Assertions that Ukraine is banning Christianity are absurd. Ukrainian authorities are not banning anything. Rather, they are trying to curb Russian influence within a Kremlin-linked institution.
by Sergii Kostezh
September 13, 2025
Kyiv Post
The Ukrainian government is taking action against one of the religious organizations connected with Russia and its ongoing war against Ukraine – many even aiding and abetting the Russian military. As a result, there has been an aggressive reaction among pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian figures in the West.
In the United States, headlines to the effect that Ukraine is allegedly banning Christianity or the Orthodox Church are being spread by many MAGA supporters. Congressmember Anna Paulina Luna, said two months ago that the Orthodox Church had been banned by President Zelensky himself.
Even respected media, such as ABC, picked up on these claims, misusing the word “ban” in its headline to describe a much more complicated process of mitigating Moscow’s influence in Ukraine, which the Kremlin has historically done through ostensibly religious organizations as well as other means.
Veteran Republican senator Chuck Grassley highlights how Moscow is using religious institutions to support its war campaign to re-establish the Soviet empire.
Kyiv Post has been keeping track of what is happening with regard to the Religious Organizations law. In short: No, no one is banning any religious organization.
On Aug. 20, 2024, the Ukrainian parliament passed a historic law: “On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Activities of Religious Organizations.” Its aim is to prohibit the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in Ukraine, which has overtly supported Russian military activities on Ukrainian territory.
In reality, though, ROC parishes never actually existed in independent Ukraine. The organization at issue is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) – which is subordinated to the Moscow Patriarchate and de facto governed from Moscow, even though it has significant autonomy. Importantly, only about 20 percent of all Orthodox Christians in Ukraine identify as members of the UOC.
According to the law, Ukrainian state bodies – primarily the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) – demanded that the UOC sever all its ties
with Moscow within nine months, because multiple UOC priests have been charged with aiding and abetting Russian invasion forces on Ukrainian territory.
Religious scholar and historian Andriy Smirnov explained what severing ties entails: “First of all, this means refusing the connection with the ROC through the statute. It is impossible to change the ROC statute, but you can clearly state that you will not be guided by this statute. It was also necessary to declare that UOC bishops would not take part in the meetings of the ROC Synod. For now, the head of the UOC – Metropolitan Onufriy – remains a permanent member of the ROC Synod, and the Luhansk Metropolitan Panteleimon traveled from the occupied territory to Moscow as a non-permanent member of the Synod. So this was not done.”
As a result, time had run out, and DESS filed a lawsuit against the Metropolis of Kyiv– the governing body of the UOC – calling for the court to confirm the fact of the UOC’s ties with the Moscow Patriarchate.
The UOC itself says it severed all ties with Russia back in the spring of 2022, after the full-scale invasion. However, the state argues that ties have been maintained, with Onufriy’s presence in the Synod as just one example.
What will happen now?
Notwithstanding the propaganda effect of the word “ban,” the reality is such that banning the UOC is logically impossible. As such, the state is not seeking this. As a result of the court’s decision (which can still be appealed for several months), the legal entity status of the UOC Metropolis of Kyiv may be terminated. This would mean merely that the church could not use state-owned premises, such as churches in protected zones that are architectural monuments.
There are currently 154 such churches among more than 8,000 UOC parishes. In other words, the loss would concern the most famous and historically significant churches. However, they make up a minority among all the UOC churches.
As former UOC priest and press secretary, and now a priest in the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Heorhiy Kovalenko, said: “This is in no way a ban on the UOC itself. In Ukraine, it is impossible by law to ban religious activity, because registration is not required for this. You can pray, even publicly, without any registration. That is, even if the UOC Metropolis of Kyiv is deprived of its legal entity status, UOC parishes, dioceses, bishops, and churches that are owned by communities will continue to exist and pray without any obstacles.”
Of course, the prospect of terminating lease agreements for the largest and most famous churches and monasteries in Ukraine is very worrying for the UOC and its supporters, as these places of worship have both symbolic value and offer a significant source of income. Many of the lease agreements were extensions of arrangements from Soviet times, when the Orthodox Church was thoroughly infiltrated by the KGB. Hence many analysts believe the real source of Russian propaganda claims stem from the fear of potentially losing these perks from the Soviet days.
Ukraine is a complex historical mosaic of Christian denominations and other faiths.
According to a 2021 study by the Razumkov Centre, an independent Ukrainian think tank, 67 percent of adult Ukrainians consider themselves to be believers, the vast majority of them Christians. Among the Christians, 60 percent are Orthodox (of which 45 percent consider themselves loyal to the Kyiv patriarchate and 20 percent to Moscow patriarchate), 9 percent belong to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC), and 8.5 percent identify as “simply Christian.” The Muslim population is 1.64 percent, and the Jewish population is 0.1 percent.
In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine gained independence, the religious landscape was wide open.
The UGCC had been declared legal several years earlier, during the Perestroika years, and was trying to take back churches that had been expropriated by the communists.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was split among those loyal to the Moscow patriarchate (today’s UOC) and two separate Churches that were trying to re-establish a patriarchate in Kyiv.
Eventually the two Kyivan Churches merged in 2018, and Constantinople granted canonical status – known as a tomos – to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2019, much to the chagrin of the Patriarch of Moscow.
So the OCU is not even the largest Orthodox Church in terms of individual worshippers. Financially, however, they benefit from their location in historic monasteries as well as from money coming indirectly from the ROC in Moscow.
Before 2018, the UOC had more parishes than the OCU (10,000 versus 6,000); but later, up to 20 percent of UOC parishes and communities moved to the new Ukrainian church, the OCU – and now the number of their parishes is approximately equal, about 8,000 each.
Both Orthodox Churches practice the same Eastern (Orthodox) rite – as does the UGCC, which is subordinate to the Roman Catholic pope. So, even in the hypothetical case of a ban (which, as we explained above, is impossible), Orthodox believers would still have the opportunity to pray in another Ukrainian Church, one that is simply independent from Moscow.
Besides these two largest Orthodox denominations, there are more than 10,000 Protestant communities in Ukraine (mostly Baptists, Adventists, and Pentecostals).
There are also more than 3,000 communities of the UGCC, almost 1,000 parishes of the Roman Catholic Church, and several dozen parishes of other Christian denominations – the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Old Believer Church, and others.
All these denominations, especially Protestants, increase their number of parishes and members year by year. Thus, claims that Ukraine is allegedly banning Christianity are outright false.
How did the Moscow Patriarchate appear in Ukraine?
Historically, Christianity in the Eastern (Orthodox) rite spread to the territory of present-day Ukraine and Russia after the baptism of Kyivan Rus’ by Prince Volodymyr the Great in 988. At
that time, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, would appoint the bishops for Rus’.
This order remained for a long time, until after the Mongol invasion of Europe in the 1240s, when Kyiv was razed to the ground. From that time on, Kyiv metropolitans increasingly resided in Moscow – a more northern center that began to concentrate power in northern Rus’.
In 1438, a split occurred – Moscow did not recognize a number of decisions coming from Constantinople, and with the capital of the Byzantine Empire collapsing under Ottoman attacks, the Muscovites appointed their own metropolitan. Later, Moscow unilaterally proclaimed him patriarch.
At that time, Constantinople, having no authority over Moscow, continued to appoint metropolitans of Kyiv, who only had church authority within Ukrainian lands.
The balance of power changed in the 1640s. After the Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky and the formation of the Ukrainian Cossack state, Muscovy was the first country to recognize it. However, the Muscovite Tsardom quickly began to absorb the young Ukrainian state.
In the 1680s, Moscow’s envoys bribed the patriarch of Constantinople to change Kyiv’s jurisdiction – he allowed Moscow to appoint the metropolitans of Kyiv. From that point onward, the Ukrainian church came under Moscow’s authority and could not get rid of it for a long time.
On the eve of the USSR’s collapse, in 1990, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was created in canonical unity with the Moscow Patriarchate. That autonomous Orthodox entity, which has a certain degree of self-governance and independence, remains today a part of Moscow’s church empire and is now threatened with court action by the Ukrainian state if ties with Moscow are not severed.
What’s next?
The question arises: Why won’t the UOC simply sever all ties with Russia, which is killing its flock in Ukraine?
There are two reasons: First, Russia has managed to create a strong pro-Russian wing within the UOC since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, and the more moderate among these Orthodox fear that a quick break with Moscow would lead to a split inside the UOC. And second, it’s a matter of status. “In the world, the UOC is perceived as a canonical church, precisely as an autonomous part of the Russian Orthodox Church. If they break away from Moscow, they will lose this status. And they do not have an autocephalous status [independent in governance]. Thus, in the case of breaking ties with Moscow, they would find themselves in a gray zone,” Smirnov said.
The option of joining, or more precisely, “merging” with the OCU from the UOC side is not seriously considered by any experts. Individual UOC communities or parishes are indeed transferring to the OCU, as well as two bishops. However, a mass transfer has not yet happened.
At present, it is among UOC clerics that the largest number of pro-Russian agents has been recorded among all Christian denominations. Since the full-scale invasion, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has opened 180 criminal cases against priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, with 23 bishops among those under investigation. As such, the UOC has been deemed a fifth column in Moscow’s revanchist ambitions in Ukraine.
Sergii Kostezh is a Kyiv Post Special Correspondent. He has worked for various Ukrainian TV channels as a reporter from the field and war zone.