“No matter what they do to us, whatever decisions they make, we will still love everyone equally. We will love God, we will love our land, our people, our government, our army. We will love all people and pray for them. Because our Church is the Church of love. It was founded by God, Who Himself is Love” (Metropolitan Onufry Berezovsky, Primate of Ukrainian Orthodox Church [UOC], October 22, 2023. Official UOC website).
“When we are called Banderites, we are proud of it… For some, this name is offensive, but for us it is an honor. Because our land gave birth to such glorious heroes who once said that the time will come when one will say ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ and millions will answer ‘Glory to the Heroes!” (“Metropolitan” Epifaniy Dumenko, Head of the ‘Orthodox Church of Ukraine’ [OCU], April 11, 2019. Official OCU website).
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On August 20, 2024 the Ukrainian parliament (Rada) voted on the second reading of its Bill 8371 establishing a nationwide ban on the thousand-year-old, multi-million member Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Its first reading won overwhelming parliamentary support in October, 2023, although some MPs, including Artem Dmytruk, spoke out against it as an unconscionable violation of rights. The second reading passed by a vote of 265-29-4. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky signed the bill as Law No. 3894-IX on August 24, 2024. In his national address after the signing, Zelensky referred to members of the UOC with same epithet his predecessor Petro Poroshenko had frequently used for them: “Moscow demons.” A full analysis of the law was published soon thereafter by Elizabeth A. Clark, Director of the International Center for Law and Religion at Brigham Young University, and Dmytro Vovk, Visiting Professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. They stipulated that law 3894-IX as a whole “contradicts international human rights law.” Among its faults noted were lack of impartiality and justification in light of already-existing criminal law; heavily disproportionality and use of collective punishment; failure to set requirements for the state to prove criminal activities; lack of proper evidence for the state’s own claims about the UOC; stipulations of impossible-to-fulfill standards; use of “confusing and vague language that lacks legal precision; punishment of an institution for having a certain historical lineage. The list goes on. In short, Clark and Vovk wrote, it simply “does not comply with international standards of freedom of religion or belief.”
On a day to day basis, little has changed since the law’s passage from what was already going on since the 2010s: Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) bishops, priests and parishioners enduring violent attacks and sieges on their parish churches without retaliation. The attacks continue to be led by internal forces tied since late 2018 to an entity styled “The Orthodox Church of Ukraine” (OCU), a government-sponsored organization created in December of that year and addressed in detail below. Such attacks have been documented for years by Ukrainian journalists and others putting themselves at risk.
Law 3894-IX initiated a countdown beginning on September 23, 2024 requiring full UOC self-dissolution within nine months, yet still the violence persists. In just one example, on October 17, an OCU military clergyman leading a group of masked assailants wielding tear gas pistols seized Archangel Michael Cathedral of the UOC in Cherkasy after having twice laid siege to the church that same day. Ten UOC parishioners were hospitalized with resulting burns and injuries. The attackers physically assaulted the church’s bishop, Metropolitan Theodosy Snigirev, firing tear gas into his eyes at point blank range and striking him on the head. Seizing his bishop’s staff, they used it to beat the UOC parishioners. Snigirev was hospitalized with corneal burns and a concussion. The attack was caught on a clear video. Notwithstanding the obvious, press forums such as the official “Religious Information Service of Ukraine” claimed Snigirev staged the attack on himself. This episode is a microcosm of years of analogous occurrences. In this essay, I will address the contours of what is happening and why, keeping an eye on both historical and contemporary lenses. By the end, the implications of the contrast between the epigraph’s two quotes should become clear.
As a history professor in the United States specializing in religion and culture, I have been watching the religious realm in Ukraine for a number of years and marveling at the extent to which a large swath of the country’s native citizens have been flatly denied their guaranteed free exercise of religion, more recently under the cover of a horrifying war. To my amazement, I have also seen most of my own country’s press swing between ignoring the debacle and facilitating the process. Whenever one looked to the newspapers of record in recent years, the resulting picture has been remarkably similar. A typical example of facilitation is Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jillian Kay Melchior’s March 22, 2024 article contending that persecution is merely “a narrative—the product of a public relations campaign—[that] sounds bad. But it’s false.”
