Is Ukraine’s largest church still pro-Russian?

Ukraine is preparing to celebrate Christmas on December 25 for a second year in a break with tradition and Russia, but divisions persist. “Soviet intelligence either forced all priests to the pro-communist Orthodoxy or killed them off in Siberia,” Oleh Dyba, a publicist and scholar of Transcarpathia’s religious life, told Al Jazeera. Kirill is accused of purging dissident priests, he has described Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war”, and he has said that Russian servicemen dying in Ukraine have their sins “washed away”. “Russia is virtually returning to the discourse of medieval Crusades,” Andrey Kordochkin, an Oxford-educated theologian who left Kirill’s church to join the Istanbul-based Patriarchate of Constantinople, told Al Jazeera. The pressure violates Ukraine’s constitution and attracts criticism from the collective West, jeopardising the supply of military and financial aid, he said, adding that the pressure gives the Kremlin a perfect excuse to lambast “Kyiv’s neo-Nazi junta,” spread anti-Ukrainian messages, and appropriate parishes in Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions.