Shared Roots, Divergent Paths

Ukrainian Orthodox Christianity traces to the same 988 baptism of Kievan Rus that the Russian church claims as its own founding moment, since Kyiv, not Moscow, was the political and religious center of the Rus lands converted under Prince Vladimir. For centuries the Metropolitanate of Kyiv held a senior, largely autonomous place under the Ecumenical Patriarchate even as political power in the Rus lands shifted northward after the Mongol conquest.

In 1686 the Ecumenical Patriarchate transferred the Kyiv Metropolitanate to the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, an act whose canonical propriety Constantinople itself later disputed, ruling in 2018 that the original transfer had been intended as temporary and improperly exercised. For the following three centuries most Ukrainian Orthodox life was administered from Moscow, though rival Ukrainian jurisdictions repeatedly asserted independence, including a short-lived Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church proclaimed in 1921 and suppressed under Soviet rule, and further autocephalous and independent bodies that formed after Ukrainian independence in 1991 but received no wide international recognition for decades.

By the early twenty-first century, Ukrainian Orthodoxy existed as several competing jurisdictions claiming the same territory and often the same parishes, a fragmentation the events described in the following article attempted, only partially, to resolve.