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Russia, Ukraine, and the Coming Schism in Orthodox Christianity
Clash of the Patriarchs
A hard-line Russian bishop backed by the political might of the Kremlin could split the Orthodox Church in two.
Photo-illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. Sources: Sefa Karacan / Anadolu Agency / Getty; Getty; Gali Tibbon / AFP / Getty.
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In late August of 2018, Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, flew from Moscow to Istanbul on an urgent mission. He brought with him an entourage—a dozen clerics, diplomats, and bodyguards—that made its way in a convoy to the Phanar, the Orthodox world’s equivalent of the Vatican, housed in a complex of buildings just off the Golden Horn waterway, on Istanbul’s European side.
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Kirill was on his way to meet Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the archbishop of Constantinople and the most senior figure in the Orthodox Christian world. Kirill had heard that Bartholomew was preparing to cut Moscow’s ancient religious ties to Ukraine by recognizing a new and independent Orthodox Church in Kyiv. For Kirill and his de facto boss, Russian President Vladimir Putin, this posed an almost existential threat. Ukraine and its monasteries are the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox Church; both nations trace their spiritual and national origins to the Kyiv-based kingdom that was converted from paganism to Christianity about 1,000 years ago. If the Church in Ukraine succeeded in breaking away from the Russian Church, it would seriously weaken efforts to maintain what Putin has called a “Russian world” of influence in the old Soviet sphere. And the decision was in the hands of Bartholomew, the sole figure with the canonical authority to issue a “tomos of autocephaly” and thereby bless Ukraine’s declaration of religious independence.
When Kirill arrived outside the Phanar, a crowd of Ukrainian protesters had already gathered around the compound’s beige stone walls. Kirill’s support for Russia’s brutal behavior—the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the bloody proxy war in eastern Ukraine—had made him a hated figure, and had helped boost support in Kyiv for an independent Church.
Kirill and his men cleared a path and ascended the marble steps. Black-clad priests led them to Bartholomew, who was waiting in a wood-paneled throne room. The two white-bearded patriarchs both wore formal robes and headdresses, but they cut strikingly different figures. Bartholomew, then 78, was all in black, a round-shouldered man with a ruddy face and a humble demeanor; Kirill, 71, looked austere and reserved, his head draped regally in an embroidered white koukoulion with a small golden cross at the top.
The tone of the meeting was set just after the two sides sat down at a table laden with sweets and beverages. Kirill reached for a glass of mineral water, but before he could take a drink, one of his bodyguards snatched the glass from his hand, put it aside, and brought out a plastic bottle of water from his bag. “As if we would try to poison the patriarch of Moscow,” I was told by Archbishop Elpidophoros, one of the Phanar’s senior clerics. The two sides disagreed on a wide range of issues, but when they reached the meeting’s real subject—Ukraine—the mood shifted from chilly politeness to open hostility. Bartholomew recited a list of grievances, all but accusing Kirill of trying to displace him and become the new arbiter of the Orthodox faith.
Kirill deflected the accusations and drove home his central demand: Ukraine must not be allowed to separate its Church from Moscow’s. The issue was “a ticking time bomb,” he said, according to a leaked transcript of the meeting. “We have never abandoned the notion that we are one country and one people. It is impossible for us to separate Kyiv from our country, because this is where our history began.”
Bartholomew explained that “the Ukrainians don’t feel comfortable under the control of Russia and desire full ecclesiastical independence just as they have political independence.” He added that he had been receiving petitions and pleas for years from Ukrainians at all levels, including members of Parliament and the country’s then–president and prime minister. Kirill replied that those pleas were meaningless because Ukraine’s political class was illegitimate. The people, he said with a disquieting certainty, “will overthrow them and expel them.” Bartholomew, shocked by the implied violence in Kirill’s words, called on the Russians “not to issue such threats, neither for schism nor for bloodshed in Ukraine.” When the meeting concluded, Kirill and his men were so angry that they skipped lunch and headed straight back to their private plane, I was told by an adviser to Bartholomew.
In the end, the threats proved unavailing: Bartholomew approved the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and Kirill issued an order to cut the Russian Church’s ties with the Phanar. (Confusingly, the Moscow-linked Church is called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.) The clash of the patriarchs—they have not spoken since—now looks a lot like a prelude to the Russian war in Ukraine. Just after Bartholomew announced his decision, Putin convened a meeting of his security council to discuss it. Putin later cited the Church schism as part of his justification for the 2022 invasion, and he and Kirill continue to speak of the breakaway Church as an assault on Russia’s national identity.
