Earlier this month, on the same day that Ukrainian lawmakers effectively moved to ban an entire branch of the Russian Orthodox Church, the leader of Bulgaria's Orthodox Church publicly weighed in with a critical opinion on the historic, and controversial, step.
The Ukrainian law, Patriarch Daniil said, subjects the Russian church to "serious factual and legal restrictions," amounting to a "discriminatory policy."
Daniil's public positions backing the Russian church had already raised eyebrows in Bulgaria. And Daniil is not the only one.
Last year, Bulgaria expelled three priests -- two Belarusians and one Russian -- employed by the Russian Orthodox Church, citing national security grounds.
In Ukraine, where Russia's all-out war stands at 30 months and counting, Kyiv's move against a branch of the Orthodox Church seen as loyal to Moscow was yet another watershed moment in a decades-long struggle to define Ukraine's Orthodox identity. Some saw it, or outright misconstrued it, as an attack on religious freedom.
But in a growing number of other countries, the Russian church is finding it difficult to continue its operations as more authorities turn a critical eye toward its presence -- under the argument that rather than being an exclusively religious, spiritual organization, it is instead an active tool of Russian government soft power.
"It has never been a secret that Russia uses the church and Orthodox values as a significant part of its foreign policy," said Vladimir Liparteliani, a scholar at Durham University in Britain who has researched the Russian Orthodox Church, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation ROC.
"When a state bans and restricts the influence of the ROC, it is essentially trying to reduce the impact of Russian soft power," he said. "Moreover, for many European states, it is critically important to address this issue because Russian religious and conservative narratives are highly anti-Western and anti-liberal, and their danger should not be underestimated."
'The Kremlin's Calculation'
The ROC, the largest and wealthiest single unit among all Eastern Orthodox churches, has for centuries claimed the mantle of the true home of Orthodox Christianity.
Its current chief, Patriarch Kirill, is a vocal and visible supporter of President Vladimir Putin and the war against Ukraine. In September 2022, seven months after the start of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine, Kirill told Russian soldiers that "sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins." Earlier this year, Kirill declared the Ukraine invasion to be a "holy war."
"The more militant the patriarch's rhetoric and the more visible he becomes in Russian propaganda, the more bigoted he looks from the outside and the stronger the centrifugal forces within the church," Ksenia Luchenko, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a commentary last year. "By using force to try to keep the splintering parts of the once unified ROC together, the patriarch is only driving them away."
Inside Ukraine, the Russian church has long held sway over one of the largest branches of the fractured Orthodox faith, known until recently as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate, or simply UOC.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, a church called the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate emerged, competing for primacy among Ukrainian believers. It also competed with the Moscow Patriarchate church for prime real estate.
As tensions built following Russia's seizure of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, the Ukrainian churches edged further away from Moscow.
In late 2018, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate merged with another, smaller denomination called the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, which had been around since the Bolshevik Revolution a century earlier.
The newly merged church was called the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, or OCU. In January 2019, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the spiritual head of all Orthodox Christians, for the first time in history recognized the OCU's independence from Moscow.
Under pressure from Kyiv, the UOC formally renounced its ties to Moscow in the wake of the Ukraine war.
But Ukrainian lawmakers were unconvinced, and on August 20, passed legislation banning religious organizations linked to the ROC from operating in Ukraine.
"Protecting our people from Russian aggression, we must do it together not only on the battlefield, informational, diplomatic, economic, and other spheres but accordingly in the spiritual sphere as well," the head of the Ukrainian church, Metropolitan Epiphany, said in a TV interview following the vote. "Because without spiritual independence from the Kremlin, from the Russian 'evil empire,' we cannot talk about our true independence."
Ukraine's move was met with predictable anger in Moscow.
In other places, it was framed as an attack on religious liberty. Even the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, criticized the legislation, saying, "I fear for the liberty of those who pray."
For some in Ukraine, however, the move was a welcome effort to counter the Moscow-linked church's efforts to sway sympathies of Ukrainians, either overtly or subtly.
