting between Putin and Russian ambassadors in Moscow.
While the official separatist media were silent on the issue, Zakharchenko’s political adviser Alexander Kazakov admitted on July 20 in comments to the Russian RBC news site that the separatist leadership had not known about this but found it exciting: “Everyone in Donetsk talks about this because the fate of the Republic and the people depends on it,” he was quoted as saying.
The report said that Putin’s proposal called for a vote conducted under international auspices by the residents of the separatist territories on their status. But the issue seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared after both the White House and the US State Department rejected the idea.
Kazakov suggested that the issue would be discussed at the Minsk Trilateral Contact Group talks on July 25. However, this is unlikely as those talks tend to focus on day-to-day issues and the US are not part of that group, which is sponsored by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
Direct talks between Russia and the US over Donbass have not taken place since January, when US Special Envoy Kurt Volker and Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s aide responsible for the region, met the last time. Those talks were later suspended amid rumours that the Kremlin aide would lose his job. Surkov was reappointed only in June, two months after Putin’s new term in office began. Volker said in an interview on July 24 that while he was open for a new meeting there were no plans to hold one.
