 So ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you to the United States Institute of Peace. My name is Bill Taylor. I'm the Executive Vice President here at the Institute. And we are very pleased, excited, had been looking forward to this event for months. And I'm so pleased that you can join us in this great event. The Religious Freedom Institute, the head of which I'm going to introduce in a moment. And the George Washington University participants here and the Institute of Peace are coming together to have this conversation about religion and about the Orthodox Church in that particular part and a part of the world where this is focused, where people are focused on these issues in Ukraine. So this is the Institute of Peace where our business, we're established by the Congress 35 years ago to try to do things and think about things and work on ways to prevent conflict, resolve conflict when it comes and then help clean up after conflict when it occurs and is resolved. So this is a perfect issue for us. This is one that we've been, our work on religion, the United States Institute of Peace work on religion goes back, it actually is our oldest standing program, goes back 25 years. About the same length of time that Ukraine's independence goes back. And so there's a coincidence of this. This topic that we'll talk about today, I have, I was characterizing as the divorce of the century, but I was corrected as the divorce of the millennium. And I want to argue, I will make the case that it is more significant than, say, Brexit. This is a major event that we ought to understand from a conflict prevention standpoint, which is why we're here, from a religious freedom standpoint from our colleagues. This is, I think, a great topic for us to look at and we're spending some time today, the full day, to take a look at this. I'm very glad to see my old friend Kent Hill. We worked together as, when we were trying to support the Russians and the Ukrainians and the Uzbeks and others as they came out of the out of Soviet times. John Herps will join us in a little bit later. And John and I were in Kiev at the same, we overlapped for about three days. He on the way out and me on the way in. This is, Susie Hayward is also the head of our religious program. And she does, that's Reverend Susie Hayward, I would be quick to point out. And Charles North, who helped organize this. And Charles is right there in the middle, right at the back with Leslie Many, who also helped organize this. And they will, you'll see them as a participants later on today. But Charles knows something about Moscow, about Russia and about Ukraine. And Charles and Leslie just got back from Kiev a couple of weeks ago. So this is a great opportunity for us. I'm so pleased to be co-sponsoring here with the Religious Freedom Institute. And the president of the Religious Freedom Institute is Tom Farr, who will give opening statements and then kick us off. Tom has a great background in both the State Department and the military. I'm glad to see we've got some military representatives here today. As well as I have some of those same connections going back there, Tom. So it's a very, very great honor for me to invite Tom to come up here. So please welcome him to the stage. Thank you so much. It really is a pleasure to be here, Bill, with you and USIP, an honor to introduce and say hello to you. My job is to kick this off, as Bill said, and then get out of the way and let's get going on this. This is one of the most important issues in the world today. And as Bill mentioned, our angle on this is Religious Freedom. And that's what we do at the Religious Freedom Institute. It would be odd with that name if we didn't. Our job is to advance Religious Freedom around the world in selected areas. And I can tell you, as someone who tries to keep a broad view of what's going on in the world, there's some pretty terrible things going on in the world, as you know, and other parts of it, with respect to religious persecution. This is one of the worst. This competes for this terrible honor of being one of the places where the depredations against people because of their religious beliefs and practices is difficult to overstate. It is nuanced. There are issues that we will get into today that will help to explain and shine a light on this problem. But it is a deep problem for all defenders of religious liberty and a problem for the United States government that will be explored today. So thank you, Bill, for inviting us to cosponsor. Let me simply say that on behalf of our colleague, Father Deacon, former ambassador for Religious Freedom, Andrew Bennett, who was involved in conceiving this with Charles North and others, who could not be here today because, ironically, of some visa issues, those of you who know Andrew know that he lives in Canada. And he is also a senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute and one of the most valuable parts of what we do. And it's a deep disappointment to us that he's not here. And I know he's disappointed not to be here with you today. But he's here with you in spirit. He's very much concerned as we are with what's going on in Ukraine. So let me simply say welcome on behalf of the Religious Freedom Institute and let's get started in this very, very important consideration of one of the most important issues on the planet. I'm going to ask Dr. Mark Morosevich to come on up. And along with Cyril Kennedy, I believe our first two panelists, please join us on the stage. And we will kick this off right away. Father, thank you. Thank you, Tom. Please welcome our panelists. Good morning. If you indulge me, I would prefer to stand for the first part of the presentation. As a professor, I just have never sat down. And it's hard for me to give a talk while sitting. Do I move the? So first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to speak here today. And for your interest in these complex issues. I'm humbled to open this discussion. And according to the title given to me, the historical ecclesial context of Russia-Ukraine relations. It's a daunting task for a short opening presentation. Obviously, I will not be able to present you a complete history either of the countries or the various ecclesial bodies. Rather, I want to focus on some of the major issues of state and church to help structure and contextualize the discussions of the day. This thumbnail sketch will outline the major issues. And I hope that will provide a context for the discussion sessions later. Also, my vain hope maybe, is that it will be a catalyst for your future study that you may explore these issues on your own. The Eastern Slavs possess a rich but little known history. The history of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia provides important clues to understanding the complexities of the current events. Ukraine is defending its Donbas region from unacknowledged Russian incursion that began in 2014. By the end of that year, Russia occupied an annexed Crimea, violating the accepted international legal norms. This situation is serious, and the Council on Foreign Relations lists more than 10,000 casualties, and over 1.6 million people displaced. War is evil. I wonder why it's not reported more extensively here in the United States. At the same time as we're looking at this, there's a tumultuous period of the churches in Ukraine as issues have resulted in a dramatic alienation, a rupture of millennial proportions between the Moscow Patriarch and the Constantinopolitan Patriarch. This is really one of the biggest crises in Orthodox history. So as we began to look at these questions in the historical setting, I asked that you indulge me by acknowledging some preconceived notions that we will need to hold in bay in order to develop a more complete understanding of this topic. The first is a very American notion of the separation of church and state. Actually, 70% of the world live in countries where there is no freedom of religion. This is the very tenet of our society and the focal point of the formation of our country. Yet throughout history, it simply wasn't so. So we need to appropriate the past without our preconceived notions, without our prejudices, so that we can understand what happened. The second issue revolves around the 19th century popularization of the concept of a nation-state. This concept evolving for centuries takes root as people identify in different groups but along linguistic, cultural, political, and economic ties. Often these groupings are generic, but at other times, they're forced. An interesting example that demonstrates this notion of how this nation is not completely owned and its complete unification is seen with Italy of all places. Dialects continue to be so strong. The Romanesque dialogue, the dialect in Sicily, they hold on to those identities to those dialects. Anyone who's traveled through those hill towns knows that even though you speak Italian, you may not understand them. I mentioned this Western example to remind ourselves that nation-states are not static. They may even reflect political aspirations rather than realities. The nation-state concept is evolving even today in Russia and Ukraine. So I caution a simplified approach in developing conclusions as they are often based on an incomplete historical situation. So we're setting aside the idea of religious freedom and its Western conceptualization and gonna look at church-state relationships in a new way. And remember that in Eastern Europe, especially, there are no homogeneous countries that have the whole ethnic ideal brought together and these are often the source of tensions. So let us begin with an overview of the history of this area. If you haven't read this article from the Washington Post, I suggest that you do. It has some great maps and I will be using these maps throughout but I just wanted to share with you a quick view, the 18th to 13th century, a view of the whole of Vladimir's reign and then back to the 1650s, the 1812s, the freedom of Ukraine, the Soviet system, the freedom of Ukraine in the 1989 and then finally to today where we have the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of the Donbas area. We're gonna see these maps a lot today so what I just wanted to give you an idea of these markers. So the ancient people of Rus, the ancient term for this area, often identified as Varyngians from a Norwegian influence who were actually a combination of various peoples stemming from a several thousand year old indigenous Tripilian tribes. For our purpose, we will begin with the ninth century Rurik dynasty which many in the scholarly world identify as a Varyngian supported state. Rurik's son, Ihor, establishes a nation state in Kiev and the entire state was known as Rus. His son, Siatoslav, becomes a ruler during his minority upon the untimely death of his father. Ihor's wife, Olga, reigns as a regent giving her great influence. She is the first widely known Christian in the court. It is Siatoslav's son, Volodymyr, who accepts Christianity from the Constantinopolitan Emperor in 988 as he marries Emperor Basil II's sister Anna. This simple diagram, as a liturgist mind you, I have to get a little bit of this understanding in here, gives you some sense of the various realities and where we find the Byzantine tradition. It's a tradition rooted in Antioch and has all of these various followers as you see there. That's not all of them, but just to give you a taste. But so this was what Volodymyr had chosen, the church in Constantinople as the place of baptism for his people in 988. This formal introduction of Christianity to the people of Rus creates not just a spiritual link, but also a political link sealed in marriage as many people did in those days. Volodymyr's first conversion of his people matched other such rulers' actions as the period dictated. Remember Caesar opapism evident in Christianity from the very beginning of freedom as witnessed by the pagan Constantine convoking the first council of Nicaea in 325, something that we don't always think about. So this fledgling Kievan state found a military ally in Constantinople as well as a dependency upon the patriarch of Constantinople for naming its bishops. The Christianization of Kiev likewise involved massive building programs of churches, most notably the church of Saint Sophia in Kiev. And it's interesting as well if you travel there, as I just had the opportunity two weeks ago, you can see 11th century icons. How many places in the world do you have these preserved? Now it's intriguing to note in the Hague of Saint Sophia of Kiev that these are really all Byzantine iconographers. Everything's in Greek. You go to St. Michael's, which was destroyed, but some of the frescoes and the mosaics were preserved. They actually have the iconography with the Slavonic titles. So a sign already of that appropriation as well as the differentiation of art form. So this building program with Hague of Sophia as well Saint Michael's parish and the famous Church of the Tithes, which no longer exists, it was a church dedicated to Mary, form a spiritual center of Kiev. And as well, I have to mention St. Pontelemeon near Hallich. And as well the caves monastery along the Nipro River, and they provided a fitting that it was wonderful for this group of Russ, this Kievan people to exist, to declare, to own that sense of their Christianity. It is important to note as well that the Constantapolitan patriarch continued to nominate the metropolitan of this area for centuries. We'll get back to that fact. So the Kievan state included a vast amount of territory. You can see it here pictured beyond Novrod and Volodomir continue to conquer and acquire territory solidifying his reign. It expands both west and north and is plagued in the following years by the usual dynastic and personal squabbles and wars, which are very interesting. But again, I have a limited amount of time. While it's instructed to understand these successive battles and the competing dynasties following the death of Volodomir, the Mongol invasions of the 13th century determine much of the next course of history. Between 1223 and 1240, the Mongols, often referred to as Tartars, invade the Kievan state and cripple it by finally seizing Kievan 1240. As the center of Russ shifts west and north, Kiev is eventually incorporated into the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom. Meanwhile, ancient Novrod and Moscow founded in 1147 find a momus vivendi with the Mongols and prosper by controlling the trade routes, a little-known fact. Prince Ivan I of Moscow joins the Mongols in a battle of 1327 and this connection continues into the 15th century. Facility II, the Prince of Moscow, even uses the Tartar language in his court. By the end of the 15th century, his successor, Ivan III of Moscow, reverses the relationship, subjugating the Tartars. By the end of the next century, Moscow gains control of much of the area around Kiev and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. While all of this is happening in these Slavic lands, the Ottoman Turks conquer Constantinople in 1453 and the local Greeks are expelled and it severely curtailes the activities of the Constantinopolitan patriarch, sending it into turmoil. The destruction of the empire affected the Orthodox church that viewed the emperor as a divinely elected ruler. An important thing that we don't always think about that impact. The 16th century marks a further consolidation of power by the 1569 Union of Lublin, which brought about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which lasted until late into the 18th century with its final collapse in 1795 with a third partition of Poland. Around the same time of the Union of Lublin, we see the rise of Ivan IV, or better known as Ivan the Terrible. He ruled Moscow from 1533 to 1547. He expanded his reign, taking the title Tsar until his death in 1584. The Moscow Patriarchate was then established during this period in 1589 through the pressure of the Russian ruler upon the Constantinopolitan patriarch who was now living in a severely curtailed existence in the Ottoman Empire. The Kievan metropolitanate responding to the global situation and the current rule of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth sought out union with the Catholic church in the Union of Rust in 1596. It is worth noting that the farther western eparchies of Lviv and Ushorod did not sign on to the accord. That was the place where, as we'll see traditionally, Catholicism became strong. They only came into union later, Ushorod in 1646, in Lviv in 1700. During this epoch, the Muscovite rulers gained further power following a period of dynastic crisis called the time of troubles. It was Peter the Great, 1682 to 1725, who consolidated the royal rule and subordinated the Russian Orthodox Church to the state by abolishing the Russian Orthodox Patriarchate in 1721 and placing it into rule of the Holy Synod. Catherine the Great conquered the lands previously held by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during her reign from 1762 to 1796. These incursions led to an intense Russification that eliminated the Uniate Church proclaimed by the Kievan Metropolitanate. Its only place of survival was in the lands ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, most notably the last to come into union, Lviv and Ushorod, but also Prémysil. I've mentioned very little about the Russian Orthodox Church as I've outlined historical progression the lands around Kiev that form modern-day Ukraine. This important shifting of political borders indicates that tumultuous period of history. The societal upheaval coupled with continuous war and incursions of foreign invaders made for a very difficult period of Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church under the Metropolitan of Moscow, Makari, 1463 solidified the understanding of this principality as a state and helped to solidify this notion by positing Moscow as the third Rome. Remember, 1453, Constantinople falls, so now there's this law. Where is this power? So it was Makari who begins that notion. It developed in 1589, Moscow was proclaimed a patriarchate during the reign of Fyodor I with the naming of Metropolitan Job as the first patriarch of Moscow. This is an important point to remember as this happens in 1589, and as we saw the Kievan Metropolitanate declares the Union of 1596 only some seven years later. The Russian Church continues its affinity with a state and spreads its reach and lockstep with the Tsars as they conquer the various territories. In Kiev and the surrounding eparchies, they eliminate unionism, eliminate the Ukrainian language and impose the Russian language by force. As a side note, it is interesting to remember that in 1721, as we've already noted, the patriarch is removed and the Holy Synod is placed further complicating, if you will, the relationship between the Tsar and the church. And that lasts until the Bolshevik Revolution and when in November 5th, 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church puts patriarch Tikhon into power. Although each of these issues demand a much more thorough treatment, I must now focus, I told you it was gonna be a blitzkrieg, on the First World War, as it brought about other political shifts in a brief period of independence in Kiev and the proclamation of a short-lived Ukrainian state. However, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution loomed large. The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Lutosk was then dissolved after the creation of the Ukrainian SSR in 1922. At that point, the dioceses of the western part of Ukraine were under Polish control. And you can see that in the framework there. Final conquering of the lands followed following the Second World War led to the creation of the current borders of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 1954. This communist takeover and consolidation of the country as one Ukraine marked a new period. For the first time in the modern epoch, a territorial identity was established for the Kievan rules, the lineage, that demarcated fixed borders. These boundaries gathered diverse people and diverse experiences of education into one. The repressive communist regime instilled Russian as the official language in order to solidify the Soviet Union, so not just in Ukraine, but throughout, and it imposed its atheistic ideals by severely limiting religious freedom. As you can see in the CIA report in 1945 in the region of Halichena, the western eparchies, which were the only ones to remain in union, were then liquidated. According to the report publicly available on the internet, all of the Ukrainian Catholic bishops were arrested on the 9th of May 1945. In 1946, the Russian Orthodox Church conducted a synod in Lviv without the presence of a single Ukrainian Greek Catholic bishop and liquidated the Union of Rest. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church became the largest persecuted Catholic Church in the world as it continued to exist in the underground. Liturgy celebrated in private homes and even sometimes in the forest attracted strong adherents. The atheistic regime severely curtailed the Russian Orthodox Church and embarked on its forced atheistic ideal that included intimidation, destruction of church buildings, co-opting of clerics. Well, many of these churches throughout Ukrainian Russia were destroyed, others were made into museums and even others into simple warehouses even for grain. Jumping fast forward, we have the reforms of Gorbachev and his glass nose brought about the freedom of the underground Ukrainian Catholic Church that emerged forth for the first time in 1989 with the commemoration of the Pope during a liturgy and downtown Lviv Church of the Holy Transfiguration in 1989. This renewal came to its completion when the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Cardinal Miroslav Lubachivsky, who had been in Rome, following upon the lineage of Shilpey, who had been exiled, returned to Lviv on the 30th of March, 1991. A mere 10 years later, St. Pope John Paul II would visit Ukraine and celebrate in both the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Liturgical Tradition as well as the Latin Catholic Eucharistic Liturgies. This opportunity for the freedom of conscience in Ukraine led to an explosion of church life. In early 1992, the Moscow Orthodox Bishop Filaret following an early meeting and the earlier meeting in the Pachevsky Lavra formally petitioned Moscow to establish an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate denied his petition. Upon Filaret's return to Ukraine, he held a unifying meeting and an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church was established with Patriarch Misloslav as its head until his death in 1993. Patriarch Volodymyr was elected and then dies in 1995 and the currently reigning Patriarch Filaret becomes the head of the Kievan Patriarchal Orthodox Church. Now remember, at this time, the Moscow Orthodox Church declared this church to be non-canonical, not recognizing the validity of its sacraments and really therefore denying the reality of the operation of God's grace for the people who adhered to this church. The smaller of the current three official Orthodox churches, the Ottocephalus Orthodox Church, was born during this brief period of the post-World War I independence. In the free Ukrainian capital of Kiev in 1921, all Ukrainian subor was called and an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church was created. The church was officially liquidated and absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviet control that was solidified in 1945. In 1991, the church is re-established under the governance of Patriarch Misloslav from the States and following upon his 1993 death by Patriarch Volodymyr, so a current sort of connection with what we saw with the Kievan Patriarchate. Well, Volodymyr then working with Filaret led to a dissension and those unwilling to be under that organization created a new entity and elected a new head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Dmitry Yerema. Currently, Metropolitan Makari heads the Ukrainian Ottocephalus Orthodox Church. I would be remiss not to mention the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine with its head as Archbishop Metchislav Moksitsky as the Archbishop of Lviv. The church began to exist in the 14th century with the influence of the Polish Kingdom. Its activity during the Soviet period was curtailed, although it did continue to hold religious services on a restricted basis. The hierarchy which had been exiled returned to Ukraine and resumed normal life in 1990, 1991 as well. So, that's a lot I know. We have the historical facts and coupled with the ecclesial realities of today. The complex history of the churches in Ukraine is intimately tied to its ruling powers for most of its history, whoever those ruling powers might have been. A situation that is indeed the same in Russia even today. You need to be registered and they have a curtailment of religious freedom in Russia and the Ukrainian Catholic Church for one who has hundreds of thousands of adherents in Russia is illegal. The Kievan state besieged and crippled by the 13th century Mongol invasion suffered greatly and was diminished. The rise of the Moskovite principality and the new political power gained as it engaged in trade agreements with a golden horde led to a new level of prosperity. It succeeded in developing a nation state that proceeded to acquire territory and conquer others. As it gained territory and keeping with the ethos of the time, it imposed its religious standard on the people it conquered. In fact, it dominated as well by the imposition of its language on others. This coupled with the Bolshevik Revolution and the atheistic regime limits the free development of religious life. The period of independence officially recognized in 1991 saw the establishment of a new form of government in Ukraine, a government that leans westward in its ideology and favors religious freedom. Actually, it is a freedom of individuals to follow their own consciences. The council, the churches in Ukraine exists and enjoys a good fraternal working relationship even with non-Christians, the Crimean Tartars who are now being persecuted following the Russian occupation of Crimea. This dramatic shift from atheistic domination to freedom of conscience, to freedom of religion is a remarkable step that is still being brought into existence in Ukraine today. It's a dramatic shift. It's monumental. And it's something that we see playing out as we try to understand the relationship between Moscow and Constantinople, the relationship that brings about the occupation of Crimea and the war in Donbas. So it's a nation state idea about who is Rus. And who is Ukraine today? Thank you very much. Okay, it works. You summed up in your last two sentences what I was thinking about as soon as I saw the picture of the baptism of Kiev and the Rus. So as a child, I went to Ukrainian Catholic Church and images like that are very prevalent in the parish office or some other part of the church, usually not in the worship space itself, but sometimes even there. And that was a very seminally Ukrainian portrayal. Vladimir has the drooping mustache of a Cossack. I don't know what he looked like, but if I contrast that with the images I've seen in the Russian Orthodox churches I've visited, where Vladimir has the long beard of, I don't know of what, but certainly not the drooping mustache of the Cossack. The other Ukrainian images that were present there, I don't know if they're historically accurate, but they don't appear in the images I've seen in a more Russian context portraying the same event. Yet, both groups see this as part of their heritage. If you could ask the question, would the real metropolitan of Kyiv please stand up? Or would the real heir of Kyiv and the Rus' please stand up? And in Ukraine right now, four people would potentially stand up. Or perhaps I'll back up a little bit. I don't know who would stand up right now at this moment, but several months ago four people would have stood up. And maybe more, some people in the background who are perhaps sectarian or something, but they also would claim to this. So this is a question used the term of spiritual center. I kept on thinking about the situation of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which in its, in the long history of Kosovo and Kosovo's independence in the 1990s and into this century, the Serbian Orthodox Church has repeatedly said, Kosovo is our spiritual center. And whatever claim they're making about that, I'm not precisely sure, or I shouldn't go down that road. But certainly here we're talking about a similar situation. That along the banks of the Dnipro, the Dnipro River in Ukraine, you have those caves, you have those churches with the golden domes. Who is the rightful heir? So that's one thing that comes to mind. Another thing that comes to mind, and this is, it's impossible in a talk like yours to do more than hit the crises. And so we, in a sense, we get the worst version of the story. For a 200 year period, there was extremely turbulent at times, coexistence between Orthodox, Eastern Catholic to use the pejorative old term units, but these sort of, the people came into union at the Union of Breast, Roman Catholics, Protestants, extreme Protestants, Unitarians, people, Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Now obviously at times this boiled over into real violence. And yet, at other times, I don't want to say people lived and let lived, but you could have found members of all these religious institutions in the elites of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. So perhaps that's something worth thinking about as well. What does this, what does, what's in the background, you know, for 17 or 18 years, there has been real religious tension in Ukraine between different Orthodox groups and between other religious groups. And yet there's also been moments of cooperation and friendship, and we're seeing some of that today right now in the midst of this crisis. So what can we learn from these less dramatic moments of coexistence? And perhaps a last thought before I ask you a first question is that as I was thinking who does this history belong to and I will actually, I'm going, that will be my first question. But I couldn't help but think how much this is a shared history. The Union of Breast, if you look at a map of Ukraine today, I don't think you'll find breast because it's in Belarus, correct? So it's actually outside the borders of the country we're talking about. And you rightly pointed out how what is today of the Greek Catholic heartland, Galicia, was a latecomer to this Union. And in many ways, Belarus was really the heartland of the Union for the first 150 or so years. And so it's impossible in a certain way for us to get away from the shared history that today there are Belarusian Catholics and Belarusian Orthodox, very small groups, who want, they want neither to be subsumed by the Russian experience nor by the Ukrainian experience. And yet at least those Belarusian Catholics would look to the Union of Breasts the same way that you and I would look to the Union of Breasts. So with that, those thoughts, I will try to sum up my first question. And first of all, I should also thank you for your coaching summary. It's impossible. How would you, you could teach a whole course on that. You could actually teach several courses on that. So good job getting through it in 25 minutes. So understanding these issues in their historical context, what do we do with them now? What do we do with, what do we learn from the incoate situation of the past in which religious identities are more often local and then sometimes imperial and only very gradually and hesitatingly are they national? And perhaps to give a specific example to play on would the real metropolitan of Caves please stand up. The issue of Moscow is the third Rome which I saw in the media in the last few months regularly mentioned the BBC's whatever you, wherever you find your news, I found that being mentioned. To what extent should, to what extent do we see Moscow really taking that claim seriously? And to what extent should we treat it as newsworthy whether Moscow does or not? In other words, can our conversation about religious freedom in Ukraine move away from questions of historical and cultural legitimacy or at least not be bound only by those questions, questions of the legitimacy that the past grants the