Mark Galeotti
Why Ukraine raided a Kyiv monastery
Perhaps it should not have been a surprise to see the camouflaged special forces of the SBU, the Ukrainian Security Service, fanning out over the usually serene grounds of Kyiv’s Holy Dormition Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery on Tuesday. After all, Vladimir Putin’s political alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church has ensured that his war with Ukraine is also a holy one. And until this year the monastery was under the jurisdiction of the Russian church. But the raid is also a reminder of the dangerous potential for civic strife and the politics of revenge tearing at Ukraine’s unity.
Putin, himself a member of the faith, has developed close ties with Kirill, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia since 2009. In part this reflects traditional close ties between church and state in Russia, pre-dating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It is in some ways a very modern deal, whereby the Church receives status and privileges in return for cheerleading for the Kremlin. This has become central to Putin’s post-modern tsardom.
In Russia, Kirill and his church has been a vocal supporter of the invasion, despite occasional genuflections towards the tragedy of war. The Bryansk Metropolitanate even put out a statement to Russian soldiers telling them that ‘Your task is to wipe the Ukrainian nation off the face of the earth.’
Some two-thirds of Ukrainians are Orthodox, so it was perhaps unsurprising that ever since Kirill blessed the annexation of Crimea in 2014, this religious hostility has been divisive. At the time of the invasion, only around 13 per cent of Ukrainians followed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), with the majority identifying with the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which in 2019 had been formally granted autocephaly, making it independent of the Moscow Patriarchate.
In May, the UOC-MP formally cut its ties with Moscow, but suspicions remain that it still secretly cleaves to Kirill. And this suspicion especially applies to the hierarchy at the thousand-year-old Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery.
On Tuesday the SBU announced a full-blown ‘counter-intelligence operation’ at the monastery ‘to counter the subversive activities of the Russian special services in Ukraine.’ Specifically, it was searching for hidden weapons or evidence that the monastery was being used as the base for sabotage operations or anti-government propaganda.
Meanwhile, a similar operation was taking place in Rivne region to the north-west of the country, with a raid on the Holy Trinity Monastery in Koretsk and the Mother of God Volyn Icon convent in Sernyky.
It is by no means unlikely that elements of the UOC-MP are indeed, whether from their own initiative of on orders from Moscow, acting as fifth columnists. The Russian state certainly has a track record of using any institutions it can as instruments of influence and subversion, and the Patriarchate is no exception.
On the other hand, one westerner who has worked with the SBU immediately emailed me with concerns that this could be counter-productive ‘security theatre’ following news that the service was opening criminal proceedings into claims that prayers were sung at the monastery ‘for Mother Russia.’
The SBU has, after all, a rather mixed record. It has demonstrated considerable skill in foiling Russian operations, but also at times revealed itself as a thuggish agency still in need of considerable reform. Those reform efforts launched by Volodymyr Zelenskyy after his election in 2019 have, needless to say, fallen by the wayside since the invasion.
Whatever the specific outcomes of these raids, they point to a potential challenge as Ukraine looks to a future after the war. It will need to knit together a society which includes not only those who still have sentimental or theological ties to Russia, but also the citizens of regions such as the Donetsk and Lugansk ‘people’s republics’ who have for years been under de facto Russian control. Will still speaking Russian, or having ties to Moscow, while still legal, prove to be enough to have someone denounced as a quisling?
The anger of Ukrainians is understandable and inevitable. And the sporadic reports of alleged Russian collaborators being zip-tied to lampposts, bloodied and blindfolded, and held without charge for weeks, need to be taken in context. They are nothing compared to the systemic brutality of the Russian invaders. However, the task of distinguishing those who willingly collaborated with the Russians and those who simply did what they did at gunpoint or out of a sense that it was in their communities’ best interests will be a sensitive and difficult one.
On the other hand, the pressures of the war are also having their effects within the Moscow Patriarchate. In June, Metropolitan Hilarion was dismissed from his role as its ‘foreign minister,’ having spoken out against a war in January. More to the point, there is evidence of a growing undercurrent of dissent among the grassroots. While for now the Moscow Patriarchate may continue to present the war as a necessary crusade, this may also pose a challenge to a pernicious alliance of church and state.