UKRAINIAN religious leaders are resisting any demand for the Russian Orthodox Church and language to have an official status in their country. This, together with a warning against “reducing everything to the issue of territories”, is among the responses to the current high-level talks in the United States.
“It is widely known that the Russian Federation uses religion, particularly the Russian Orthodox Church, as a weapon to pursue its neo-imperial goals,” the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations (UCCRO) said in response to demands made by President Putin last week.
“We support the Ukrainian state in defending Ukraine’s legitimate interests at the international level and in building relations with other states based on the principle of reciprocity. Ukraine must not be forced into asymmetric obligations.”
The Council — which includes Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim leaders — was reacting to media reports that the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had demanded guarantees for Russia’s language and Church during his 15 August summit with the US President, Donald Trump.
Several European countries, UCCRO said, had already imposed restrictions on the Russian Orthodox Church, in line with resolutions by the Council of Europe and European Parliament, because of the Russian Orthodox Church’s “destructive activities” as “a Russian state institution, fully integrated into the Kremlin’s aggressive political system”. It had supported the “killing of peaceful Ukrainian citizens” and “the destruction of Ukrainian sovereignty, culture, and national identity”.
Meanwhile, the Greek Catholic Primate of Ukraine, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said that citizens were grateful to those now “exerting unprecedented international pressure on the aggressor to stay his murderous hand”, but warned that Russia had continued to attack Ukrainian cities and to kill civilians with drones and missiles while the latest talks were taking place.
“Watching the negotiations at the highest world level, we hope that they will bring results — yet we feel this is only the beginning,” Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk said in a message to the nation.
“In the context of various ideas and proposals currently voiced by presidents, diplomats, and experts, I emphasise once again that Ukraine is not just a territory. . . Ukraine is a nation — it means people.”
The words were published as European heads of government held further consultations — both online and in-person — after accompanying the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, to White House talks on Monday with President Trump, three days after the US leader’s summit with President Putin in Alaska.
In a statement, President Zelensky welcomed a “clear signal” from the US that it would “help, coordinate and participate in security guarantees for Ukraine”, and said that he was grateful that “all European leaders” were now supporting him.
Archbishop Shevchuk, however, said that Ukrainians were also asking world leaders to remember “those now in the clutches of occupation”, and to include “the right to life and freedom” and “to be Ukrainian” in their negotiations.
Russia’s “neocolonial ideology” risked destroying “modern man’s consciousness from within” if planted “in the minds of presidents, diplomats, and the world community”, he said.
Preaching in Kyiv on Sunday, the Primate of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), urged Ukrainians to continue to trust in God when their future seemed “hidden in the darkness of ignorance”. Nothing would be impossible, he said, if they maintained a “firm and unwavering” faith.
“We have read the Bible and know from the history of Church and humanity how powerful, but wicked and sinful, rulers were overthrown from their thrones, and seemingly invincible armies were defeated,” he said.
“Even now, when the Kremlin tyrant and his evil empire have risen against us and against world peace, we should not doubt that this empire will fall and the tyrant perish in disgrace.”
There were other reactions to the latest talks. The Pope requested prayers on Sunday that efforts “to promote peace may bear fruit” and that “the common good of peoples” would “always be placed first”.
The World Council of Churches said that it hoped for “a just peace for the people of Ukraine” and called on member-denominations to support UCCRO’s appeal for a World Day of Prayer on 24 August, the anniversary of Ukraine’s post-Soviet independence.
Ukraine’s Moscow-linked Orthodox Church, the UOC, was given until Monday by the Kyiv authorities to prove that it had severed its ties with the Moscow Patriarchate as a condition for continuing to function. In a weekend letter, however, the UOC’s leader, Metropolitan Onufriy (Berezovsky), said that his Church would not comply with the order’s “fictitious requirements”, and that the State Service for Freedom of Conscience lacked the necessary expertise to investigate the UOC’s links with Moscow and was “grossly interfering” in the Church’s internal affairs.
This was rejected by UCCRO, which said that the relevant law, enacted in August 2024, had been necessitated by Russian Orthodox actions and did not prohibit the UOC, but merely established “democratic and legal procedures” for suing church communities that remained linked to Moscow.
“In the territories of Ukraine temporarily occupied by Russian troops, it is precisely Ukrainian religious organisations, including the UOC, whose activities are restricted or outright banned,” the Council said in its declaration.
“The Russian state, both on its own territory and even more so in the occupied Ukrainian territories, systematically disregards and violates all fundamental principles of religious freedom, as documented in numerous reports.”
Last Friday, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow praised President Trump for being open to talks with Russia. His “show of goodwill” with President Putin was, the Patriarch said, “a very important signal for all”. Russia and the US could now become “allies and equal participants in a dialogue, intellectual and practical, political and cultural”.
President Putin’s exchange of icons in Anchorage with Archbishop Alexei (Trader) of Sitka & Alaska, a hierarch of the Orthodox Church in America, was deplored by Ukrainian Orthodox leaders in the United States, who said that the exchange of courtesies “with a tyrant who wages war and commits crimes” had been tantamount to “desecrating the graves of the fallen” and “standing deaf to the cries of orphaned, displaced, and murdered children”.