But the struggle between Bartholomew and Kirill is bigger than Ukraine. It is a battle for the soul of Orthodox Christianity, a faith with 300 million believers around the world. The divide has drawn comparisons to the Great Schism, which a millennium ago separated the Orthodox East and the Catholic West.
On one side, Bartholomew has spent three decades trying to make Orthodoxy more compatible with the modern liberal world. He openly urges the faithful to accept evolution and other scientific tenets. He has been a passionate advocate for environmental protection. And, like Pope Francis, he has quietly promoted a more accepting attitude toward homosexuality. But Bartholomew’s power is more limited than the pope’s. There are eight other Orthodox patriarchs, each of whom presides over a national or regional Church, and Bartholomew’s role is that of “first among equals.”
Kirill, who heads by far the largest national Church, has made it into a bastion of militancy. He has given the war against Ukraine his full-throated support, and some of his priests go further, preaching about the glory of firing Grad rockets and dying in battle for Russia. Kirill’s tediously Manichaean tirades—about saintly Russia defending “traditional values” against the gay-pride parades of the decadent West—are much more than a justification for Putin’s autocracy. His anti-modern ideology has become an instrument of soft power that is eagerly consumed by conservatives across the Orthodox world as well as by right-wing figures in Europe (such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán). It has even won adherents in the United States, where some evangelicals and right-wing Catholics seek a stronger hand in the culture wars.
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Kirill has also launched an aggressive effort to capture Orthodox parishes allied with Bartholomew, allegedly with the help of the FSB, Russia’s intelligence apparatus, and of the Wagner Group, Russia’s mercenary arm. The Russian Orthodox Church has used bribery and blackmail, threatening to undermine churches that do not adopt its policies and requiring newly converted (and well-paid) clerics to sign documents renouncing all ties with Bartholomew’s Church. The goal of this campaign is a very old one. Five centuries ago, after Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans, a Russian monk famously wrote that Moscow was now the world’s great Christian capital: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there shall not be a fourth.” Kirill and Putin seem determined to make this declaration of a “third Rome”—Moscow—come true.
The spiritual heart of Orthodox Christianity is on Mount Athos, a densely forested peninsula in northern Greece. It is a community of 20 ancient monasteries, and pilgrims must receive written permission to visit. No women are allowed, and the peninsula—sealed from the mainland by fences—can be reached only by boat, as if it were an island. I got my entry paper stamped just after dawn at a waterside kiosk in Ouranoupoli, a Greek beach town full of restaurants and bars that is the main gateway to Athos. The waitress who had brought my coffee would be the last woman I saw for three days. At the pier, I climbed onto a battered old ferry that gradually filled with bearded monks, construction workers, and a smattering of pilgrims. A heavy funk of unwashed male bodies mingled with the sea breeze. As I looked out at the gorgeous blue-green water, I pitied the monks, who must also renounce swimming here.
Not much has changed on Athos since the monks first arrived, more than 1,000 years ago. They have followed the same candle-lit rituals of prayer and chanting even as the Christian world around them—once contained in a single empire—split and transformed over the centuries like a slow detonation. The Great Schism occurred in 1054. Around that same time, Mount Athos saw the arrival of Slavic monks, recently converted from paganism, who became an important presence on the peninsula and remain so today.
The ferry trawled alongside the western coast of Athos. After half an hour, we saw a cluster of buildings topped by the distinctive onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Church: the St. Panteleimon Monastery. It is the most Russia-friendly monastery on Athos, and its monks have posted a video of one of their priests chanting a prayer for “President Vladimir Vladimirovich, the government, and army of our God-protected fatherland.” After the Ukraine invasion in 2022, the monastery’s abbot sent Putin a birthday letter expressing the belief that “Russia under your wise guidance will overcome all difficulties and become a world power.” The monastery had not responded to my request for a visit. Still, my translator—a Macedonian named Goran who speaks fluent Russian as well as Greek—and I were hoping to persuade the monks to chat.
As we walked uphill from the pier, it became apparent that some of the monastery’s buildings were brand-new. Others were still under construction or being renovated, tall cranes hovering above them. Starting in the late 1990s, wealthy Russians, including a coterie of oligarchs close to Putin, began investing huge amounts of money in St. Panteleimon. It is now the largest and most opulent compound in all of Athos. The finances of the monasteries are opaque, and little supervision was introduced even after an abbot with ties to Russian oligarchs was jailed in Greece for embezzlement and fraud in 2011 over a lucrative land deal. (He was acquitted six years later.)