As noted above, it is not false according to manifold evidence from the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and others detailing violent persecution against the UOC going back years before the Russian Federation’s brutal and illegal 2022 invasion. The crucial point is not just that persecution is occurring. It is that its duration puts the lie to all characterizations that the UOC ban is a response to supposed wartime disloyalty (the official explanation). Consequences cannot precede their antecedents. If not that, then what is the motivation for a government turning against millions of its own citizens’ freedom of conscience at a time—a defensive war–when simple logic would indicate they need all the internal unity they can get?
Before considering that question, I must state clearly what this essay is not about. It is not about the Russian Federation, its grievous wartime conduct, its politicians, its military, its religious institutions, its media or its extensive propaganda. It is not that these things are unimportant. They are very important and have rightly received significant critique, sometimes even by well qualified people. They are not addressed here because the origin of everything below long predates 2022. Where the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s current plight is concerned, that is key. One additional point is also important: the arguments in this essay are based exclusively on evidence from public records.
Having said that, a substantive clue to motivation is found in the nature of the entity into which the Ukrainian government and other actors have tried to force UOC members over a span of time closing in on six years. The aforementioned “Orthodox Church in Ukraine” (OCU) is a state-sponsored entity birthed in December 2018 by stitching together several mutually antagonistic splinter groups operating in entrenched, decades-long schism from the UOC. The largest of these groups was the self-styled “Kiev Patriarchate,” led by a highly controversial figure who, by the mid-1990s, had become known as a blood and soil Ukrainian far nationalist: the deposed bishop Filaret Denysenko.
The OCU’s political bloodline flows directly from Ukraine’s former President Petro Poroshenko (in office 2014-2019) under the open sponsorship of state actors outside Ukraine, including in the United States, Great Britain, and others. A significant series of officially-publicized meetings charting the development of that organization over the years featured former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland; former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; then-U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden; former U.S. Ambassador to both Ukraine and Greece, Geoffrey Pyatt; former U.S. Ambassador-at-large for Religious Freedom Samuel Brownback, and others, all employing a very important bishop in Istanbul, Turkey, Patriarch Bartholomew Archontonis, whose role seems inexplicable. Some of the latter’s subordinates also acted in important capacities in the project. Of note are the bishops Emmanuel Adamakis and Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, both awarded the Ukrainian Order of Prince Yaroslav the Wise by former Ukrainian President Poroshenko at the completion of the OCU project for having “played pivotal roles in garnering Ukraine her own local canonical Church,” in the phrasing of the official website of the patriarch’s ethnic Ukrainian jurisdiction in the U.S.
Combinations of these figures began to meet in documented encounters starting in 2013, although evidence shows some of them meeting as far back as 2009. These encounters picked up pace in 2018, particularly in the lead-up to the OCU’s creation late that year. For example, Mr. Biden met with Denysenko, his onetime protégé, Epifaniy Dumenko, and his then- lieutenant, Yevstratiy Zorya (both of whom we will meet again below), and others, at least twice in 2018, including in Washington, DC on September 18, 2018. A Penn Biden Center tweet publicized the meeting with Denysenko and Dumenko, showing a photo with both flanking Mr. Biden. It was at that same meeting where Denysenko was shown awarding Biden the Order of St. Volodymyr the Great for his work on behalf of the OCU cause.
The broader set of figures, or their successors, continued to meet thereafter. Following the creation of the OCU, heads of various local Orthodox churches saw publicized visits by others in the cast of government figures attempting to persuade them to officially recognize the new entity. The head of the Orthodox Church of Greece, Archbishop Ieronymos Liapis, attested in an interview with the Greek site Kathimerini that U.S. officials directly requested him to recognize Dumenko and the OCU, which he did. A few others followed on the same basis, notably the patriarch Theodore Khoreftakis of Alexandria in North Africa, theretofore a vociferous advocate of the UOC.
Although the UOC and OCU’s names are confusingly similar, their essential difference is a crucial element in the broader imbroglio. In fact, the difference suggests why some figures might welcome the elimination of the UOC and the invention of the OCU as its replacement in Ukraine’s cultural and historical memory. More on that below, but first, a little about what has happened to the UOC as a whole in recent years.
Well over a thousand UOC congregations have had their churches forcibly transferred to the OCU through improper property re-registrations. These re-registrations have not infrequently been accompanied by violence. Attorneys and human rights officials have noted a common method used whereby large numbers of non-parishioners would appear on the scene at parish meetings and then sign property transfer documents brought with them against the parishioners’ will. The procedure often ended with the parishioners padlocked out of their buildings. A good number of those acts have been documented by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights going back before 2019. As an example, its March 2024 report, which accounts only for the period between December 1, 2023 and February 29, 2024, reads: “Clergymen and parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to experience intimidation,“ and “[We] recorded six cases across five regions where groups of people forcefully broke into UOC churches, justifying their actions with decisions from local authorities to register new communities of the (OCU) at the same address as existing UOC communities.” Additionally, “On 28 December 2023, a group of persons attacked the Kazan [UOC] parish in Ladyzhin, Vinnytsia region, with at least two individuals in the attack claiming to be active servicemen of the Ukrainian armed forces. Police officers present at the site did not intervene. Subsequently, on 9 January 2024, a group of about 20 individuals wearing camouflage uniforms without insignia used two heavy construction vehicles to break the gates and fence of the [UOC parish] and forced their way into the UOC church. They beat the clergymen and two male parishioners…. Most victims did not submit complaints [to police] because they feared retaliation, such as threats from neighbors or dismissal from their jobs.” Going back several years, this is the tip of the documented iceberg.
The OCU leadership’s relationship to these seizures is well illustrated by its bishop and aforementioned former Denysenko aide, Yevstratiy Zorya, publicly congratulating on his Telegram page those who broke open the doors of the UOC’s Transfiguration Cathedral in Bila Tservka after the city council forcibly re-registered the church to the OCU in the summer of 2023. A few months earlier, in March, OCU priests (and, unfortunately, some Ukrainian Greek Catholic priests), had been documented participating in an especially brutal group assault of the UOC Bishop Nikita Storozhuk and about two-hundred gathered congregants at the Church of Nativity of Christ in Ivano-Frankivsk as part of the forcible transfer of yet another parish church to the OCU. The center of Kievan Rus monasticism, the Kiev Caves Lavra, has likewise been almost completely confiscated from the UOC’s monks by government diktat, alongside scores of other monasteries and church establishments. The property grabs have inspired endorsements from numerous OCU clerics and members whereas the head of the OCU steadfastly manages to deny there have been any seizures at all.
The UOC now looks annihilation in the face. As noted above, law No. 3894-IX bans the church nationally on claims of wartime disloyalty. It does so despite the UOC’s massive, ongoing aid to the Ukrainian war defense cause through volunteer soldiers, charity, and material. Official numbers from 2022 alone, the year of the Russian Federation’s invasion, show the UOC donating 180 tons of humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nearly one million dollars to the Ukrainian army. Many members of Ukraine’s military defense forces are themselves members of the UOC. The church’s national leader, the metropolitan Onufry Berezovsky, has publicly supported his country’s defense and wholly repudiated the Russian Federation’s invasion since the day it started. He also presided over his church’s full clergy-laity council that officially changed its statues to sever centuries-old canonical ties with the Russian Church in May 2022.
Under Law No. 3894-IX, UOC parishes refusing government orders to join the OCU by the summer of 2025 will be de-classified as religious entities. Since the government already owns and rents out many UOC properties, it will simply cancel the congregations’ leases, terminate their tax benefits, and confiscate their assets. Mykyta Poturaiev, head of the government’s Committee for Humanitarian and Information Policy and chair of the parliamentary committee that drafted Law No. 3894-IX stated at one point, without irony, that the dispossessed congregations would still be “free” to assemble and reincorporate as a business. Indeed. Historians of the Soviet Union will recognize the very methods of 1920s Bolshevism. So, too will they recognize the move to create and substitute a doppelganger church in place of one targeted for obliteration. The Bolsheviks called their parallel organization “The Living Church.” Mr. Poturaiev and current actors call theirs the OCU.