present and instead go in a direction that takes principles into account at least as much as historical precedent. Thank you very much. That's a interesting thing and it points out how at times we look to say, well, is there one Kievan metropolitan? Well, should there be one? That's another question. What are we applying here? And as we look at the whole question about the patriarch of Moscow and how the patriarch sees itself, I think that we need to look at how the patriarchate acts. You have Hilarion making clear statements to the West condemning the West, condemning our ideals and really seeing itself as in some ways the savior of Christianity, of their version of Christianity. And so when we see that, we have a different interpretation because you see sometimes, as again, as I said, we wanna think about religious freedom in our terms and well, they're not thinking that way. They're still in this mode of thinking about that, if you will, caeseral papism. And this is something that's been engendered as well by the politic of Putin, the whole Russian world. So as we look at these questions, I mean, the fact of the matter, it's very simple, is today, there are different geopolitical organizations of these people. The fact of the matter is today, even in Ukraine, as I mentioned about Italy, there are differences of language in different parts of the country. Even in Uzharod, it's a separate ecclesial jurisdiction than the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. So these are signs of how the interaction between the local culture, the ecclesial identity, and as well than political identities all overlap one on the other. One of the interesting things I think that's fascinating about this is the imposition that happened with the Soviet Union, of course, with the Tsars on the Russification. I mean, this was the polity. You know, you come in, you conquer, you bring your people, you establish your reign, you establish your language. Now, it was only in the Tomas of 1686 that Moscow was granted the ability to ordain the metropolitan of Kiev. Not saying, and I haven't read the Tomas, I confess, and I should, but not saying that this territory gets transferred to Moscow. So that's the gist of the argument is the Constantinople and Patriarch is now saying, hey, I granted you this authority and now I have the power to change that authority and I have the power to do this, but it's not just about the religion, it's about the ethnic aspirations, it's about the political aspirations, it's about what happened to the Nabesny Sotny, the heavenly hundred. It's about the people standing up and saying, why don't wanna be with those people? I wanna be with these people. I have the aspirations of the freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, which Ukraine is Orthodox primarily. But if you go into a village, you go into a city and you count up the amount of spaces in churches where people can attend and you look at the population, you can see very quickly that you're lucky if 10% of the people could fit into the churches in the area. So there's lots of vicissitudes that are in the midst of all of this, the political overtures, the ethnic overtures, the idea for domination. So yes, I think we do need to understand what the Moscow Patriarchate is saying about being that third Rome and we need to take that very seriously. But I don't think, and this will be a challenge that some of our other presenters will talk about, there is no church that is a function of the state in Ukraine. President Poroshenko has said very clearly, I asked Constantinople for this recognition so that people would know that their church is valid. I don't remember the young boy's name, but about two years ago, maybe you would remember, there was a young boy who was baptized as a Ukrainian Kievan Orthodox Patriarchate child. He then dies, the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate looked upon him as a non-baptized Christian because they did not recognize the validity of his baptism. They would not pray for him. How could this be? That's a big question that needs to loom in our minds as we try to understand how this Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate is functioning, how it's understanding its role and where it's defining these lines. Okay, thank you. My second question, and I wouldn't be surprised if some other people are curious about this as well. When we look at the Soviet legacy, we know that many important people in the current Russian government, and I don't know, but I would be curious if many important people in the current Ukrainian government were important people in the Soviet government. Certainly we know that about the Russian government and I wouldn't be terribly shocked if that was the case with the Ukrainian government, but this is not precisely my area of expertise. So with that Soviet background, nonetheless, so it seems to me we have three models. We have the terrible persecution that the Russian Orthodox Church experienced in the first two decades of Soviet rule where it goes from 150 eparchies to four and almost every bishop is dead or in Siberia. It's hardly, hardly 5% of the churches are still left open. And then a half-hearted about face in 1943 where Stalin allows the church to have enough activity to support the war effort, and then the next 40 years, 40 odd years of Soviet history are filled with vicissitudes of some period of relative freedom, followed by the crackdown under Khrushchev and et cetera, back and forth, back and forth under, and but in this whole period, the Russian Orthodox Church being very closely supervised by the Soviet state apparatus and in many cases effectively controlled. On the other hand, so then the second model we have thinking about Ukraine now specifically, and I'm sorry, I wish I could talk about Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, but I'll have to limit myself to Christians. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church actually tacitly supported in its emergence in the 1920s and relatively prosperous for five or 10 years before Soviet policy becomes hostile to Ukrainian nationalism in the 1930s and that church is totally decimated as well. Either completely destroyed or just absorbed into the Russian Orthodox Church. And then the third model is the violent liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church immediately after the Second World War, followed by an eventual status quo which changed from time to time, but in which the Soviet authorities were willing to tolerate these midnight liturgies and people gathering in the woods and in some cases even people using remote church buildings for Ukrainian clandestine Ukrainian Catholic Church services in order to give people a small outlet for their opposition to Soviet power and then to put the lid back on. So in light of these different approaches, we have toleration, support, suppression, manipulation and we could even wonder to the extent to which the Tsarist prehistory informs these situations, what do these different approaches, what light do they shed on the current modes of religious freedom in Ukraine, including Crimea and Donbass and how might parallels between Soviet policy and contemporary realities actually help us with a direction forward so that we don't simply and maybe people, eventually people in the audience might have some thoughts about this too, but history might teach us something about our future. So I really don't know how to answer the question about the Soviet possibilities and how that might shed light on the current. The suppression, the manipulation, the arrests, the killing, the total striving to put doubt into people's minds. I recently said that I was in Kiev. I was visiting with a nun from the Holy Family Ukrainian Catholic Order there and she was recounting to some guests that were non-Ukrainians that had never heard about Ukraine until I took them on this trip. And she said, I can remember in second grade when the teacher asked us about religion, do you have icons in the home? Do you pray? And she said, shoot, that's a second grade or answered. So that night the teacher comes and knocks on the door of her parents and says, Pani, you have to teach your daughter how to lie. I think that's so instructive. I think as well, you know, stories, now I'd never seen it, but stories that telephones were very rare in the Soviet period and oftentimes there was only one here or one there but it was odd that to the sacristy of the church there was a telephone line going in. So questions about that control, questions about freedom, I mean, you know, would you go to confession to a guy who had the phone right away? So this is the style of subjugation mentally that had gone on. And so some of these places in Western Ukraine, it was a shorter period only from 1945, but in Eastern Ukraine, I mean, I didn't mention the 1932, 33 Holocaust, the Holodomor in Ukraine, the genocide where over seven million people died, were starved in a forced collectivization, forced by whom? Stalin. This is not our notion of freedom. These people lived horrendous experiences. And these are experiences that are still live about their uncles, about their grandfathers, that one day they're here and over the night they're gone and never seen from again. So I think that those are some of the realities that, you know, that influence even today, you know, the role of religion in Ukraine, the role of religion in Russia, the way that this whole complex set of issues plays out. And so I really think that we're dealing with a clash of civilization. As I said before, I think that, you know, the independence rallies and the Maidan Square were the witness to that sense of liberty and freedom, those ideals that we all hold dear in this country. And I think that that was being established and being fought for there by the people in the streets. And so we're in the midst of this establishment of a new way of thinking that will take generations to establish, generations to unfold in the creation of this liberty, in the creation of how a church can function in this society. So with that in mind, then I'll ask, you're pointing to the, dare I say, the sickness that's created by a totalitarian society within individuals that's going to transform their relationship with their parents, with their teachers, and with their God. At a higher level, what about the role of the state not only negatively in suppressing religious freedom, but in a positive way endorsing it and how can that tightrope be walked? So what I'm thinking about here is that in 1919, the briefly independent Ukrainian Republic passes a law allowing for the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. In the 1920s, the Polish government advocates for the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church in Poland. And so today, President Poroshenko visits the