For all the new buildings, I found St. Panteleimon almost empty. Near the main sanctuary, we tried to have a word with a monk who was hurrying past. The man grimaced and brushed us off. We spotted a second monk, and he, too, refused to speak. Goran, who has been to Athos many times, seemed amazed by this rudeness. There is an ancient tradition on Athos of hospitality for pilgrims, and Goran told me he had been warmly received at St. Panteleimon before the war in Ukraine. Not anymore.
Our next stop was the Monastery of Simonopetra, a little farther down the coast. The reception could not have been more different. In the main building, a young monk from Syria named Seraphim escorted us into an anteroom with a magnificent view over the sea. He vanished, reappearing a minute later with a silver tray bearing coffee, water, and tiny glasses of cherry liqueur made by the monks. When we described our experience at St. Panteleimon, Seraphim nodded sadly. He then began telling us about a Russian plot to capture and annex Athos. It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about something that had occurred in the 19th century.
The past is very close on Athos. Clocks there still run on Byzantine time, with the day starting at sunset rather than midnight. The monks live surrounded by frescoes depicting events that happened centuries or even a millennium ago. Most of the clerics have little contact with the outside world, and must seek approval from their superiors to use the internet. Some current events do penetrate. The Ukraine war has had a profound impact, and not just for the Russian monks who gave me the silent treatment; it has begun to erode what the monks call a shared “Athonite consciousness.”
“It’s like a huge scar, this war between two Orthodox nations,” I was told by Elder Elissaios, the abbot of Simonopetra, who met with me the morning after our arrival. “Even if the war ends, the scars will still be painful … We cannot protect against this kind of thing.” I asked him what he meant. He paused for a moment, sipping his coffee and looking out at the blue expanse of the Aegean. “We don’t know how to separate the Church from the nation,” he said. “This is a problem of the Orthodox tradition.”
The Monastery of Simonopetra, on Mount Athos (Yves Gellie / Gamma-Rapho / Getty)
That problem has its origins in the fourth century C.E., when Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and then imposed it on his subjects. For more than 1,000 years afterward, Church and state in Constantinople “were seen as parts of a single organism,” according to the historian Timothy Ware, under a doctrine called sinfonia, or “harmony.” The echoes of this fusion can be seen today in many of the symbols of Orthodox authority, including the crown worn by Bartholomew on formal occasions and the throne on which he sits.
One of the paradoxes of modern Orthodoxy is that its rigidity has become a selling point in the West. Many conservatives complain that mainstream churches—Catholic and Protestant alike—have grown soft and spineless. Some in Europe and the United States openly yearn for a more explicitly Christian political sphere. Conversions to Orthodoxy are on the rise, and most of the converts are not looking for a tolerant message like Patriarch Bartholomew’s. According to Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a scholar of Orthodoxy who teaches at Northeastern University, in Boston, the new converts tend to be right-wing and Russophile, and some speak freely of their admiration for Putin’s “kingly” role. In the U.S., converts are concentrated in the South and Midwest, and some have become ardent online evangelists for the idea that “Dixie,” with its beleaguered patriarchal traditions, is a natural home for Russian Orthodoxy. Some of them adorn their websites with a mash-up of Confederate nostalgia and icons of Russian saints.
Patriarch Kirill is keenly aware of his rising status among American religious conservatives, and he and his deputies have been welcomed warmly during visits to the U.S. (These visits took place before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.) During a visit to Moscow in 2015, Franklin Graham—the son of the late Southern Baptist leader Billy Graham—told Kirill that many Americans wished that someone like Putin could be their president.
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Russian Orthodoxy looks very different to many who grew up inside it. On my last day on Mount Athos, I had a conversation with a young man named Mykola Kosytskyy, a Ukrainian linguistics student and a frequent visitor to Athos. He had brought with him this time a group of 40 Ukrainian pilgrims. Kosytskyy talked about the war—the friends he’d lost, the shattered lives, the role of Russian propaganda. I asked him about the Moscow-linked Church that he’d known all his life, and he said something that surprised me: “The Ukrainian Orthodox Church”—meaning the Church of Kirill and Putin—“is the weapon in this war.”