OCU bishop Yevstratiy Zorya’s above-mentioned support of violence against the UOC brings us back to the OCU as elephant in the room. All who defend the legitimacy of banning an entire religious institution fall back on the claim that the OCU is the same as the UOC, only state approved. But if the UOC and the OCU are the same, why have millions of average Ukrainians refused to abandon the first for the second to the point of suffering overt persecution? For the faithful, besides simply wanting to worship where they please, a big part of the reason is that most Orthodox national churches around the world formally consider the OCU an illegitimate sect. A good number, including the metropolitan Sawa Hrycuniak of Warsaw, primate of the neighboring autocephalous Polish Orthodox Church, have declared in no uncertain terms that the OCU’s leader is not even a real, ordained priest, nor are many others within the organization. The renowned Greek theologian Anastasios Yannoulatos, archbishop and primate of the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania, one with no close relationship to either the Ukrainian or Russian Church, formally agreed with the aforementioned view, laying out an assessment based on canon law and history. As such, those who join the OCU group would be leaving communion with the vast majority of the world’s Orthodox churches to take up schismatic status and partake of unrecognized sacraments.
But another reason many in the UOC steadfastly refuse to switch to the OCU is of even more direct concern to Americans, religious or otherwise: Along with other key figures, the OCU’s top leader assertively champions a movement that can best be analogized in American history to the second Ku Klux Klan.
Forty-five year old Epifaniy Dumenko, former chief protégé of Filaret Denysenko when in the Kiev Patriarchate and head of the OCU since it claimed full independence in December 2018, wasted little time after his enthronement to remind everyone that he is “proud” to be called a “Banderite,” as quoted in the present essay’s second epigraph. He did this in an April 11, 2019 public address given at the Lviv National Agricultural University, a talk publicized by the OCU press service. The words are worth repeating because they suggest the extent of his support of Stepan Bandera, the man whom he called “the genius of the Ukrainian national and nation-building spirit.” Dumenko told his listeners, “our land has given birth to such glorious heroes who once said that the time will come, and one will say ‘Glory to Ukraine!’ [Slava Ukraini!], And millions will answer ‘Glory to the Heroes!’” He went on there to offer Bandera’s vision as a guide for the future, adding, “You and I have waited for this time, so we should be happy that we are the heirs of our heroes and have the opportunity to understand and continue what they mapped out.” Who was Stepan Bandera and what does championing him imply about a future vision for Ukraine, including Ukrainian Christianity?
Although whitewashed during the Cold War as an anti-communist “freedom fighter” and reverse propagandized by the merciless Soviets, meticulous archival scholarship has placed the historical Bandera in extensive relief. Scholars of interwar and WWII Ukrainian history such as Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe of Freie Universität Berlin— a former fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—the distinguished University of Toronto scholar Paul R. Magocsi, and others, have assessed a swath of evidence showing Bandera to be one of Ukrainian history’s most brutal and notorious terrorist radicals. Bandera was onetime leader of the dominant faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-b), itself Ukraine’s most violent political racialist movement of the twentieth century.
Back in 2010, forums like The New York Times was publishing articles testifying to Banderism’s growing influence in Western Ukraine. In one, Clifford Levy’s “Hero of Ukraine Splits Nation, Inside and Out,” from March 1, the author described Bandera statues popping up on the landscape, noting that “in Eastern Ukraine and as far away as Moscow and Brussels, Mr. Bandera is reviled as a Nazi puppet.” It is the “and Brussels” part of the sentence at issue here. The problem of the growing cult of Bandera was, in other words, already well known in political centers in Brussels and across the Atlantic in 2010. So was its entanglement with particular religio-national ideologies in Ukraine, such as those espoused by Denysenko’s Kiev Patriarchate. None of this was forgotten in 2019, right after the OCU’s creation. Just one of many articles in the mainline press covering the ultra- nationalist Banderite movement’s social authority appeared in the famous Nation magazine on February 22 of that year. Written by a Ukrainian refugee journalist who came to the US in 1990, its title and subtitle were telling: “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right are on the March in Ukraine: Five Years after the Maidan uprising, anti-Semitism and fascist-inflected ultranationalism are rampant.” During that 2014 Maidan uprising, The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola had written from the scene that Bandera had become “the single biggest icon of crisis on the ground,” noting that “some of the pro-Western nationalists still occupying Kiev’s independence square known as Maidan are black-clad far right storm troopers who idolize Bandera.”