patriarch of Constantinople as a statesman, and for, I think for legitimate state reasons, but nonetheless, does what sort of problems does that potentially create? That I don't want to sound alarmist, but we might want to consider whether such efforts are a double-edged sword, in other words. Do you see any double-edged sword there? Well, you know, I mean, of course, there is the challenge is how well have these principles of freedom of conscience and freedom of religion been established in every member of society? You know, that's something that generations that it will take to really come to fruition. I think that there will be some that will be tempted to say, no, for Ukraine to be strong, we have to have one church and have to abolish all the others. I mean, this is a historical way of doing things. I don't think, though, that that's really where Ukraine is going. And certainly, President Poroshenko has stated unequivocally that I did my job. Now, you guys do your job. You know, now it's up to you to figure out how this works out and as I must say about, you know, I myself am a Ukrainian Greek Catholic boy born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and having been ordained for the Ukrainian aparchy of St. Joseph at and, you know, having had the opportunity as a stranger in a sense to work in the Catholic University of America, not as a stranger, I mean, I'm Catholic after all, but being a Ukrainian Catholic is an oddity. And then being the dean of that school is another great thing that we have the possibility to, you know, do what we wanna do in freedom in this country and that we have the ability that there are people who are willing to see beyond these sort of tribal ideas. So I think that that's sort of the hope for Ukraine as well. That, you know, that you can live your life, you can belong to the church that most expresses your ideals. I mean, as far as the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church stands, we welcome this opportunity. We're happy that the Kievan Orthodox Patriarchate and that the autocephalous Orthodox Patriarchate is recognized as a valid ecclesial entity. The Catholic Church has never said that the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate or any of the Orthodox Patriarchates are not valid churches. That's a unique statement. If you read the statement that was signed between Patriarch Kirill and Francis, they wouldn't call the uni its churches because that would admit in theology that they were valid representations of God's grace. So that's an important distinction to remember that they view us, they view me as a member of a sect, not as a member of a tzakava, a church. And so that distinction plays out. So I don't know about you, but maybe we should ask for questions from the floor. So I think maybe we have about 16 minutes. So I see somebody at the back and then I'm just gonna make my way forward. They're done, CPD. If you have questions on this side, put your hand up, but they also could be on this side, go ahead. Yes, my name is Jose Casanova from Georgetown University. I'm very glad that you mentioned the experience of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth because I think it is the model to a certain extent that influenced Ukraine at the time very much. This was the time of a reformation within Ukraine Orthodoxy, which had a big impact with Metropolitan Petromohela. And you could say that Ukraine today represents such a model. Think of the fact that after Maidan, you had President Poroshenko, who is a Ukrainian Orthodox member of the Moscow Patriarchate. You had the head of Congress or parliament that was a Baptist Protestant. And the Prime Minister of Ukraine was a Greek Catholic. Give me a country in Europe that had the three most important political figures, members of three different religions. I mean, and this was the fact of Maidan. So today Ukraine represents the only country in Europe in which all the Christian religions, and Jews and Muslims live together and have a council of religions where they collaborate. And so the question is whether we follow the model of canonical territory in which somebody says this territory is ours, or we follow the model of letting the people of this territory organize their religious communities and where they can live together. So I don't know if you're familiar with what he mentioned about canonical territory. It's a ecclesial idea that one bishop has a specific territory sort of in governing powers. Many people don't know that a diocese is actually a Roman military term. So the church borrowed this from the Roman Empire. So the concept is that this is our canonical territory and this is who has the valid church relationship there. The Catholic Church has solved this by understanding overlapping territories and understanding that churches and people have the freedom to belong to the church that they want to belong to. So in this country, for instance, we have the canonical territory of the Latin church. We're in the canonical diocese, the archdiocese of Washington. You go across the river, you're in the Arlington, you go to Baltimore, you're in the Baltimore diocese. So there's specific areas. Now, I'm a Ukrainian Greek Catholic. I belong to none of those dioceses. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has parallel territory on the same space. So we have an archbishop metropolitan in Philadelphia that has this as his territory. I, myself, am from the eparchy of Parma, Ohio, that has the territory of Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, everything south of Virginia and east of the Mississippi, south of Indiana as well, just broadly speaking. So the Catholic Church has clearly understood this and that's what I believe would be a model for Ukraine as well of overlapping canonical territories. And just having, again, the recognizing of the freedom. Jose mentioned an important thing about the freedoms that existed. One of the things that we have to understand is in Ukraine you had a higher level of learning and knowledge and groups of, if you will, scientific people that have associated. They benefited so much that in the 19th century, a majority of the books that were published regarding church issues even were published in Kiev. So I wanna make a real pitch that we understand that education is critical because the establishment of these thought processes, the opening of the world by learning makes a huge difference. These people in Western Ukraine, these people in Kiev, they had these possibilities and he mentioned about Petro Mochila and Orthodox Archbishop who was educated by Jesuits. So we have to always keep in mind how important education is. Okay, I've gotten a note asking me to take three or four questions at a time. So one, two, three. Go ahead. Martha Borzevski, home Russian historian. I'd like to comment on the excellent presentation of Dr. Morozovich, but argue that it was incomplete historically. We overlooked Western Europe or all of Europe and perhaps it would help us to remember that Western Europe went through the similar problems of trying to figure out who they are and where they are. If I ask you today who was Karl Der Große, you might think twice, but if I ask you who was Charlemagne, you'll know. This is the question of Große and of Kiev and of where Russia fits in. Andrew Sorokowski, the question was raised how the Soviet experience might have influenced church, the church situation today and what problems that would pose for the future. I think one or actually two aspects of that experience were that the bishops were taught to be compliant to government demands, to be in effect servants of the state. And of course a lot of those people still are around. And on the other side, the laity were taught, as we saw from the example given, to keep religion as a strictly private matter and a secret matter even, not to go outside the confines of their apartments. Now it seems to me that the exercise of religious liberty requires independent church leaders and an act of laity. And therefore those habits of mind and conduct would tend to retard the exercise of church liberty. Could you maybe, you know, perhaps someone could comment on that. I watched on television this past summer when President Poroshenko made it clear that no one will be forced to join an Ukrainian Orthodox church after it receives a Thomas of autocephaly from the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. So that's a very important fact. So there's no end which unilaterally basically declared autocephaly from Constantinople and was not recognized by the Orthodox world as being autocephalus from the 1450s until 1589, you mentioned that date. And then later suddenly this daughter church of the Church of Kyiv proclaims that it is its mother's mother, which is an anomaly in the natural world and it should be studied by biologists and all kinds of scientists because I think it's the first claim ever such made that the later body is the mother church of Kyiv. The Kyivans and this includes a lot of Orthodox in Ukraine and certainly the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church all recognize that Constantinople is where we got the faith and Constantinople is who gave birth to Christianity in Kyiv and Russia and so who's the real mother? Will the real mother of the Church of Kyiv please stand up? I will stay crouched so that I don't look like I'm making that claim. If we, if you and I keep it to two and a half minutes then we can maybe get one or two more questions. Stand up it did and recognizing the independence, Constantinople, that's very simple. You know, that's what I pointed out with St. Sophia's, I showed you that brief image that these were Greek artists. They did this in Kyiv, it's an 11th century thing. You can go there and see it today. They give wonderful tours. Larissa is a great tour guide, I just had her and you can see it, it's there. I think though that the question begs the understanding of the political overlying onto this whole issue and that these are political aspirations and that's why I went to sort of pains and talk about the conquering that happened, especially, you know, and was finished by Catherine the Great of these lands. This was conquering, this wasn't, you know, the story that's told in Russia about, you know, bringing all the people of Rus together. They conquered these lands, they imposed their will. I would just add to this, the second gentleman's question, I think you make an excellent point and that unfortunately often the alternative to playing Second Fiddle, the churches playing Second Fiddle to the state is sectarianism. So we see either the Russian Orthodox Church effectively subordinate to the Tsar or the old believers and the Russian Orthodox Church outside of Russia, which for 70 or 80 odd years was outside the realm of the Moscow Patriarchate. In many ways was a vibrant dynamic ecclesial reality, but in many ways was isolated and at its worst could be sectarian. So I think the struggle that Ukraine has going forward in the whole, that whole part of the world has going forward is finding the middle ground between those two extremes. So now one or two more questions. I don't need to, do I need to identify myself or not? Okay, a question, in the West, the Russian schisms we've had in churches in West have been driven by issues such as acceptance of LGBT or women's roles or birth control abortion issue or level of outreach and ecumenical outreach to other religions, that kind of thing. I wish to know if any of these particular issues have any role to play in this religious issue in the Ukraine there and if so, do you detect which side is more liberal on these issues? Liberal on these issues, first the other side, thanks. And then this is, okay. Thank you, Carl Golvin. My question is drawn from an audio tape I recently discovered of a man named Benjamin Friedman speaking here at the Willard Hotel in D.C. in 1961. Life long Jew converted to Roman Catholicism late in his life was prominent even in Wilson's administration, very politically, economically active and the text, the 13th tribe by Kessler. And just because it pertains to this region, can you speak to the truth of the history of the Khazar kingdom as having mass converted to Judaism during the period 700 to about 1100 when they were driven out by the Russe and constituted thereafter the people that became Eastern European Jews? And Friedman also argues that the Bolshevik Revolution was essentially 98% Eastern European Jews, about 40,000 who perpetrated the revolution. Is that true? I wasn't taught that growing up in public schools in Montgomery County. I wasn't taught that growing up either. So I don't believe this to be entirely accurate. However, we're joined here that I just do not know that period of history and those issues so I couldn't comment on that. Thank you, good morning, my name's Maureen Coates. I'm actually a former Defense Department official and I wanted to ask you a question about your point about trade routes. Trade routes, military routes, agricultural requirements. It strikes me hearing your discussion and my experience that there is an interface between the human capital management of religion and the management of natural capital. In other words, who gets to access, use and bear fruit from land and water and now more recently, air. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the Crimea is the host to the only warm water port available to the Soviet Navy. So I was wondering if you saw these interfaces and parallels and if you could talk to them in a little more detail, I take your point about early religious changes and issues did relate to trade routes which was access to land or access to water and later issues with starvation was access to land over agriculture and of course there's military requirements. So these two seem to go together. I think you're absolutely correct and that's a fabulous way of looking at it. I mean, all too often we separate the ecclesial from the political, from the trade issues and you have to put them all together in order to understand that in Lviv today, you can see the Polish quarter, you can see the Jewish quarter and the Armenian quarter and the Ukrainian quarter. And it was very clearly pointed out to us that this was all artifact of the trade routes from east to west, north and south. And this is a very profitable place as well but as well where profit is as conflict and all those things need to be broadened to understanding. So I think though expanding the idea that in Lviv for instance, there was that multiplicity. You had the Jewish synagogue, you had the Armenian church. The Jewish synagogue was destroyed by the Nazis. The Armenian church still exists and the Polish church you can still see and of course the Ukrainian churches of those area are there. The idea that Ukraine as a Ukrainian only place was something that was really pushed by the Soviets. They liquidated all the Polish people. They liquidated, well, of course the Nazis as well with the Jewish liquidation, but it was a creation of an unreal situation and yes, you're right, the trade is so literally important. I do wanna get to your point, sir, about these various issues. I don't think that these are issues that any of the churches are really appropriating and certainly they do not play a role in the divisions today. If the only qualification I would add is that they do play a role in the negative propaganda so that people in Ukraine who are in any way perceived as Western oriented are somehow simultaneously fascists but also liberal demagogues. This is a very inconsistent approach, but yes, they're whatever they are, they represent the degradation of a traditional culture. I'll end it at that, four seconds to go. Maybe somebody else with a microphone could tell us what's happening now. Can everyone hear me on this microphone? So now we'll just break for a short coffee break and networking and we'll rejoin at 11. The next panel. This is a momentary. Yes. Oh, I did not know that. First time at 11, huh? You're welcome. Are you? Okay, thanks to me too. Oh, are you? Yeah, I wasn't sure if they're doing interviews, but I'll go ahead and. If everyone could please begin to take their seats, we'll begin with our next panel. We'll begin with our next panel. If everyone could please take their seats and we'll get started. Welcome everyone. I know people are still taking their seats here, but we'll go ahead and get started on our second panel today. My name is Leslie Minney. I am a research coordinator here at United States Institute of Peace. Working on Ukraine. We've recently launched a religious landscape mapping, looking at the role of religious figures, institutions and other faith organizations in the role of the conflict. And so this couldn't come at a more timely time. It's a pleasure to introduce everyone today on our panel entitled The Maidan Revolution and the Role of Religious Communities in Ukraine. The 2013 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine are also known as the Revolution of Dignity, which first sparked from protests against President Yanukovych, rejected deal of a greater integration into the EU, killed over 130 people and injured more than 1,100. When we look at pictures of the Revolution of Dignity, we often see religious figures present, bishops, priests and others, sometimes seen blessing protesters and sometimes seen serving as a physical barrier between police and protesters. During the Revolution, prayers took place regularly in Independence Square and cathedrals served as an important place of refuge during the violence. At the same time, those opposed to the protesters, far-right groups, among others, use religious ideology and references to express their vision, demonstrating the real reach of the Russian worldview. During this panel, we will explore the role of religious communities during the Revolution of Dignity, the impact of the Revolution on faith communities and how the Revolution led to the recent decision on autocephaly. I'm eager and honored to introduce a deeply experienced panel today. I'll start with a right Reverend, Dr. Andrew Chavosky, who is founding director of the Metropolitan Andrew Sheptisky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at the University of St. Michael's College and the University of Toronto. Father Chavosky was born into a family of Ukrainian World War II refugees in New Jersey. He studied for the priesthood in Rome and Toronto with doctoral studies at the Notre Dame in Moundelin and was ordained in 1980 by Patriarch Joseph Slipschy and elevated to the rank of Richard Archpriest in August 2005. He's seen as a writer and popular lecturer and he has spoke throughout North America, Europe and Australia. Next we have Ambassador John Herbst. He's the current director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center and former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006. He has over 30 years of experience as a foreign service officer at the U.S. Department of State holding the rank of career minister. He has served as ambassador to Uzbekistan and Ukraine where he supported the Orange Revolution and helped prevent violence and guide Ukraine to a more effective government. He has written many book chapters, articles and op-eds on stability and operations in Central Asia, Ukraine and Russia and his writings have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, the Atlantic among others. And Dr. Paul Collier, who is a research professor at the Institute of World Politics. He is also a professor associate at the Ecole Spéciale Militaire de Sainte-Crie. Sainte-Crie? Sainte-Crie? Sainte-Cire. Sire. Okay. In France, which I'm told is the French version of West Point. He focuses on foreign policy including the geopolitics of Eurasia, the activities of major Eurasian powers and the globe and how religion and faith communities shape international affairs today. He is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and he's a contributor to Forbes, Providence, Azerbaijan today and the Kiev Post. And welcome everyone. I would like to start off with Reverend Dr. Andrew Trevowski today to discuss the role of the churches at the forefront of the revolution, the full depth of a religiosity in Ukraine and what role religion plays and plays still in the life of Ukrainians. Thank you. Your PowerPoint should be coming up soon. You're welcome. Well, good morning everyone. I'm honored to be here. You're going to see a PowerPoint. It's not the traditional kind of PowerPoint that follows my presentation. It's going to be a photo remembrance of the Maidan to bring us back to those days, to see those images. Now I realize it's risky business for me to try to talk about one thing and you're trying to watch another thing but you know I'm very willing to lose that contest. Because the images are very powerful and they express what I'm going to be talking about in another way. So consumers of news media in today's 24 hour news cycle often display a sort of attention deficit disorder. Since news programs today often function as entertainment as much as they do to inform citizens of vitally important events, this is not entirely surprising. And yet for several months, the situation in Ukraine grabbed world headlines. Alas, it should still be in the headlines but it is in the words of patriarch Svyatoslav, the head of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, Europe's Forgotten War. Of course the news outlets almost universally focus on the sensational, the confrontational and the violent, regularly failing to report on positive developments beyond brief statements that these may have occurred. More importantly, what's most often omitted is any deeper