Jean Marcou, Professor of Law at Sciences Po Grenoble, researcher at CERDAP2 and associate researcher at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul.

Russia's military offensive in Ukraine embodies Moscow's determination to maintain control over what Russian diplomacy considers its "near abroad". Since the implosion of the Soviet Union, the accession to independence of its fifteen federated republics has often resulted in the installation in power of post-Soviet regimes, closely linked to that of the Russian Federation.

Over the last thirty years, attempts to break free from this tutelage have regularly manifested themselves in socio-political movements seeking to overthrow the pro-Russian elites who held on to power after independence.

The first particularity of the emancipation movements that have taken place in Ukraine over the past thirty years is that they have led to several major protests (in particular, the Orange Revolution in 2004-2005 and the Maïdan Revolution in 2014). But the other specificity of this Ukrainian desire for emancipation is that it has taken on a significant religious dimension.

The schism of 2018

Orthodoxy is organized into a series of autocephalous churches, each with its own pope. These churches usually recognize each other, concelebrating the names of their the names of their leaders in their prayers (diptychs). Although part of its is attached to the Church of Rome, Ukraine is one of the cradles of Slavic of Slavic Orthodoxy, and once had its own church. In the ^17th century, however, it was subordinated to the Moscow church in a movement the Russian-Ukrainian political symbiosis on which the Empire of the on which the Tsarist Empire was built. However, this Russian-Ukrainian union shattered after the Maidan revolution, when in 2018, Ukrainian Orthodoxy Ukrainian Orthodoxy regained its autonomy, re-establishing an autocephalous church dissociated from that of Moscow, the fifteenth.

We know that Vladimir Putin, who had a hard time coping with the collapse and disappearance of the USSR, has never stopped trying to preserve and even re-establish Russia's battered power. This has involved restoring the official position of the Orthodox Church. The fact that this process, which at first sight seems to represent a break with the Soviet era, was led by a former KGB colonel, is in fact hardly surprising, given that the Soviet regime, after the militant atheism of its early years, restored Orthodoxy to a certain position and influence, because it enabled the exaltation of national values and sometimes favored the social control of the political authorities.

This relative restoration took place during the Second World War, when the Soviet government had an interest in allowing Russians to express their own Orthodox religious feelings in the fight against the Nazi invaders. Subsequently, without forming part of the official ideology, Orthodoxy helped to maintain a sense of Slavic identity, particularly in the societies of the European Soviet republics (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus in particular) and in the Russian communities of the Union, which was not discouraged by the Communist regime.

It's easy to understand the end of the USSR, Orthodoxy was quickly in a position to fill the void left position to fill the void left by the demise of the official Soviet ideology ideology, and that the newly independent Slavic republics restored it to official official status, helping to consolidate new national, even nationalistic nationalist values. In Ukraine and Russia, one might have thought that that the community of religious structuring (assumed by a common patriarchate) would resist the political dissociation of the two countries. This was not the case. Ukraine's independence, particularly in the aftermath of Maïdan to cut its ties of dependence with Russia, Ukraine's independence Russia saw the Kiev Orthodox Church secede, inflicting yet another humiliation Putin a further humiliation.

The emblematic recognition of "Constantinople

If this new challenge did not go down well with the Russians, it was also because it quickly shook the Orthodox world in the years leading up to the outbreak of war. Even as the Moscow Church denounced this secession, the Autocephalous Church of Kiev was recognized by the Church of Constantinople. In practice, the scope of this initiative may have seemed limited. Indeed, Bartholomew I, Patriarch of the Phanar (or Fener in Turkish, the district of Istanbul where the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate is located) now manages only a few souls who maintain the memory of an Ottoman past when the Greek Orthodox millet was an influential community of the Empire, and even that of an early republican era, when the Greeks of Istanbul, who had escaped the population exchanges of 1923, remained an important population of the then much less populous city.

But despite his church's demographic insignificance, Patriarch Bartholomew is primus inter pares. For he is the head of the Autocephalous Church of Constantinople, the former capital of the Byzantine Empire, the historic cradle of Orthodoxy, and claims a moral authority far exceeding that of his contemporary ministry alone.

Indeed, this ecumenical claim is at the root of a tenacious misunderstanding in the Patriarch's relations with the Turkish government, which, since the early days of the Republic, has regarded him solely as the head of the Orthodox Church in Turkey, and intends to curb his claim to extend his authority. At the beginning of the Kemalist period, in order to put an end to the Phanar's desire to maintain a Byzantine flame in a secular, national republic, the regime tried to promote a competing, specifically Turkish Orthodox Church.