As a leader in the OUN, it was Bandera who cemented the thought of Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi and Dmytro Dontsov as foundational for the group in the 1930s and 1940s. Mikhnovs’kyi directly advocated cleansing a linguistically and culturally homogeneous state for the Ukrainian “race” free of Poles, Jews, Russians, and others. Racial eugenicist Dontsov translated Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism into Ukrainian and was the first to translate and publish portions of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in 1926. Dontsov analogized the Führer to Christ, anointing Bandera his Ukrainian parallel. The influence showed.
In a 1936 legal trial, Bandera directly testified that he was the Providnyk (absolute leader) of a Ukrainian fascist state. His OUN followers acclaimed him as such, conferring on him what the Germans called Führerprinzip status. Bandera used that status to order the terrorizing and destruction of well over a hundred thousand people. With important limits, there are parallels to today in that the Bandera OUN featured numerous Ukrainian priest members who supported and even joined violent efforts. This is in no small part because of the strongly mystical element to Bandera’s brand of fascism. The nationalism of Bandera’s generation of OUN members was grounded in that mysticism, and in its spread through an institutional religion, something which Rossolinski-Liebe has thoroughly documented. The same scholar also shows that this mystical fascism undergirds the cult that currently exists around Bandera’s memory.
It was Bandera’a good friend and associate, Stepan Lemkavs’kyi, who wrote Ten Commandments of a Ukrainian Nationalist, whose values the organization referred to “a new religion, the religion of the Ukrainian Nationalist.” This decalogue’s seventh provision gave religious sanction to wholescale moral inversion, stating: “You should not hesitate to commit the greatest crime if the good of the cause demands it.” The OUN planned to prop up an official church for use in building a new state on these terms, a church in which “the teaching should be about liberation, the history of Ukraine… the true Ukraine, Her Heroes….”
In its original Krakow resolutions of April 1941 found in Central State Archives of Public Organizations of Ukraine, the OUN—already allied with both Mussolini and Croatia’s Ustaša—adopted the infamous right-arm salute directly from the League of Ukrainian Fascists along with the LUF’s greeting, “Glory to Ukraine!” (Slava Ukraini!). At the time, Ukrainian Catholic bishop Andrei Sheptyts’kyi denounced the slogan as intentionally mutilating the traditional Slavic greeting “Glory to Jesus Christ!” (Slava Isusu Christu!). Months later, on December 9, 1941, Bandera wrote to German Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg: “The Ukrainian nationalists believe that the German and Ukrainian interests in Eastern Europe are identical,” and the OUN would “bring the Ukrainian masses spiritually close to contemporary Germany,” adding that his nationalists would “spiritually cure the Ukrainian youth” in the Soviet Union.
Bandera co-authored the OUN document “Struggle and Activities” in 1941 that guided OUN policy on enemies in the Holocaust. In 1943, the OUN formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UIA/ alt. UPA) as a direct unit in Adolf Hitler’s army. Many of its members had served in the Waffen SS Galizien Division. Numerous scholars and official governments, including Poland, the State of Israel, and others, have recognized the UIA as killing over a hundred thousand Jews, Poles, Russians, Roma, and many Ukrainians speaking the languages of those peoples, women and children among them. This was, in other words, part of what we know as the Holocaust in Ukraine.
OCU leader Dumenko’s 2019 public adulation of Bandera came at the very university where the latter had studied and which today assists in proliferating his cult. With a Banderite-inflected form of mystical fascism, that is the kind of “alternative” entity, the OCU, into which the legal and political apparatus of Ukraine is trying to force millions of Christians at the threat of having their religious property liquidated and their religious freedom ended.