All through his childhood, he explained, he had heard priests speaking of Russia in language that mixed the sacred and the secular—“this concept of saint Russia, the saviors of this world.” He went on: “You hear this every Sunday from your priest—that this nation fights against evil, that it’s the third Rome, yes, the new Rome. They truly believe this.” That is why, Kosytskyy said, many Ukrainians have such difficulty detaching themselves from the message, even when they see Kirill speaking of their own national leaders as the anti-Christ. Kosytskyy told me it had taken years for him to separate the truth from the lies. His entire family joined the new Ukrainian Church right after Bartholomew recognized it, in 2018. So have millions of other Ukrainians.
But religious ideas die hard, Kosytskyy said. The Russian message lives on in the minds of many Ukrainians, especially older ones. Among the hardest messages to unlearn is that the West represents a threat to Christian values, and that the vehicle for this threat is the humble-looking patriarch in Istanbul.
I first glimpsed Bartholomew on a rainy evening in late November. From where I stood, in the dim and damp recesses of St. George’s cathedral, in Istanbul, the patriarch appeared as a distant figure in a red-and-gold cape, framed by a high wall inset with a dense golden filigree of angels and dragons and foliage. Bartholomew walked forward, clutching a staff, and ascended his patriarchal throne. To anyone who was raised, as I was, on threadbare Protestant rituals, Orthodox services are a bit like dropping acid at the opera. The cathedral was as deep and shadowed as a canyon, full of drifting incense and the thrilling sound of low choral chanting. Sparkling eyes gazed down from icons on the sanctuary walls.
That evening, the church was packed with people who had come from all corners of the Orthodox world for the annual Feast of Saint Andrew, the Phanar’s patron saint. I heard shreds of multiple languages in the crowd—Greek, Serbian, French—and saw three East African priests in brown robes that were cinched with a rope at the waist. As the service came to an end, Bartholomew delivered the traditional blessing for a new archon, a layperson being honored for service to the Church. “Axios! ” he called out three times (“He is worthy”), and each time the faithful repeated after him in unison: “Axios! ”
When the service ended, we filed out into a small flagstone courtyard that underscores the peculiar status of the Phanar. It is revered as the ecclesiastical capital of the Orthodox world, but it is crammed into a space no bigger than a midsize hotel, and surrounded by a Muslim society that has treated it with undisguised hostility. The compound is overshadowed by the minaret of a neighboring mosque, whose PA system loudly proclaims the Islamic call to prayer five times a day. The clergy must change out of their clerical garb every time they leave the compound, lest they offend Muslim sensibilities.
I had a chance to speak with Bartholomew at an evening reception after an electric-violin concert in his honor at a Greek school in Istanbul. It was surprisingly easy to thread my way through a thicket of fawning diplomats, visiting Catholic bishops, and waiters balancing trays of wine and hors d’oeuvres—and there he was, seated in an armchair. He beckoned to me, and as I sat down he gave my forearm a paternal squeeze. Up close, Bartholomew has a rosy, patchy complexion, and his white beard looks almost like a rectangle of smoke spreading south from his chin. He spoke excellent English; when we were interrupted a few times by well-wishers, he conversed with them in French, Greek, and Turkish. He seemed very much at ease, answering my questions about the Church and its traditions as well as about his two highest priorities as patriarch—fostering greater openness to other sects and religions, and protecting the environment. As for the Ukraine war, he said bluntly that “Kirill is allowing himself to be a tool, to be an instrument of Putin.”
I asked him about the political inconvenience of being based in Istanbul. Bartholomew conceded that the Turks were difficult hosts, but added: “It’s better for us to be in a non-Orthodox country. If we were in Greece, we would be a Greek Church. If we were in Bulgaria, we would be a Bulgarian Church. Being here, we can be a supranational Church.” This larger role is the reason the Istanbul Church is known as the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
Broadening the Church’s mission has been a hallmark of Bartholomew’s career. He was born Demetrios Archondonis on the Aegean island of Imvros in 1940, just two decades after Turkey’s Greek Christian population had been decimated by violence and forced exile in the aftermath of the First World War. A local bishop saw his potential and paid for him to go to secondary school. He continued on to seminary and then to study in Rome, where he arrived in 1963 amid the theological ferment of the Second Vatican Council. Bartholomew had a front-row seat, meeting with council delegates, theologians, and other prominent Catholic figures. The Orthodox Church was, if anything, more rigidly traditional than the Roman Church, and Bartholomew seems to have been inspired by the Vatican reformers’ efforts to clear away the cobwebs.
