In Russia/Ukraine: A Seismic Shift in World Christian History

National Review ^ | Dec 2018 | George Weigel

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The creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) on December 15, at a Unification Council in Kyiv attended by representatives of three previously divided Orthodox jurisdictions in Ukraine, is a seismic event in world Christian history that could also have significant geopolitical repercussions.

For centuries, Orthodoxy in Ukraine was subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, as Ukraine itself was subjected to Russian suzerainty (sometimes under the guise of Soviet “republicanism”).

The first phase of Vladimir Putin’s attempt to re-create some form of the old Soviet empire in the Russian “near abroad” has unfolded under the banner of the Russkiy mir, the “Russian world,” which, Putin claims, extends far beyond the boundaries of today’s Russian Federation.

Historically and culturally, the notion of an extensive Russkiy mir encompassing today’s Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus rests on the claim that Russia is the sole legitimate heir of the baptism of the Eastern Slavs in 988, by which the Rus’ tribes became part of a then-undivided Christian world.

This was, and is, a historical lie; the baptism of the Rus’ took place near today’s Kyiv and a flourishing Orthodox Christianity, including colossal monasteries and magnificent gilded churches, could be found in today’s Ukraine when Moscow was a raw, primitive forest inhabited by wolves and bears. But however historically dubious, Moscow’s claim to be the sole legitimate inheritor of the baptism of Rus’ has underwritten Russian imperialism since the days of Peter the Great.

...The work of reconstructing a true (and, in the best sense of the term, “usable”) history of Christianity among the Eastern Slavs can now proceed, absent the burden of Muscovite claims to hegemony over all other Orthodox Churches in the Russian near abroad.