analysis of such positive events. That's why it's imperative at this point to offer at least a preliminary glance beyond the headlines at what has been going on in Ukraine since November 13, 2013, and especially at what the religious implications might be. The phenomenon of the Euro-Maidan is a complex one. The term Maidan, a word of Turkic origin, simply refers to a public square. Millions of people walk through them and utilize them on a daily basis. Occasionally in the face of an unresponsive political system, a public square turns into the public square. When the government is controlled to an inordinate degree by corruption, notice I say inordinate degree, it's too idealistic to imagine that after the fall of humanity, one could have a political system without any corruption. But when there's inordinate corruption, when cronyism and distortion take the place of a civil society and a sufficiently large percentage of the press and other media fall under the control of the corrupt political system or are at least docile to that system, the people in the end rise up. This rising is usually initiated by a small group or groups of dissenters. These are people who have the sheer audacity to imagine a different reality, whether in response to a particular question or as a generalized expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. In Ukraine, between November 2013 and late February 2014, a revolution took place. Not the right wing junta so graphically described by the Russian government and the Russian media over which the forces of Putinism exert a stranglehold. Instead, what happened was a revolution of dignity, a term that was coined at the Maidan by Bishop Boris Guzyak. What started as the protest of a certain number of university students and supporters against the president who betrayed the expectations for closer ties with Europe turned into a national movement to resist the thugs who had seized hold of the political process in the country and to carve out for the citizenry of Ukraine a life worth living again, in which citizens would take responsibility for their country and pay the price for such civic involvement. The dreams of European integration that served as a catalyst for the initial protests were transformed as the government of Viktor Yanukovych attempted to crush them with brutal force. Accustomed to the use of brutality through centuries of foreign occupation and nearly 70 years of Bolshevik rule, the not yet thoroughly decommunized ruling authorities in Kiev completely miscalculated the depth of the discontent in the country. Analysts will surely spend years trying to come to grips with the pro-European protests in Ukraine and why they were able to topple a thuggish regime. But as long as the events in Ukraine in 2014 are ascribed mainly to pro-European sentiments among a majority of the population, these events will be poorly understood. Human beings tend to exercise their sometimes unruly instincts toward freedom more often against something that is rather than for something that might be. When we look at Europe today, it is hardly the model civilization for which people might want to risk their lives. In practice, Europe is consumerist, bureaucratic, morally confused and spiritually insipid. The incredible weakness of the political leadership has never been so apparent as during the most overt phases of Russian aggression in Ukraine. When European leaders could not decide on an effective source of action, course of action in response to the most serious, violent disregard for national sovereignty on the continent since World War II. The very thought of perhaps needing to sacrifice a little profit or a little energy through effective economic sanctions against Russia through the Western powers into disarray. The empty threats of the United States administration at that time against Putinist adventurism only heightened the irony of Ukrainians willing to die for what the West stands for. Perhaps what drives the Ukrainian idealist is the realization that what one stands for is rarely echoed in the way one actually lives. And they chose what the West conceivably stands for. The basic notion that individual human beings actually have inherent value and hence possess dignity. No human society has been entirely successful in fully protecting such dignity. Both the right and the left have been much more deft at infringing upon the rights and values of some at the cost of others through the pursuit of misguided policies. Nevertheless, in democratic societies, the human person is at least paid adequate lip service. And so it appears that a significant majority of the people of Ukraine chose this democratic ideal and indeed saw the events of 2014 as a revolution of dignity and that's the way they refer to it even today. During his visit to Ukraine in 2001, Pope Saint John Paul II took pains to lay particular emphasis on human dignity in his various talks in Kiev and Lviv that may have in some way contributed to this awareness. What's particularly lacking in press coverage of this momentous development is any attention to the remarkable unity exhibited by the historically fractious populace of Ukraine, especially in the religious realm. While the main stage of the Kiev might done was often occupied by entertainers who buoyed the spirits of the protesters and the politicians who read the signs of the times and attempted to earn political capital with the swelling masses both in Kiev and throughout the country, the astute observer would have noticed that the whole phenomenon had some clearly religious overtones. To be sure, there were icons and crosses held in the crowd as well as decorating the main stage. This in itself is not yet the indication of something powerfully alive in the spiritual realm as superstition is still very widespread in Ukraine as a result of cultural development that was stunted by oppression from miscellaneous foreign occupations of various durations over several centuries. Crosses, icons and the like can be signs of an interior faith, but they can also be used simply like talismans, especially in dangerous situations with no deep interiority yet manifesting itself. Much more telling was the constant presence of the clergy and representatives of so many different religious traditions. To be sure, some made speeches supporting the rightful demands of the people. What was more powerful than well-chosen words was their serene unity and the witness of their constant prayer. Christians, representatives of all three major Orthodox jurisdictions, as well as Greco-Catholics, Roman Catholics and various Protestant groups, Jewish rabbis and Muslim imams stood on the stage and prayed either together or in succession day after day and more importantly night after night. Some prayed in Ukrainian while others did so in Old Slavonic or in Russian. To be fair, there was significant coverage of the inspiring photos of monks or priests standing between the protesters and the riot police, but some of the reports seemed to have a difficult time understanding the situation as more than a colorful stunt on the part of exotic looking clerics. Believers in the West might have found the images inspiring. News editors probably saw them potentially award-winning photographs. There was, however, something unquestionably spiritual and God-centered going on as the protests unfolded. Patriarch Siotoslav of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church put it aptly when in May 2014 at the Shchetitsky Institute event at the University of Toronto, he presented the spiritual nature of what was transpiring and I quote, for many it was a nation-building experience. For many more, it was also a religious experience. Representatives of the Roman Catholic, Greco-Catholic, various Orthodox churches, Baptists, Pentecostals, evangelicals, other Christians, Jewish rabbis and Muslim imams surrounded the Maidan with prayer. Our people have been praying, praying, praying in their homes, their parishes, in their workplaces and at their computer screens, engaged in social media. They have prayed personally and communally and ecumenism of engagement arose on the Maidan. As we prayed together in various languages and in various faith traditions, we felt the presence of God. This is not just the naive persuasion that God is on our side, therefore we will prevail. No, this experience of God's presence was much more nuanced. Many felt in those critical last days before the snipers started massacring the protesters that this night, this hour, might be the last hour of our lives. And yet we felt, we saw with some of the clearest vision of our lives that God indeed was with us. It so happened that what became the favorite prayer of the Maidan was the passage from Isaiah. God is with us. Understand all you nations and submit for God is with us. That was repeated on an hourly basis during the nights, especially those last several weeks. It was sung, of course. This is the kind of statement, so that's the end of the quote from Patriarch Sethus Love. This is the kind of statement that one will never, almost never see in the secular press. But without it, any analysis of what was happening in Ukraine and what is continuing to happen in Ukraine would be woefully incomplete and perhaps even distortive. Since 1996, there exists in Ukraine a body called the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations. That does not mean that it's all Ukrainians, okay? All-Ukrainian means a nationwide council. It includes representatives at the national level of some 95% of religious bodies operating in Ukraine. Interestingly, there's no such body that brings together religious believers of all stripes in most Western democracies. We don't have it in the United States or Canada, but it exists in Ukraine. A pluralistic organization that brings together various religions. In this council, Christians, Jews, and Muslims have the opportunity to discuss issues of mutual concern. It is through this organization that these various religious groups presented a united front regarding the Yanukovych government's violent attempts to repress protesters in Kyiv. In fact, in their statement of February 19th, 2014, the council beseeched both the protesters and the government to refrain from violence. On February 22nd, the council issued a statement condemning any talk of separatism or division of the country as dangerous given the delicate situation. This same organization met with the government on February 26th, 2014, soon after the election of an interim president following the flight of Yanukovych to Russia, issuing a statement condemning corruption and supporting the legitimacy of the new governing bodies. When Russia's council of the Federation authorized Putin to invade Ukraine on March 1st, the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and religious organizations swiftly responded