This spring, a new Ukrainian law—“On the protection of the constitutional order in the activities of religious organizations”—comes into force. One of its goals is to limit the influence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which declared its independence from the Moscow Patriarchate back in May 2022, but which the Ukrainian authorities still suspect of collaborating with Russia.
Previously, most of the criticism of the standoff between the Ukrainian authorities and the UOC came from Moscow, which cited it as one of its justifications for invading Ukraine. But now the church issue has begun to create international problems for Kyiv from other quarters: namely, the new U.S. administration.
The day after U.S. President Donald Trump called his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator, the controversial U.S. commentator Tucker Carlson published an interview with Robert Amsterdam, an American lawyer and lobbyist hired to defend the UOC by the Ukrainian oligarch and former parliamentary deputy Vadym Novynskyi, who is sanctioned in his home country.
Unsurprisingly, Russian state media immediately seized upon the interview, in which Amsterdam repeated Trump’s claims that Zelensky is a dictator whose ratings are falsified. According to the lawyer, the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), set up in 2018 to counterbalance the UOC, was in fact created by the CIA, supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The Biden administration therefore funded a project aimed at destroying the UOC, according to Amsterdam, while the State Department violated the U.S. constitution by supporting restrictions on religious freedom in another country.
Trump’s allies have long tried to use the UOC as a bargaining chip when discussing military aid to Ukraine. In June 2024, at a congressional hearing, Robert Destro, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor during Trump’s first term, accused the Biden administration of hushing up religious persecution in Ukraine. Robert Amsterdam was the first to report Destro’s speech on social media, meaning it was likely the result of his lobbying efforts.
The same issue was raised several times by Trump’s vice president JD Vance, both when he was a senator for Ohio and as a vice presidential candidate. In March 2024, he called on Kyiv to be “a little bit more careful of human rights, including religious liberties.” Ukraine “is doing some pretty bad stuff,” he said, mentioning “news reports of priests being investigated, church assets being seized, and priests being arrested.” Other Republicans have made similar comments.
In September 2024, lobbyists tried to convince Congress to make further military aid to Ukraine conditional on preserving the UOC. Vance did not beat around the bush, saying that the “hundreds of billions of dollars” the United States was sending to Kyiv should be used as “leverage to ensure and guarantee real religious freedom.”
The line of argument adopted by Amsterdam is suspiciously similar to the rhetoric of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian authorities: they also present the UOC as a victim of persecution in need of external protection. Indeed, that protection was one of the pretexts for Russia’s invasion. In the eyes of Ukrainian society, that coincidence discredits the UOC by appearing to confirm its connection with Moscow. But for Western public opinion, such arguments could encourage the growth of anti-Ukraine sentiment.
Last year’s Ukrainian law, adopted in August 2024, bans organizations managed from an aggressor country. It effectively targets the UOC, and was promoted by former president Petro Poroshenko who, while still president, actively supported the creation of an independent autocephalous church in Ukraine: the OCU.
The law has not only been criticized by Republican lobbyists in the United States, but also by Pope Francis and the World Council of Churches. The latter said it was “deeply alarmed by the potential for unjustified collective punishment of an entire religious community and violation of the principles of freedom of religion or belief.”
The law gave Ukrainian religious organizations nine months to sever ties with governing centers in Russia, meaning the first legal applications to liquidate organizations that failed to comply—including UOC parishes and monasteries—will be filed at the end of May and the first court rulings will be made around the middle of summer.
However, there have already been cases of churches and other UOC property being forcibly seized by OCU communities. The most high-profile case took place in October 2024 in the city of Cherkasy. Metropolitan Feodosiy (Snigirev) of Cherkasy, who holds pro-Russian views, had continued to pray for Patriarch Kirill during liturgies, which angered some local residents. They seized the UOC St. Michael’s Cathedral to hand it over to the OCU. Dozens of people were injured in the ensuing mass brawl. The police did not intervene, and local authorities supported the transfer of the cathedral to the OCU.
The concerns of the Ukrainian authorities are not without grounds. Over one hundred UOC clergy members and bishops have been charged with collaborating with the occupiers and aiding Russia, with sentences already handed down in many of them. Security forces have recorded incidents of weapons being stored in churches, while the abbot of the Sviatohirsk Lavra is accused of having given away the positions of Ukrainian checkpoints to the Russians during a sermon.
Still, given the overall scale of the UOC, collaborators are a very small part of the UOC clergy and congregation. Most of the criminal cases were opened into the incitement of religious hatred and justification of Russian aggression. Several UOC bishops have chosen to leave for Russia. One UOC clergyman who had been sentenced in Ukraine to five years in prison “for denying the armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine” was subsequently included in a prisoner exchange. But it also happens the other way around: a UOC priest serving in the occupied part of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region was sentenced to fourteen years in prison by a Russian court for spying for Ukraine.
In 2021 (the most recent year for which data are available), the UOC’s clergy numbered 10,500. Some of them have transferred to the OCU since the full-scale invasion; some have ended up in occupied territory; and some have moved to Russia. But the overwhelming majority of parishioners and ordinary priests of the UOC are citizens of Ukraine like everyone else. Priests’ sons are also dying at the front. Some clergy members have been called up to fight themselves. There are also those who have found themselves under occupation but continue to pray for Ukraine.
The theologian and human rights activist Natallia Vasilevich argues that the Ukrainian authorities were shortsighted in their strategy, and could have “made the UOC an ally rather than an antagonist.” Now, in her opinion, official denials that there is any persecution look “unconvincing.”
Russia’s use of Orthodoxy as a soft power—including to undermine other countries’ security—is no secret. But there are no legal or moral grounds for holding the entire UOC collectively responsible for individual collaborators. Nor is there irrefutable evidence of the UOC’s connection to the Russian Orthodox Church.
In May 2022, long before the appearance of the draft law on religious organizations eventually passed last year, the UOC Council removed all references to the ROC from its charter except for one, a reference in the preface to the 1990 charter on the autonomy of the UOC issued by the ROC’s then leader, Patriarch Alexy II. That reference is the historical justification for the formation of the UOC and legitimizes it in the Orthodox world. The UOC Council’s decision was a response to Patriarch Kirill’s endorsement of the invasion of Ukraine and de facto meant a break with the ROC.
The ROC, however, did not change its charter, so the UOC is still listed as part of it, and Metropolitan Onufriy, the head of the UOC, de jure remains a member of the ROC Synod, though he does not participate in its meetings. The Ukrainian law adopted last August required the UOC to settle that issue: ties with the church of the aggressor country are only considered officially terminated when the head of the religious organization publicly declares “their disagreement with their appointment to the governing bodies of the foreign religious organization in question.”
The UOC, however, believes that the changes to its charter and the statements of its council were sufficient. Ukraine’s State Service for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, meanwhile, insists that in addition, the ROC Synod and Patriarch Kirill must be formally notified of the severing of relations with the UOC. No such letters have been sent to the ROC.
Now the UOC Synod has officially hired Robert Amsterdam—whose statements are only escalating tensions. These tensions between the UOC and the Ukrainian state are turning it into an “anti-Ukrainian church” in the eyes of many Ukrainians and worsening the already difficult position of the UOC inside the country. Meanwhile, Russia insists that the UOC is its church and must be protected, while for Trumpists it has become a tool for forcing Kyiv to make concessions to Moscow.