Tetyana Derkach, a Ukrainian analyst and religious scholar, charged that the Russian church played a role in undermining Ukrainian national sentiments in the wake of the 2014 Maidan public protests, which led to the ouster of the country's pro-Russian president. The Kremlin has repeatedly tried to depict those events not as a public display of anti-government sentiment but rather a coup d'etat.
"The Kremlin's calculation that [the UOC] would be able to 'educate' believers into people loyal to Russia was largely justified," Derkach said. "In essence, the UOC was preparing a springboard for people to accept the idea of unifying Ukraine with Russia and restoring the union state."
Bulgaria Looks East
In Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church has been under scrutiny for its positions siding with the Russian church, particularly regarding the fight in Ukraine. The church leadership has refused to recognize the 2018 decision that granted the Orthodox Church of Ukraine independence from Moscow.
Last year's expulsion of three Russian priests -- who were affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church in Bulgaria, not the Bulgarian Orthodox Church itself -- had a different dimension.
The chief priest who was expelled, Archimandrite Vassian, was kicked out on national security grounds in a decision that appeared to stem from his work in neighboring North Macedonia.
Vassian had repeatedly visited North Macedonia "to perform the functions of Russian intelligence with the aim of dividing the Macedonian church," Atanas Atanasov, a lawmaker with the Democratic Bulgaria party, said at the time.
The two other Russian Orthodox priests expelled by Bulgaria were Belarusian citizens. One, Yevhen Pavelchuk, served in a secret military unit near Moscow prior to joining the priesthood. He also, according to an investigation by RFE/RL's Belarusian Service, helped found an Orthodox youth club that taught troubled teenagers military skills as well as Russian-centric, nationalist ideas broadly known as "Russian World."
After the expulsions, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that the main Russian church in the capital, Sofia, would be shut down.
Patriarch Daniil, who was elected head of the Bulgarian church in June, publicly criticized the closure of the church and the priests' expulsions and, more recently, the Ukrainian move to criminalize Russian-linked church entities.
"Patriarch Daniil has categorically proven himself as a pro-Russian Bulgarian bishop," historian and publicist Goran Blagoev, a Sofia-based historian and commentator, told RFE/RL's Bulgarian Service.
Czechs, Very Much. Georgian, Not So Much.
Bulgaria is far from the only country where the Russian Orthodox Church is under growing pressure.
In the Czech Republic, authorities have tightened the screws as part of a multiyear campaign to restrict activities of Russian officials and related entities – a campaign that gained new momentum after revelations in 2021 that Russian intelligence agents were responsible for blowing up two Czech ammunition depots in 2014.
Czech authorities sanctioned Patriarch Kirill last year and have expelled one Russian cleric. Some lawmakers have called on the government to investigate whether Russian churches were involved in "influence operations" in the country.
"I do not consider the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate to be a church and its representatives to be clergymen," Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said earlier this month. "It is part of the Kremlin's repressive machine that is involved in Russia's influence operations."
In other countries where local Orthodox churches are considered subservient to Moscow, there have been tangible efforts to weaken ties with the Russian church.
In the Baltics, Lithuanian and Latvian Orthodox church authorities, with the backing of political leaders, have moved toward independence, though the Orthodox Christianity's communal organizational structure has made that difficult.
By contrast, in Georgia, the situation is quite different.
After the 2018 decision by Patriarch Bartholomew granting the Ukrainian church independence from Moscow, three of the world's bigger Orthodox churches that are self-governing -- Greek, Alexandrian, and Cypriot -- recognized the decision.
The Georgian Orthodox Church, which is also formally independent of Moscow, was one of the national churches that did not.
Georgian scholars said that decision contrasted sharply with a decision in February 2023 to recognize the independence of the Orthodox church in North Macedonia.
Fear of angering the Russian church was the main reason for not recognizing the Ukrainian church's independence, Georgian theologian Lela Jejelava said.
"The issue of Ukraine has much deeper content," she told RFE/RL's Georgian Service last year. "It's a political issue rather than a canonical one."
"We have a purely political subtext," she said. "In this case, the Georgian Church confirms its presence in the orbit of the Russian Church."