He was no firebrand. But he spoke consistently in favor of modernizing the Church and fostering greater openness. Despite the Church’s overall conservatism, he had a few role models in this, including his godfather, Archbishop Iakovos, who was the Phanar’s representative in North and South America from 1959 to 1996—and one of the only non-Black clerics to accompany Martin Luther King Jr. on his march from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery in 1965.
Bartholomew’s most distinctive effort to “update” the Church is his commitment to environmentalism. In the press, he is sometimes called the Green Patriarch. When, in 1997, he declared that abusing the natural environment was a sin against God, he became the first major religious leader to articulate such a position. Perhaps more controversial—at least to some Orthodox Christians—is Bartholomew’s emphatic call for believers to accept unreservedly the findings of modern science and medicine. He believes in evolution, and regularly reminds his followers that the first life forms emerged on the planet some 4 billion years ago.
Bartholomew and Kirill have at least one thing in common: Both grew up as Christians in the shadow of rigidly secular rulers. But the Turkish republic was mild compared with the Bolshevik regime, whose Marxist faith decreed that religion was illusory and backward—the “opium of the people.” The Bolsheviks were especially keen on destroying the Orthodox Church, because of its deep ties to czarist tradition. In the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the new rulers imprisoned and executed thousands of Orthodox priests and bishops.
In early 2019, Patriarch Bartholomew signed a “tomos of autocephaly” blessing the religious independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. (Onur Coban / Anadolu Agency / Getty)
By the time Kirill was born, in 1946, Joseph Stalin had changed tack, feeling that he needed religion to shore up popular support. He revived the Church in zombified form, an instrument of the state that was massively surveilled and controlled by the security services. When some of the KGB’s archives were exposed in 2014—thanks in part to the brave efforts of the late Gleb Yakunin, a dissident Russian priest who spent years in prison—the collusion of the Church’s leaders was revealed. One of the collaborating clerics, whose code name in the files is Drozdov (“The Thrush”), is alleged to be Patriarch Alexy II, Kirill’s immediate predecessor. Kirill’s name did not come up in the files, but he was the product of a system in which advancement was impossible without the approval of the regime.
As the Soviet Union collapsed, the Church faced a crisis of identity. Kirill was one of its most visible and charismatic leaders, and for a brief moment, he seemed to urge a new and more democratic direction for the Church. But as Russian society descended into chaos and gangsterism, Kirill staked out much more conservative and autocratic views.
By the time Putin came to power, in 1999, some of his old KGB friends had already started getting religion. It made a certain kind of sense that the most devout and pitiless Communists were those who most needed a new faith, and many of them had already spent years collaborating with Church figures. Putin made his first visit to Mount Athos in 2005, attending services at St. Panteleimon and climbing the monastery’s bell tower. A year later, one of his old confidants from the KGB helped found the Russian Athos Society to organize donations to the monasteries there. Putin’s own religious feelings are hard to discern, though he is rumored to have been brought into the Orthodox faith in the ’90s by a priest named Tikhon Shevkunov, who ran a monastery not far from the FSB’s Moscow headquarters.
In 2008, a documentary called The Fall of an Empire: The Lesson of Byzantium was broadcast on Russian state television, not once but three times. The director and star was the same Tikhon Shevkunov. The movie’s thesis was that Byzantium had been irrevocably undermined even before Ottoman armies conquered it in 1453, its religious culture and resolve eroded by the individualism of the encroaching West. Russia was held up as Byzantium’s heir, the natural vehicle of its holy mission. Historians pilloried the show as historically illiterate, but they were missing the point. It wasn’t really about the past. It was a blueprint for the future.
Kirill became patriarch in 2009. Soon afterward, Putin began invoking Orthodoxy when talking about Russia and its role in the world. Thousands of churches have since been built throughout the country, and Putin has made very public visits to Church elders. Kirill “inspired Putin to a great extent, to make him think in civilizational terms,” I was told by Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian-born theologian who spent 10 years as a personal assistant and speechwriter to Kirill before resigning in 2012, unhappy with the Church’s direction. Putin’s loyalists quickly began aping their president’s talk of “Holy Russia” and her “satanic” enemies.
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Putin’s decision to restore Orthodoxy to its old public role was a shrewd one, whatever his personal religious feelings. The Russian empire had collapsed, but its outlines could still be seen in the Russian Orthodox religious sphere, which extended beyond Russia’s borders and as far afield as Mount Athos and even Jerusalem. For a ruler seeking to revive his country’s lost status, the Church was a superb way to spread propaganda and influence.
