The Russian Orthodox Church Beyond Russia: Global Pretensions and Security Concerns

This series scrutinizes the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in three overlapping contexts: ROC pretensions to the leadership of the Orthodox world, the ROC as a global conservative force, and the ROC as a supporter and tool of Russian geopolitical ambitions.

Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine has significantly affected all three contexts. And it has deepened and intensified conflicts between the ROC and the Ecumenical Patriarchate and its allies as well as the split in global Orthodoxy generally.

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The Russian Orthodox Church and Inner-Orthodox Relations

Thomas Bremer is a Roman Catholic theologian and professor emeritus of the University of Münster.

Even before the Russian aggression against Ukraine, world Orthodoxy was in a crisis that made its normal functioning impossible. The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) refused the autocephaly that the Ecumenical Patriarchate (EP) had granted to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in early 2019, and the ROC eventually broke communion with the EP and three more (out of some fifteen) Orthodox Churches.

The ROC resisted the autocephaly of the OCU for four interconnected reasons, all diametrically opposed to the position of the EP:

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The Russian Orthodox Church and the Holy See: 70 Years of Political Ecumenism

Pavlo Smytsnyuk is a Mary Seeger O’Boyle Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University.

The Russia-Ukraine war has posed a significant challenge to relations between the Holy See and the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Although the Vatican’s position on the war has been criticized by some as ambiguous and overly neutral, certain war-related comments by Catholic leadership have been interpreted negatively by the ROC. The Pope’s warning that Kirill must not serve as Putin’s “altar boy” was followed by an accusation by Cardinal Kurt Koch (Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, the main Vatican body on inter-confessional relations) that the ROC was in a state of “heresy,” in light of its justification for the war in Ukraine.

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