The President and the Patriarch

Vladimir Putin, who after a sham “referendum” completed his
aggressive seizure of Crimea, denies he has plans to invade Eastern Ukraine.
Meanwhile, he is increasing the number of troops on the Russian-Ukrainian
border and sending provocateurs and criminals to incite ethnic tensions in
Ukraine. At a minimum, Putin wants to destabilize Ukraine politically and use the
ensuing disarray to manipulate the presidential elections, which are scheduled
for May 2014. The worst-case scenario is that he wants to provoke a war to
continue his “Eurasian” expansion. Whatever the case, the Russian Orthodox
Church—less a handmaiden of Putin than commonly believed—must bear witness.

In the beginning of the Crimean crisis, on March 1, the head
of the Russian Orthodox Church’s Department of the Relations between Church and
Society, archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, issued a statement that the Russian
troops were engaged in a “peace-keeping” mission in Ukraine and that “Russian
people had the right to be re-united in the same political body.” Many Orthodox
believers, both within and outside Ukraine, were outraged by this justification
of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and, in principle, anywhere else in the world
where Russian nationals did not share “the same political body.” (The
“historically Russian” land of Alaska comes to mind.) The next day, which
happened to be the beginning of Orthodox Lent, I wrote the following Open
Letter to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church:

2 March 2014, Forgiveness Sunday

To His Holiness Kirill

Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia

Your Holiness,

On the Sunday of Forgiveness, we, the clergy and
faithful representing different Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States,
are asking you to influence the normalization of the situation in Crimea and
the restoration of peace between Russia and Ukraine. The intervention of the
Russian Army on the territory of Ukraine is an act of military aggression,
which increases ethnic tensions between Russians and Ukrainians. We beseech
you, while there is still time, to demand from the President Vladimir Putin to
withdraw the Russian troops from the territory of Ukraine, including the
Crimean peninsula, in order to prevent bloodshed. Let the peoples of Ukraine
and Russia hear the Russian Orthodox Church’s prophetic call to peace, love and
mutual forgiveness.

The letter was co-signed by a dozen clergy and university
professors of different Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States. Some
bishops and faithful of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church sent similar messages to
Moscow. On the same day, in his public statement addressing the Crimean crisis,
patriarch Kirill noted that “the Church does not take sides in a political
struggle” and assured the Ukrainian faithful that he would “do everything
possible to convince people in power to abstain from shedding blood of the
peaceful citizens of Ukraine.” He spoke of the brotherly unity between Russian,
Ukrainian, and Belorussian peoples and emphasized that the growing ethnic
polarization of Ukrainian society must be prevented.

What is one to make of the patriarch’s response? Some
Ukrainian commentators have interpreted Kirill’s statements as cowardly and
evasive. The Western observers see the Russian patriarch as subservient to the
Russian president. To be sure, strong parallels can be found between Putin’s
pet project of the “Eurasian Union” (an anti-European military and economic
association of Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia) and Kirill’s project of Russkii Mir (“the Russian World”), which
is a quasi-ecclesiastical unification of the Eastern Orthodox Slavs on the
so-called “spiritual space” (whatever that means) of the same triad of Russia,
Ukraine, and Belorussia. The project of Russkii
Mir has recently been revived in the official rhetoric of the Moscow
Patriarchate. Based on these compelling parallels, Putin’s Crimean “Anschluss”
appears to be aiding militarily what Kirill wished to accomplish jurisdictionally.

But the matter is not quite as simple as it seems.

In reality, Putin’s invasion of Crimea presents formidable
challenges for the Moscow Patriarchate. Most urgently, the patriarch has to
address the status of the Russian Orthodox parishes within the territory of
Crimea. Should these parishes continue to belong to the Ukrainian Orthodox
Church (Moscow Patriarchate), or should they become a part of the Russian
Orthodox Church, as would be expected from such parishes on the territory of
the Russian Federation? If the patriarch changes the status of these parishes,
this would be taken as his “blessing” of the Crimean annexation, news which
will not be favorably received in other parts of Ukraine, where close to 13,000
parishes still belong to the Moscow Patriarchate. The grassroots movement
towards one autocephalous (self-governing) Ukrainian Orthodox Church is
stronger than ever. Another significant ecclesial body with more than 4500
parishes in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Kyivan Patriarchate), has
recently doubled its efforts to promote the canonical reunion of Orthodox
churches in Ukraine in one national autocephalous church. By “annexing” the
Orthodox parishes in Crimea to the Russian Orthodox Church, the patriarch
Kirill risks alienating and ultimately losing his parishes in the rest of
Ukraine.

Despite a widespread Western conviction to the contrary,
Kirill is not Putin’s man. Kirill was elevated to the post of the patriarch by
the wife of Dmitry Medvedev in 2009, when Medvedev was the Russian president
and Putin served as the Prime Minister. During those years Kirill was perceived
as Medvedev’s counterweight to Putin. Now, in Putin’s third term as the Russian
president, the balance of power seems to have shifted rather sharply toward Putin
and away from Medvedev, but the psychological and political tension between
Putin and Kirill still remains.

There is another, darker side to Putin’s manipulation of the
political and civil order in Ukraine. There could be forces within the Moscow
Patriarchate, as there are forces in the Russian government, that would be
interested in the annexation of Eastern and Central Ukraine, for it is only
after such an annexation that Putin’s Eurasian pretensions would coincide with
Kirill’s Russkii Mir.

As the Greek Catholic bishop Borys Gudziak said in a recent
interview: “In Ukraine people are dying for European values. [But] the
resolution of Europe is yet to be fully demonstrated.” Taking Putin’s lies for
what they are, the European Union and the United States must continue their
pressure on Moscow by expanding economic sanctions before it is too late.

Paul L.
Gavrilyuk is Aquinas Chair in theology and philosophy at the University of St.
Thomas and a deacon in the Orthodox Church in America.

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