If Kirill had any illusions about who stood higher in the new sinfonia between Church and state, they were quickly snuffed out. In 2011, he endorsed criticism of corrupt parliamentary elections in Russia. Reports soon appeared in the state-controlled media about luxury apartments belonging to Kirill and his relatives. Other stories began to circulate about billions of dollars in secret bank accounts. One website published a photograph from 2009 in which Kirill could be seen wearing a Breguet watch worth about $30,000. Kirill denied ever wearing it, but after a bungled effort to airbrush it out of the photo, the Church had to admit that the watch was his and make a humiliating apology. Kirill has shown abject loyalty ever since. At a celebration in honor of his first decade as head of the Russian Church, in 2019, he appeared alongside Putin and thanked God and “especially you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.” (My request for comment from Kirill and the Moscow Patriarchate went unanswered.)
For Kirill and Putin, it was not enough to restore the Church’s status in Russia. To reclaim the “Russian world,” they had to wage a much wider battle for influence and prestige, one that would include tarring Bartholomew.
The Russian campaign started in Greece, where there is a natural well of sympathy formed by ancient religious ties and shared enemies. In the mid-2000s, Russian oligarchs began building churches and doling out cash for favors. Bishops who lent holy relics for tours in Russia could make a tidy profit for themselves or their parishes. The Russian investments were followed by a systematic effort to denigrate Patriarch Bartholomew on hundreds of new Greek-language websites, blogs, and Facebook groups, an online offensive documented by Alexandros Massavetas, a Greek journalist, in his 2019 book, The Third Rome. “The message was that Bartholomew is being manipulated by the Turks or the U.S. or the Vatican,” Massavetas told me, “and that only Russia represents the true Orthodox spirit, with Putin as its protector.”
The Phanar overlooked these attacks for years. Bartholomew was working hard to maintain unity at all costs, because he was planning to convene a historic pan-Orthodox gathering that he saw as the crowning achievement of his tenure. The Church had not held a Holy and Great Council for more than 1,000 years, and the planning for this one had begun in 1961. Bartholomew was so keen on making the synod succeed that he accommodated the Russians at every turn. During a preparatory meeting, the Russians objected to proposed language about the Church’s opposition to discrimination and insisted that all references to racial and sexual minorities be deleted. (Kirill seems to see the language of human rights as a tacit endorsement of homosexuality and other supposed sins.) They also demanded that Ukraine’s calls for religious independence be kept off the agenda. Bartholomew caved on it all, even the seating plan.
St. Panteleimon Monastery; monks of Mount Athos (Photo-illustration by Cristiana Couceiro. Sources: Vlas2000 / Shutterstock; Agencja Fotograficzna Caro / Alamy; Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto / Getty; Royal Geographical Society / Getty; Library of Congress selected manuscripts in the Monasteries of Mount Athos)
Then, just a week before the synod’s start date, in 2016—with all the villas booked and ready at a Cretan resort town—the Russians pulled out. They defended their decision by pointing to three much smaller Orthodox bodies (Bulgaria, Georgia, and Antioch) that had withdrawn just beforehand. Although there appear to have been some genuine disagreements about the documents prepared for the meeting, the three smaller Churches have close ties with Moscow, and the Russian move came off as yet another effort to humiliate Bartholomew.
Kirill, though, appears to have miscalculated. His public snub laid bare the divisions in the Church and removed Bartholomew’s incentive to compromise. Archbishop Elpidophoros, who is now the Phanar’s senior bishop in the United States, spoke with me about this episode during a conversation in his Manhattan office, on the Upper East Side. Perhaps the most important consequence of Kirill’s move, he explained, was that it opened the door to giving the Ukrainians what they wanted. “That was the green light,” he said.
The movement for religious independence in Ukraine had been stirring for decades, and it had grown in tandem with the country’s political confrontations with Moscow. As early as 2008, the head of Ukraine’s Moscow-linked Church at the time, Metropolitan Volodymyr, was declaring that the Church and state should be separate—a position that would be unthinkable in Russia. When Viktor Yanukovych, an instrument of the Kremlin, became president of Ukraine in 2010, he made clear that he wanted the Orthodox Church—the faith of 72 percent of Ukraine’s people—back in its cage. A Ukrainian bishop, Oleksandr Drabynko, told me he was called into the ministry of internal affairs one morning in 2013 for a meeting. One of Yanukovych’s officials delivered a blunt message, Drabynko said: “We must push out Volodymyr because we need someone loyal to us.” The official added that with the next Ukrainian election approaching in 2015, “the Church must support our candidate.”
