ARCHIMANDRITE PAUL used to be a racing-car mechanic, but in 1993 he found God, left his wife, and moved into a monastery in central Kyiv known as the Pechersk Lavra. The monastery, a centre of the Orthodox faith since the region became Christian in the 10th century, is famed for its caves, which pilgrims once thought stretched to Moscow. Ukraine’s security services, too, think it is linked to Moscow: they accuse the parish of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which runs it of spreading Russian propaganda. On March 29th the government ordered the monks to leave. Since then believers have been staging a daily prayer vigil at the site’s gates. “The monastery is for monks, not for heathens,” the archimandrite fumes. “The devil is trying to scatter us.”

Oleksandr Tkachenko, the culture minister, says the government has every right to evict the monks: “The monastery remains state property.” The monks have been allowed to live there since the 1990s, and were granted permanent usage in 2013. But last year a video surfaced of a service that included a prayer for Russia. Security forces searched the monastery and turned up pro-Russian literature, and a government commission found that the monks had illegally constructed buildings and allowed other groups to use the grounds. Pavel Lebed, a senior priest known as “Pasha Mercedes” for his penchant for personal luxury, has been placed under house arrest.

The conflict is part of a years-long struggle between two bitterly divided hierarchies with frustratingly similar names: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Their dispute is less about theology than politics. The UOC was formerly the branch of the Russian Orthodox Church that operated in Ukraine under the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It was subordinate to the Moscow patriarchate. But after Ukraine became independent in 1991 some parishes broke away from the Moscow-aligned body.

The conflict sharpened after Russia attacked Ukraine and seized Crimea in 2014. The Russian Orthodox Church has been used as a state propaganda organ since Tsarist days, and its current leader, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, is a fire-breathing nationalist. In 2018 Petro Poroshenko, then Ukraine’s president, launched a process to form a unified hierarchy out of Ukraine’s various independent churches. Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the most senior cleric in the Orthodox world, recognised this new group as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019. Since then the UOC and the OCU have competed for the loyalty of parishes and believers.

Russia’s invasion has imbued the rivalry with wartime ferocity. Ukrainian security services claim the UOC is a tool of the Kremlin, though the evidence they have published is hardly overwhelming. Searches have uncovered Russian newspapers featuring pro-war headlines, as all Russian publications do, as well as a few thousand Russian rubles in cash, which would be hard to spend in Ukraine today. Priests have been accused of echoing Kremlin propaganda by stating that Ukraine and Russia are brother nations.

To clear its name, the UOC formally broke with the Moscow patriarchate in May 2022. But some of its priests seem to be fomenting dissent. On April 5th in Bukovyna, a village in western Ukraine, a UOC church refused (for unclear reasons) to allow a funeral for a Ukrainian soldier. His family and comrades forced their way in and sent the priests packing. The previous day the mayor of Lviv announced the city was transferring at least one church from the UOC to the OCU. Similar clashes are playing out across the country.

Russia is by far the worse offender against religious freedom. In territory it has occupied, it has forcibly converted churches to the UOC and killed or imprisoned other faiths’ clerics. A report by the Institute for the Study of War, a think-tank, found that such religious persecution was part of a campaign of cultural genocide to wipe out Ukrainian identity. The Kremlin exploits religion in its propaganda. “They say the Russian Orthodox Church unites three nations, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus,” says Dmytro Horevoy, a religion researcher. “They even use the symbol of the holy trinity.” On Russian talk shows, priests rail against the eviction of the monks from Pechersk Lavra and vow to annihilate the OCU.

But although elements of the UOC are indeed used by the Kremlin, it is a diffuse organisation with thousands of priests and more than a million believers. Many are Ukrainian patriots genuinely devoted to their faith. “My uncle fought at Bakhmut, was wounded and is in hospital now,” says Nikolai Lishchuk, a young seminarian at Pechersk Lavra. “To tell me that I’m for Moscow…it’s offensive.”

Ukrainian worshippers are often unaware which hierarchy their local church adheres to. Most of the country’s parishes are still officially affiliated with the UOC, largely because of inertia. But individual believers are another story: since the war started, they have turned rapidly against the church associated with Moscow. Surveys by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that the share of Ukrainians who call themselves members of the UOC dropped from 18% in June 2021 to just 4% in July 2022, while the share who identify with the OCU rose from 42% to 54%.

Metropolitan Kliment, the head of Pechersk Lavra, adamantly denies any disloyalty to his country, and says that all occupied territory must be returned to Ukraine. He considers the government’s actions towards the UOC “repressive”. Even if the government has the law on its side, it needs to tread carefully. “It’s an extremely risky game,” says Tornike Metreveli of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, who is studying the split between the UOC and OCU. Ukraine, he says, is the America of eastern Europe: “No other country has such a vibrant religious market. If they go after a national church, it’s going to be tough for their pluralism, and for their bid to enter the EU.” ■