The ideological tenacity of Banderism as tied to the statist OCU provides some clarity on the question of why the Ukrainian government would still pursue the OCU’s replacement of the UOC even now, when such a move would seemingly invite disastrous effects on the internal morale and social integrity of millions of Ukrainians during this miserable war. The aspect of Banderite fascism most useful for the OCU’s work is its judgment on which Ukrainians are really Ukrainians, both in mentality and, under the surface of the ideology, perhaps racially. Within the Dontsev-Mikhnovs’kyi model embedded in Banderism, the goal is always “liberating” true, racial Ukrainian territory from the contamination of supposed occupiers, i.e., “the other,” most numerously symbolized by Russian language speaking Ukrainians and those connected to the UOC. There is, of course, a significant question begged here about Jews in Ukraine, one important enough to warrant a digression.
It is estimated that less than 40,000 of a core Jewish population remain in Ukraine. The country’s total population—without accounting for the continued refugee flow– is around 41 million people. Are Jews not considered a threat to those factions of modern Ukrainian nationalisms built around Banderism? Put differently, in post-Soviet revised ideology, could any of them possibly be grafted onto a Banderite identity? Given the overt neo-Nazi rhetoric and fascist symbolism in contemporary strands of Banderite-centered nationalism, this would seem unlikely at first glance.
However, Rossoliński Liebe has demonstrated that for Dontsev and many others in the 1930s and 1940s, identification of Jews as agents of Russian/Soviet imperialism was intertwined with the OUN’s racial hatred of Jews. Once the Soviet Union fell, Ukrainian Jews shed one of those identifiers. For the small remaining number, loyalty as Ukrainian nationalists who did not overly challenge Banderism could seemingly take some of the target off their backs. Still, given the Banderite history of openly antisemitic murder, how could even a profession of nationalist faith be acceptable—for either side? It could be if the historical memory of that earlier antisemitism was somehow erased from the current equation.
After the fall of communism, such erasure is exactly what happened. This is shown not only by Rossolinski- Liebe but also by other historians, one being Per Anders Rudling of Lund University in Sweden. They have described a prolific strand of ideological historians that arose both in Ukraine and in the influential Ukrainian diaspora who rewrote OUN history, especially as it concerned Jews.
Coalescing around the turn of the new millennium, these historical revisionists were supported by post-Orange Revolution Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko (r. 2005-2010). That cadre, Rudling argues, “presented the [historical] OUN and UPA as pluralistic and inclusive organizations, which not only rescued Jews during the Holocaust, but invited them into their ranks to fight shoulder to shoulder against Hitler and Stalin. This mythical narrative relied partly on the OUN’s own post-war forgeries, aimed at covering up the organization’s problematic past.” On this reading, some of the relatively small contingent of contemporary Jews in Ukraine could be allowed a pass by the specifically Ukrainian form of modern neo-Nazism because rather than their ancestors having been slaughtered, they were suddenly, retroactively and posthumously granted full membership in the Ukrainian fascist state under the Providnik Bandera[!]
Rudling also noted that quite a few of Ukraine’s academics and politicians have engaged in the fictionalized inversion process. One important example is military historian and former OUN member Lev Shankovsk, who wrote that no antisemitism existed in Ukraine but that “there exists a myth about Ukrainian anti-Semitism promoted by Moscow.” Another is Taras Hunczak, who wrote that the OUN and Ukrainian nationalist underground “readily accepted Jews into their ranks and sheltered them from Nazi persecution, despite the popular perception of Jews as promoters of communism.”
In the Ukrainian diaspora, particularly Canada, certain established historians have flatly denied that the UIA killed any Jews at all due to their being Jews. In October, 2009 at the annual Danyliw Research Seminar in Contemporary Ukrainian Studies, this point was made when University of Ottawa emeritus professor Petro Potichnyj argued that “Jews killed by the UPA were killed because they were communists,” i.e. never because they were Jews.
Ironically, Ukrainian antisemitism itself was being unleashed by the Orange Revolution at the same time its historical existence in the OUN was being denied. Rudling published a 2006 article on the Interregional Academy of Human Resources (known by the Ukrainian acronym MAUP), that describes how the institution was directly connected to the international Ku Klux Klan. Former KKK “Grand Wizard” David Duke himself taught courses there. Former Ukrainian President Yushchenko served on its Board of Directors.