The landmark events of 2014, known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity, were more than just a civilian movement to overthrow a corrupt autocrat. The uprising bred a new sense of independence among Ukrainians, thanks in part to the role played by the Orthodox Church. Though some priests supported Yanukovych and his government, many others openly backed the revolt. When police attacked protesters in Kyiv’s central square, one bishop allowed them to shelter from the police in his nearby cathedral.
Russia’s brazenly neocolonial response to the 2014 revolution—the seizure of Crimea—infuriated Ukrainians and supercharged the movement for a religious divorce from Moscow. In October 2018, just weeks after his tense meeting with Kirill in Istanbul, Bartholomew dissolved the 1686 edict that had given Moscow religious control over Ukraine. He also set in motion the process that would lead to recognition of a new Ukrainian Church, one that would be under Bartholomew’s—not Moscow’s—jurisdiction.
The Russians were furious, and Kirill severed ties with the Phanar. Worldwide, Moscow began behaving as if it had already become the third Rome. A vivid illustration was provided by events in Africa, where one of the most ancient Orthodox patriarchates is based (in Alexandria, Egypt). Kirill founded a new branch of the Russian Orthodox Church and began targeting the existing Orthodox parishes there, whose leader had aligned himself with Bartholomew. “Through Facebook and Instagram they approach our followers,” Metropolitan Gregorios, a Greek bishop who has been based in Cameroon since 2004, told me. “They begin by sending money. They attach everyone to them, show that Russia is rich, show that they can get more money.”
Gregorios, who is 62, spent two hours with me in the lobby of an Athens hotel as he described Russia’s religious efforts across Africa, which he said are funded by the Wagner mercenary force. Orthodox priests are more vulnerable to bribery than their Roman Catholic peers, Gregorios explained, because they are allowed to marry, and many have large families to provide for. “So the Russians say, ‘We’ll give education for your kids.’ They bring a motorcycle, a car. They say, ‘The Greeks just give bicycles.’ And they double the salaries we pay.” Last year, he said, he lost six priests in his jurisdiction: “They got approached by the Russians and offered 300 euros a month.” Gregorios later shared with me some of the documents that priests under Russia’s thumb must sign, swearing loyalty to the patriarch of Moscow “to my dying day.”
The Russian Church has made similarly aggressive moves in Turkey, the Balkans, and elsewhere. Russia’s secret services appear to be involved in some of these operations. In September, the North Macedonian government expelled a high-ranking Russian priest and three Russian diplomats, accusing them of spying. A week later, the same priest, Vassian Zmeev, was expelled from Bulgaria. According to Nikolay Krastev, a journalist in Sofia, Zmeev appears to have been organizing efforts to divide the Balkan Orthodox Churches and shore up opposition to the new Ukrainian Church. All of this bullying has had its effect: Only four Orthodox branches (out of about 17, depending on how you count) have recognized the new Ukrainian Church approved by Bartholomew.
In late 2021, weary of the conflict and worried that it was damaging all of Orthodoxy, Bartholomew reached out to the Russians—and was rebuffed. The Moscow Patriarchate “sent us a message saying that there is no way we will engage in any dialogue,” Archbishop Elpidophoros recalled. The Russians, he went on, declared that “the wound is so deep that we will need at least two generations to overcome.” The message may not have been entirely sincere. Russia was already planning what it believed would be a much quicker resolution to its Ukraine problems, one that did not include dialogue.
The Monastery of the Caves, in Kyiv, may be the most important Christian site in the Slavic world. Founded around 1050 C.E. by a monk from Mount Athos, it is a large complex of golden-domed churches, bell towers, and underground tunnels, ringed by stone walls and set on a hill overlooking the Dnieper River, in the center of the city. In the early days of the Russian invasion, in February 2022, there were rumors of a plan to parachute Russian special forces into the monastery grounds. Welcomed by friendly Orthodox priests, the invaders would quickly move on to the government buildings nearby and gain control of the capital.
