Khust, Ukraine – “Praise Jesus” instead of “hello” is what one often hears in Transcarpathia, Ukraine’s westernmost region.
Known for piousness, mesmerising folklore, forested mountains and inventive smugglers, Transcarpathia used to be dominated by the Greek-Catholic Church that preserved Orthodox rites, but considers the pope its spiritual leader.
Transcarpathia had never been part of Russia until Soviet leader Joseph Stalin annexed it in 1944, imposing the Russian Orthodox Church whose top clerics collaborated with the KGB, the main security agency of the Soviet era.
“Soviet intelligence either forced all [Greek-Catholic] priests to the pro-communist Orthodoxy or killed them off in Siberia,” Oleh Dyba, a publicist and scholar of Transcarpathia’s religious life, told Al Jazeera.
This is the second year when Ukraine celebrates Christmas on December 25 after hundreds of years of celebrating it on January 7 in accordance with the Gregorian calendar still used by the Russian Orthodox Church.
But even so, the formerly pro-Russian Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) remains the country’s largest religious see.
Moscow Patriarch Kirill, who heads the world’s largest Orthodox see, was one of those who collaborated with the KGB. He remains the closest ideological ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB colonel.
Kirill is accused of purging dissident priests, he has described Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war”, and he has said that Russian servicemen dying in Ukraine have their sins “washed away”.
“Russia is virtually returning to the discourse of medieval Crusades,” Andrey Kordochkin, an Oxford-educated theologian who left Kirill’s church to join the Istanbul-based Patriarchate of Constantinople, told Al Jazeera.
More than a millennium ago, Constantinople dispatched Orthodox priests to baptise Kyivan Prince Vladimir, a pagan Viking whose state would give birth to what is now Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.
The UOC was a sizeable and essential part of Moscow’s religious empire with thousands of parishes and priests.
Some of them espoused pro-Russian views after Moscow annexed Crimea and backed separatists in the southeastern region of Donbas in 2014.
“Their priest refused to pray for my cousin who was fighting in Donbas in 2015,” Filip, a resident of the Transcarpathian village of Chynadievo, told Al Jazeera. “Since then, I never set foot in that church.”
Meanwhile, the separatists turned against pro-Ukrainian clerics.
One of those targeted was Archbishop Afanasy, who faced a mock execution in June 2014 in the rebel “capital” of Luhansk.
He was blindfolded, placed against a wall and heard a shot that did not touch him.
He left Luhansk in his rundown car whose brakes were deliberately damaged by the rebels, Afanasy told this reporter in 2018.
UOC vs OCU
In 2019, Ukraine’s pro-Western government established the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) that reports to the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
However, despite cajoling, coercion and persecution of clerics, the formerly pro-Russian UOC remains Ukraine’s largest religious see.
It officially broke away from Moscow and helped the war effort by hosting refugees and collecting humanitarian aid and donations for drones and medical supplies.
But many of its leaders have been under fire for their real or alleged pro-Moscow sympathies.
Metropolitan Mark, a white-bearded 73-year-old whose religious realm is centred around the tiny Transcarpathian town of Khust, is one of them.
In the past two years, he has been accused of having a Russian passport – along with two dozen top UOC clerics, and building a $225,000 house in Sergiev Posad, a spiritual centre outside Moscow where he had studied in the 1970s.
Mark’s nephew, driver and deacon Volodymyr Petrovtsyi faces desertion charges after fleeing his military unit in October and reportedly saying he did not want to fight his “Russian compatriots”.
One of Metropolitan Mark’s clerics told Al Jazeera that the claims about the house and the passport were false.
“I can tell you wholeheartedly that this is not true,” Father Vassily said, standing inside the Khust cathedral, whose walls and ceiling were filled with depictions of Evangelical scenes and icons.
He, however, claimed that back in 2018, popular comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy sought the UOC’s support ahead of the presidential vote.
Father Vassily said, without providing any evidence of this exchange, that Zelenskyy secured the support after pledging to convert to Christianity – but never stuck to his alleged “promise”.
“Since then, he punishes and persecutes us,” Father Vassily claimed.
Al Jazeera could not independently verify Vassily’s claims.
Since 2022, more than 100 UOC priests have been suspected of treason, collaborating with Moscow-appointed officials in occupied regions and spreading Russian propaganda, Ukraine’s Security Service, the main intelligence agency, said in August.
That is when the Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine’s lower house of parliament, banned the UOC to “strengthen national security and protect the constitutional order”.
‘Pretty risky to experiment with compatriots’
The move is, however, extremely counterproductive, according to a German researcher who spent decades studying Ukraine’s religious life and visiting dozens of parishes.
Far-right groups pressure the UOC into submission forcibly, taking over parishes and snubbing their parishioners who fight on the front lines, Nikolay Mitrokhin of the University of Bremen said.
“When Ukraine is losing on the battlefield, it’s pretty risky to experiment with its compatriots this way,” he told Al Jazeera.
The pressure violates Ukraine’s constitution and attracts criticism from the collective West, jeopardising the supply of military and financial aid, he said, adding that the pressure gives the Kremlin a perfect excuse to lambast “Kyiv’s neo-Nazi junta,” spread anti-Ukrainian messages, and appropriate parishes in Russia-occupied Ukrainian regions.
On December 16, popular chef Evhen Klopotenko filmed a culinary show on traditional Christmas dishes in the canteen of the Kyiv-Pecherska Lavra, a mammoth religious complex in central Kyiv.
Most of the ancient complex belongs to the UOC.
The Kremlin responded to the news with predictable derision – and shared it with the pro-Russian audience in the former Soviet Union.
“They take over churches to turn them into circuses,” Nilufar Abdullaeva, a self-described “Russian patriot” living in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, told Al Jazeera. “They lost all shame.”
The official ban on the UOC will only force it underground, and it “will sooner or later emerge from there with an image of martyr and winner”, Mitrokhin said.
Lastly, the shutdown of parishes may damage and destroy thousands of historic buildings that need constant attention, repairs and heating during harsh Ukrainian winters.
“In a short while, the catastrophic destruction of frescoes and then of buildings begins,” Mitrokhin said. “Therefore, a huge slice of Ukraine’s own cultural legacy will be gone.”