The resulting mythmaking has shown great strength, though perhaps not for those unfortunate Jews in modern Ukraine who experience persecution for not going along with this neo-Banderite mythology. In modern Ukrainian politics, the revisionist OUN myth might, however, help explain cases like Ukrainian born Israeli-Cypriot Igor Kolomoyskyi of Jewish background, who is both political patron of president Zelensky and direct funder for over a decade of several of the openly neo-Nazi military regiments engrafted into the Ukrainian army, especially the infamous wolfsangel and swastika-bearing Azov Battalion. Back in September, 2014 Newsweek had published a story titled “Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing ‘ISIS-Style’ War Crimes” centering on Amnesty International’s report of Kolomoyskyi-funded militias beheading people in Eastern Ukraine.
Inside Ukraine now, Eastern Ukrainians tied to the UOC best fit the bill as the largest remaining other sought out by Banderism. Just as in 1930s, Eastern Ukrainians still seem to be the most resistant to the Banderite ideology. Likewise, Galician-oriented West Ukraine was the heart of Banderism then, just as it is the heart of the OCU’s base now. As such, the UOC itself is made to collectively symbolize that other and, likewise, suffer the collective punishment meted out to scapegoats. Current punishment, thankfully, has not yet come in the form of physical extermination, but instead occurs though domestic terrorism, internet manipulation, and the postmodern genre of erasure and canceling, a de facto erasure given de jure status with Law No. 3894-IX.
There is another level to this that appears to go beyond Banderite-inspired internal war aims. The OCU leadership’s ideology seems to serve what looks like a broader hope to re-map Ukraine as a state in perpetual hostility to all who do not comply with this vision of the country as a wedge against its East. On this view, spreading Banderism through the state- legitimized OCU (and parts of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), while simultaneously working to extend the duration of the war would be a very cynical, but not unfathomable strategy. While one hesitates to consider such an intention, notorious actions by political figures like the former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson invite its consideration.
Beyond Johnson’s documented role at the failed peace negotiations attempted early on by Ukraine and Russia in 2022, he had no qualms on May 24, 2024 hosting representatives of the Azov battalion in London’s Parliament buildings, lionizing them there as “heroes.” Doubtless international white supremacist organizations that idolize and supported Azov over the years agree with that assessment.
In reality, there seems to have been remarkably little real time effort expended to obscure the connections between foreign influence like this and Ukraine’s internal religious policies about the Orthodox Church, even when they involved overt fascist symbolism and rhetoric. Obviously aware of the open Banderism advocated within the schismatic Ukrainian religious entities, State Department representatives publicly lauded their elevation the center of Ukrainian religious culture in official announcements. In one case, the Acting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Heather Nauert, publicly went so far as to tie the U.S. to specific religious policy in another country, saying the U.S. affirms “the ability of Ukraine’s Orthodox religious leaders and followers to pursue autocephaly according to their beliefs.” That statement on “pursuing autocephaly” was posted on the State Department website on September 25, 2018, just weeks before Dumenko, Denysenko, Zorya, and others met with then-Vice President Biden in Washington.
Further, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo himself as much as asserted in an official State Department announcement in 2020 that the American government officially endorsed the OCU and labeled it a marker of a “sovereign, independent, Ukraine.” Pompeo did so without explaining how that sentiment could co-exist with a subsequent sentence: “The United States maintains its strong support for religious freedom, including the freedom for members of religious groups to govern their religion according to their beliefs, without external interference.” In a subsequent January 3, 2021 tweet featuring himself seated with Epifaniy Dumenko, Pompeo advertised his own role in pressing for broad recognition of the OCU following its creation.
In 2019, just a few months after the OCU had been created, the leader of Patriarch Bartholomew’s American archdiocese, the archbishop Elpidophoros Lambriniadis, handed the archdiocese’s “Athenagoras Human Rights Award” to Dumenko. Formal congratulations on this occasion came from of the same Mike Pompeo, (who again met with Dumenko on October 23). Pompeo’s tweet on the event included the comment “Your defense of #religiousfreedom for all Ukrainians is commendable, and I’m glad to see you were honored with the Athenagoras Human Rights Award for it. Congratulations – well deserved!” It is worth noting that the same award in 2015 was given to Joe Biden.