The rumors were false, but they sounded plausible to many Ukrainian ears. The Russian military and its proxies had begun using Orthodox monasteries and churches as bases as soon as they arrived in eastern Ukraine in 2014, and have continued to do so over the past two years in occupied areas. They have even publicized the fact, in an apparent effort to show that the Church is on their side. Many priests, including prominent figures, did support Russia. The senior cleric at the Monastery of the Caves, Metropolitan Pavel, was well known for his pro-Moscow sympathies.
But the violence of the 2022 invasion united Ukrainians, and Kirill’s efforts to sprinkle it with holy water—describing those who opposed the Russians as “evil forces” and praising the “metaphysical significance” of the Russian advance—made him a widely hated figure. Many Ukrainians now view the Moscow-linked branch, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, with deep suspicion. The Ukrainian security services have carried out regular raids on its churches and monasteries over the past two years, including the Monastery of the Caves. Dozens of priests have been arrested and charged with espionage and other crimes. This past October, Ukraine’s Parliament approved a measure that could ban the Russia-backed Church altogether. That Church still has more parishes in Ukraine than its newer, independent rival, but its long-term prospects appear grim.
The loss of all of Ukrainian Orthodoxy would be a serious blow for Kirill. At its peak, Ukraine accounted for about a third of the parishes claimed by the Russian Orthodox Church. Ukraine also has a much higher rate of churchgoing than Russia, where actual piety seems to be rare—a fact that sits awkwardly with Kirill’s broadsides against the moral depravity of the West. Barely two months after the invasion, a well-known Russian priest and blogger named Pavel Ostrovsky—who was not ordinarily a regime critic—unleashed a tirade on Telegram: “Some argue that Russia is a stronghold of everything noble and good, which is fighting against world evil, satanism, and paganism,” he wrote. “What is all this nonsense? How can one be a noble stronghold with a 73 percent rate of divorce in families, where drunkenness and drug addiction are rampant, while theft and outright godlessness flourish?”
It is tempting to conclude that Russia’s efforts to capture world Orthodoxy will prove to be a losing bet. Religious leaders of all kinds have denounced Kirill’s embrace of the war, including Pope Francis, who famously told him not to be “Putin’s altar boy.” It may even be, as Archbishop Elpidophoros told me, that “the Patriarchate of Moscow is not a Church” so much as a convenient vehicle for nationalist ideology. The Russian people, he assured me, are the foremost victims of this religious tyranny.
The archbishop may be right about the Moscow Patriarchate: that it’s not a Church, not in the sense that we have long accepted in the West. That said, it’s not just an arm of the Kremlin. It is something more dangerous, a two-headed beast that can summon ancient religious loyalty even as it draws on all the resources of a 21st-century police state: internet trolls, abundant cash, the tacit threat of violence. Perhaps the most troubling possibility is that Kirill’s Church, with its canny blend of politics and faith, turns out to be better adapted to survival in our century than mainstream Churches are.
There are certainly dissenters from Kirill’s jingoistic line among the 40,000 Orthodox priests in Russia. But most clerics are pliant, and a vocal minority are even more extreme than their patriarch. Andrei Tkachev, an archpriest who was born in Ukraine and now lives in Moscow, has become notorious for sermons in which he asserts that “a warrior’s death is best of all.” He has millions of followers on social media. Other priests have reinterpreted Christian doctrine in ways that recall the Crusades. Online, you can easily find videos of Igor Cheremnykh, another well-known priest, asserting that the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” is meant to apply to the behavior only of civilians, not of soldiers. Cyril Hovorun, Kirill’s former assistant, knows many of these priests personally. He calls them “turbo‑Z Orthodox.” (Z is used as a symbol of Russia’s war.) Some of them were aligned with or even personally close to Yevgeny Prigozhin, the late oligarch and leader of the Wagner Group. “This monster has outgrown its creators,” Hovorun told me. “It’s a Frankenstein.”
The day after I met Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul, I went for a walk near the Phanar. The Feast of Saint Andrew was over, and the ancient streets were no longer full of pilgrims. A cold drizzle fell. As I walked past the relics of dead civilizations—Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman—I found myself wondering if Orthodoxy would ultimately split into two religions, or just weaken itself through bickering, like the Christians who once ruled Constantinople.
It may be that Kirill and his angry zealots represent the last sparks of a dying flame. This is what Bartholomew has been assuring his flock: that he is bringing the Church into the future, while Kirill is holding on to the past. But as a patriarch in Istanbul, he must also know that the arc of history doesn’t always bend the way we want it to.
This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Clash of the Patriarchs.”
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