Ukraine still matters despite ill-advised designs to abandon it | Opinion

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenshy “has shut down the biggest Ukraine Church in the country.”

So former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard falsely declared in an interview with Tucker Carlson in December 2022. That same year, without evidence, Donald Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence charged that Washington had funded at least 25 “bio-labs in Ukraine which if breached would release and spread deadly pathogens.” This claim came days after Russia made the same accusation, followed quickly by a U.S. denial, leading Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) to charge Gabbard with “parroting false Russian propaganda.”

In November 2023 Gabbard repeated her claim that Zelensky had “outlawed…Ukraine’s Orthodox Church.” So completely has Gabbard followed Moscow’s line on Ukraine that Kremlin television favorite Vladimir Solovyov christened her “our girl” and joked she might be in Russia’s employ.

Gabbard’s notions on religion in Ukraine are confused as well as mistaken. The country actually is home to two, not one Orthodoxy: The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). The UOC has been subordinate to Moscow’s Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) for centuries. In contrast, in 2018 Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew granted the OCU autocephalous (independent) status separate from the pro-Russian leanings of the UOC.

In the wake of Russia’s 2022 full scale invasion of Ukraine one element of Moscow’s disinformation campaign has been to paint Kyiv as unworthy of Western support, hence the absurd charge that it persecutes Christians. As a wartime measure of national security Ukrainian legislation of August 2024 did ban the staunchly pro-Putin, pro-war Russian Orthodox Church. It also requires that in nine months the Ukrainian Orthodox Church sever all ties with Moscow and prevent its congregations from supporting the Russian war effort.

Back in 2022 the UOC did officially break with the Russian Orthodox Church, but its disaffiliation is far from complete. The ROC website still lists over 100 UOC hierarchs as part of its episcopate; Ukraine has convicted 26 UOC clerics of Russian collaboration, with an additional 72 under investigation; and in searches of UOC premises Ukrainian police have confiscated reams of pro-Russian war propaganda, Russian passports of UOC priests, and suspiciously large sums of cash.

Particularly problematic and paradoxical, in 2023 the UOC, hoping to rebut charges of siding with the enemy, hired attorney Robert Amsterdam whose Washington lobbying fees are being paid by a pro-Russian oligarch. With a weakness for unrestrained hyperbole he castigates a “rapacious” Kyiv determined to “put chains on the gates of its churches.” In addition, Ukraine’s August 2024 legislation is said to be “persecution,” “a disgraceful transgression of civil rights,” and an “act of religious vandalism.” To date the capstone of Amsterdam’s efforts were his interviews with Tucker Carlson (October 28, 2023, and April 24, 2024), with some of the lobbying morphing into a video, “Christianity under Attack in Ukraine.”

Paying Amsterdam’s bills is Russian-born billionaire Vadym Novynski. In 1990s St. Petersburg, in partnership with a Putin associate, Novynski made a fortune in oil worth 1.4 billion today according to Forbes. Granted Ukrainian citizenship in 2012 by Ukraine’s then-Kremlin-aligned President Viktor Yanukovych, Kyiv in 2023 placed him under sanctions and opened a criminal investigation against him for “aiding and abetting the aggressor country.”

Novynski and Amsterdam have succeeded in helping soften U.S. support for Ukraine. Republican Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul bemoans the fact that Russian propaganda has “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” Specifically, with Novynski’s bankrolling, since Kyiv is unwilling to give the UOC a free pass, Amsterdam has sought to thwart continued U.S. military support for Ukraine. To the same end Vice-President Elect J. D. Vance has accused Kyiv of an “assault on traditional Christian communities” and has proposed that Ukraine aid be made “conditional on preserving the UOC.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Jillian Kay Melchior is not buying it: 1) “The evidence doesn’t support the accusation that Ukraine is persecuting Orthodox Christians;” and 2) “The national-security threat posed by some factions of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is genuine.”

By way of analogy, after 9/11, “The U.S. sought to safeguard religious freedom while protecting itself from Islamic terrorism. Ukraine seeks to uphold religious liberty while addressing Russia’s power over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which supports the Kremlin.”

Historically, Americans have been staunch champions of personal freedom and religious liberty. Because Ukraine cherishes the same, it deserves our nation’s wholehearted support. By even a calculus of pure self-interest Ukraine matters to U.S. national security because oceans no longer buffer us from intercontinental ballistic missiles, because Putin respects no borders, and because his appetite grows with the eating.

Mark R. Elliott, Wilmore, Kentucky, is a retired professor of history and editor emeritus of the East-West Church Report (www.eastwestreport.org).