Makary Maletich, the head of one of the two major Ukrainian religious organizations previously in schism from the UOC that were sewn together to create the OCU, attested in a Ukrainian interview on December 15, 2018 that the OCU’s creation was an initiative of particular foreign governments and their diplomatic corps: “Diplomats met with Philaret [Denysenko] and me. There were ambassadors for the U.S., Great Britain, and others. The meetings were held to find out whether we are ready to receive a tomos.” Two days earlier, Denysenko was advertised as having met with Jack Devine, former Acting Director and Associate Director of the CIA, thanking him for supporting Ukraine’s effort to create an autocephalous church and awarding him the Order of St. Andrew. That same month, Denysenko publicly addressed the Atlantic Council, expressing his thanks to the U.S. government for its efforts in foster a grant of autocephaly, saying he “hope(s) that the U.S. will help us bring our Church matter to an end.”
Valeriy Chaly, Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States from 2015-2019, stated in a May, 2021 television interview: “The United States did—I can say this now—a great deal to make this issue a reality for Ukraine. This is a huge achievement that they consider their own as well.” And “For the American side—by the way, this might not be known in the President’s Office—the key foreign policy topic has been freedom of religion recently. And the issue of an autonomous Church was promoted by Ukraine with the support of our partners.” Exactly how and under what legal authority the U.S. State Department, the British government, and others imagined the right to determine which Orthodox religious organization Ukrainian citizens should belong to remains a mystery.
In certain senses, evidence suggests that interference in religious freedom in the name of religious freedom—specifically by trying to rewrite the boundaries and content of Orthodox Christianity in sovereign empires and countries—has some long precedent in Atlantic diplomacy. For example, the scholarship of Jack Fairey has revealed archival evidence showing British ambassador Stratford Canning in full control of the Ottoman-era patriarch Anthimos VI Ioannidis of Constantinople’s ecclesiastical decisions in the midst of the nineteenth century Crimean War. Of note is Channing employing Anthimos as a tool to attack Slavic Orthodoxy while at the same time working to weaken the patriarchate of Constantinople by secularizing the Ottoman Orthodox millet according to the wishes of three of the “Great Powers,” Britain, France, Austria. The plan was to confine the Orthodox churches to the most narrow, newly-conceived national boundaries possible so as to split them up and weaken their influence. Hence, the push to create a series of domino independent national Orthodox churches, with autocephaly conceived as a fence keeping the national churches penned in.
Returning to the near past and present, the greatest challenge to contemporary efforts at ideological domestic colonization in Ukraine, and a big reason why they have continued to fail with the UOC, comes from those millions of Ukrainians who themselves refuse to be enslaved by a simplistic, paternalistic script and play their roles as other, instead insisting on being what they are, full-fledged Ukrainians with all attendant rights and responsibilities. An illustrative case in point is the aforementioned state-harassed UOC metropolitan Theodosy Snigirev of Cherkasy, who has testified to repeatedly refusing Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) offers to drop criminal charges against him if only he would agree to be exchanged with the Russian Federation as an enemy prisoner of war. In refusing, he says he is “a cleric of the UOC and an equal citizen of Ukraine,” not a member of any other country and certainly not an enemy.
Ultimately, when all is said and done, the broad story here is not just about what kind of religion millions of Ukrainians want to practice. It is also about what kind of Ukraine will emerge after this ghastly war ends. Is a postwar Ukrainian state featuring a monopoly institution whose leader preaches fascist ideas amidst the ruins of a banned, thousand-year-old spiritual community to be desired? If not, people of good will must work to reverse the massive attack on freedom of conscience underpinning Law No. 3894-IX and all other associated attempts at persecution. If something is not done soon, it may be too late for the people of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and, indeed, for everyone in Ukraine hoping to build a brighter future together. Either way, Metropolitan Onufry’s words illumine the path out of darkness: “No matter what they do to us, whatever decisions they make, we will still love everyone equally.”