The failure of this venture did nothing to ease the complicated relations between "Constantinople" and Ankara. With the advent of the AKP to power, however, the Patriarchate's relations with the Turkish authorities improved somewhat. Taking a more Ottoman approach to the status of religions, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was not opposed to a revalorization of Orthodoxy in Turkey, as long as it also justified that of Islam. As for the new church in Kiev, the Turkish head of state has not, of course, officially involved himself in the thorny issue of its recognition, but it seems that Bartholomew's initiative was not to his displeasure.

Following a latent atmosphere of conflict within Orthodoxy for several years, this initiative was very poorly received by the Moscow Patriarchate (with close ties to Vladimir Putin), which severed its ties with the Patriarch of Constantinople, even before the latter, in his Cathedral of St. George in Istanbul on January 5, 2019, solemnly recognized the autonomy of the Kiev church in a tomos (religious decree), in the presence of the then Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko.

The head of diplomacy of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Hilarion, said that Bartholomew's recognition was "a blow in the back" at a time when the Russian Orthodox Church was "in a difficult situation" and that "the Patriarchate of Constantinople had intruded into the canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate, sending its exarchs (delegates of a patriarch to his provinces) to Kiev". Finally, in Ukraine itself, Orthodoxy is deeply divided between autonomous Orthodoxy and Orthodoxy loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate.

The multiple positioning of other autocephalous churches

Most of the other autocephalous churches churches (notably the Slavic churches) remained on the sidelines, maintaining their relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate, without breaking with that of Constantinople. Constantinople. They therefore did not officially endorse Bartholomew's recognition decision recognition by Bartholomew, who for his part did not use his ecumenical authority authority to put them on notice to do so. The fact remains, however, that for some emblematic churches with a historical relationship with the with the Patriarchate of Constantinople, it was not possible to remain indecision. So they had to take a stand, raising the spectre of a chain reaction dreaded by Moscow.

First of all, the recognition of the Church of Greece took place on October 12, 2019, not without difficulty, and after several months of prevarication. Within Greek Orthodoxy, in fact, there was a profound dispute between a conservative tendency, which saw Ukrainian autocephaly as a schismatic movement likely to generate a dangerous split between the Slavophone and Greek-speaking churches, and a progressive tendency, a progressive tendency, ready to support not only the new Church of Kiev, but also the Patriarchate of Constantinople in its ecumenical pretensions, in the face of the Patriarchate of Moscow, suspected of wanting to take advantage of its demographic and strategic advantages to impose its primacy on the Orthodox world.

On November 8, 2019, following in the footsteps of the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, and the Archbishop of All Greece, Hieronymus II, the Patriarch of Alexandria for Egypt and All Africa, Tawadros II, declared that "an Orthodox family had been added to this great family called Orthodoxy", thereby recognizing the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, and mentioning the name of Metropolitan Epiphanius of Kiev in the diptychs read out during his religious services. This initiative immediately earned him the wrath of the Moscow Patriarchate, which, saying it was "saddened", decided to strike him from its diptychs (as it had previously done for Bartholomew and Hieronymus).

On October 24, 2020, after much hesitation and attempts at mediation, Chrysostomos II, Archbishop of Cyprus, in turn commemorated the name of Epiphanius in his diptychs, thereby recognizing the new Autocephalous Church of Kiev. Chrysostom II explained that he had initially wanted to remain neutral, but that in the end he had to take a stand. Given the many links (including political ones) between the island of Aphrodite and Athens, it's hard to see how he could not have followed the Church of Greece.

By contrast, the Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East, based in Damascus, unsurprisingly endorsed Moscow's position. Among the emblematic patriarchs of the Eastern Mediterranean, Theophilus III of Jerusalem was the only one to avoid taking a clear stand, despite pressure from both sides. Born in Greece, this patriarch has to be sensitive not only to the political leaders on both sides who visit him, but also to the many Russian and Ukrainian pilgrims and tourists who visit the holy city every year. This forces him to perform a difficult balancing act which, after the outbreak of war, saw him call on his faithful to pray "for our world and the people of Ukraine", without referring to the war, and without even mentioning the name of Russia...

In conclusion...

For the Russian authorities, the creation of the fifteenth Ukrainian Autocephalous Church was a serious snub, which undoubtedly increased their resentment towards Kiev before the outbreak of hostilities. For the churches of the south, Greek-speaking, historical but also demographically a minority, this schism represented an opportunity to resist the Moscow Patriarchate's attempts at domination, by finding a major point of support within the Slavic world.

The war in Ukraine, however, not only increases this antagonism, giving it a pronounced strategic dimension. Overall, it places Orthodox societies in a very difficult situation, where they have to arbitrate between multiple and contradictory feelings towards the religious decisions of their churches, the political stances of their governments, and above all the unbearable violence of a tragic conflict between two predominantly Orthodox peoples.