in the negative. In this statement, the council emphasizes the following and I quote, the people of Ukraine have friendly, brotherly feelings toward the Russian people. The citizens of Ukraine do not desire any inflaming of enmity. We want to continue to build fraternal relations with Russia as a sovereign, independent country. Now, this is all, all the more astounding because at the time, the rotating chair of this organization was held by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Now, what's important to note is that at the time, Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabludan was still alive, very ill, but still alive. Things would change a bit once he passed away. He passed away. The problem is that the Moscow Patriarchate has written to the heads of Orthodox churches saying things like the following. This is a quote from Patriarch Kirill's letter. We cannot ignore the fact that the conflict in Ukraine has unambiguous religious overtones. The unions and the schismatics are trying to overpower the canonical Orthodox Church, which continues to minister with patience and courage to its suffering faithful in a harsh environment. Then, the Patriarch Filaret of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Cave and Patriarchate responded that, and he defended both the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics and his own church and said, you know, this is really a war of Russia against Ukraine. This is all based on the ideology of the Rusky Mir, the Russian world, and its theological incarnation, Holy Rus. So it is impossible to understand what happened in the revolution of dignity, why it got that name without understanding the involvement of various religious communities in an erenic fashion working together and standing with the people. I asked Patriarch Svetoslav, the head of my church, so when people ask you why you were there under Maidan, how do you answer? And he said, our church stands with the people. Notice he did not say the nation. He said the people. It's not about a government. It's not about a state. It's not about some nationalistic view of things. It's standing with the people of everybody on earth. People in the United States should be able to understand that because the U.S. Constitution begins with the words we, the people. In Ukrainian, there is a clear distinction between narod, the people, and nazi, the nation which has all kind of political and statist connotations. During the Maidan, all of these diverse religious bodies stood with the people. And that is perhaps the best guarantee that what the Moscow Patriarchate predicts if the Thomas of Autosophila is delivered to the Orthodox in Ukraine is just fantasy because Ukraine is a multilingual, multiethnic religiously pluralistic society that will be able to handle all the challenges that are presented to it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dr. Chavosky. That was a really touching presentation on how religion played a role in the revolution but perhaps also remained a force of stability for those in the protest. Now I'd like to turn to Ambassador John Herbst. He will discuss the recent historic decision by the Patriarch of Constantinople and the establishment or the decision on Autosophila for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and how these issues relate to the Maidan. Good, hi, good morning. I will take a more political look at what's happening in the sphere of orthodoxy in Ukraine. So let's start by asking what happened to be precise. The Patriarch of Constantinople removed an anathema on both what's called the Kiev Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Church of Ukraine, as well as the Autosophilus Church of Ukraine. Now that anathema made those two churches in the views of view of world orthodoxy, non-canonical, illegitimate. And it made at least the Kiev Patriarchate a schismatic organization in the views of world orthodoxy. With his decision that anathema's gone, that characterization is gone. And suddenly the hierarchs of that church, the clergy of that church are canonical. And for good measure he did the same with the Autosophilus Church which had never had been granted canonical status by world orthodoxy. He also did something else that's very important. He invalidated the decision of 1686 which said that the territory which now makes up Ukraine is the canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate. So those two decisions were logically taken in tandem. And as I think everyone in this room knows, there's talk about autonomous, which will formally give autocephaly to a single Ukrainian orthodox church. But for that to happen, the Ukrainian church has to be formed. Formed of both the Kiev Patriarchate parishes, the parishes from the Autosophilus Church, and also, and this was very important, in the reasoning of the Patriarch of Constantinople, it was also supposed to include clergy and parishes from the Moscow Patriarchate. But before some RT tool takes what I just said out of context, these folks, meaning the parishes, the believers, the clergy from the Moscow Patriarchate would come over voluntarily. And you can be sure that in the couple of years, the two blocks, or more than two years, that President Poroshenko of Ukraine has been working on this and that Patriarch Folloret of the Kiev Patriarchate have been working on this. They've been in contact with their colleagues from the Moscow Patriarch and have found a good number of bishops and clergy that in the circumstances that I've just described are ready to move over peacefully by their own decision, not by coercion. And actually, let me just add that Poroshenko and Folloret have stated numerous times that there will be no seizures of property, no violent confrontations. This must all happen in a peaceful way. And it's very important for them to say that, and I'll come back to that later. Okay, this is a almost direct line consequence of what happened on the Maidan, beginning almost five years ago. When the demonstration led to a crackdown which led to even larger demonstrations, which led to other crackdowns culminating in the week of the sniper in which over a hundred Ukrainian demonstrators were murdered by snipers. So intentionally murdered. And then the flight of Yanukovych, the Kremlin seized Crimea and the Kremlin then after that, because they felt good seizing Crimea, but after they felt good, they realized, well, gee, now the balance of power or the balance of forces within Ukraine in terms of those who look east and those who look west had tilted decisively in the Western direction. They launched their covert war in Donbass. And I think just about everybody in this room understands this is a Kremlin war against Ukraine, no civil war, no internecine fighting among Ukrainians. So they launched that war. Now, how does that relate to what we're talking about today? You need to understand that the Moscow Patriarchate, a venerable church, although in fact only as venerable as Stalin's era who recreated the Moscow Patriarch after Peter the Great had gotten rid of it. The Moscow Patriarchate, at least since Stalin recreated it in the 40s of the last century has been a reliable instrument of first Soviet policy and then Russian policy. This is a critical factor. And as an instrument of Kremlin policy, and again, Kremlin is conducting a war in Ukraine. As a Kremlin instrument, the Moscow Patriarchate has from the pulpit, it's clergy from the pulpit, it's bishops from the pulpit, although not so much the earlier metropolitan Sabadan, although to me the Sabadan who died before the Russian war began or just after it began, he was smarter than that, but a successor not so much. They have said publicly that essentially what you have are as Ukrainian repression of Russians, that's what's going on in the East in Donbass, and the Russians have risen up in Donbass in righteous defense of their rights, which of course is a premier Kremlin talking point. And besides that, we saw the pictures from the Maidan of all the religious groups there promoting peace while the one church that was not present was the MP. And then finally, finally, you have more than a few instances of MP clergy unwilling to give last rights or to bury Ukrainian soldiers because, quote unquote, these were fighting a war of repression against ethnic Russians in Donbass. Needless to say, the average Ukrainian did not take these manifestations of MP fealty to the Kremlin and to Moscow's war on Ukraine, they didn't take these signs as the signs of goodwill. In fact, let me just back up for a second to tell you the following. I served in Ukraine at the U.S. Senate during the Orange Revolution. And the MP then was doing the same old things I'm describing right now. The Kremlin in its intervention during that presidential elections of 2004 sent what they call political consultants. The two most prominent, well, the guy named Pavlowski whose name you can Google him, he's still around today or he no longer works for the Kremlin. And his partner at that time was Marat Gelman. Why am I telling you this? Well, Gelman after the Orange Revolution and the failure of Kremlin policy to dictate the outcomes of the 2004 presidential election wrote an article about his excellent adventure in Ukraine in which he said that the MP had lost legitimacy in the center of Ukraine because it was just a sounding board for Kremlin propaganda. And so what happened then on a small scale has been reproduced now and as a result of Maidan on a much larger scale. And in case no one said this earlier today there are 12,000 MP churches in Ukraine, there are 5,000 KP churches, there are a few hundred I believe, autocephalous churches. Although while the Kremlin has Moscow Patriarchate has more than two thirds of the churches, around two thirds of the churches, in fact the number of believers among the KP and the MP are comparable. Okay, so the point is as a result of all the nastiness fomented by the Kremlin in Ukraine the MP's position among the people of Ukraine is notably weaker today than it had been. This all set the stage for the decision made by the Patriarch of Constantinople. He wanted to be sure that if a decision of the type that he took was taken then there would be movement towards a single Orthodox church in Ukraine. And for there to be movement that would have to include members and clergy from the MP. So one of the tasks of those in Kyiv who were pushing for this was to reach out and to be able to report back to Constantinople did yes, a growing number of folks, clergy and believers, parishioners were ready to move. And that happened. All right, so that's setting the stage for the big events that we saw a few weeks ago. But there are other factors too. One is the complicated relationship between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Patriarchate of Moscow. Constantinople is one of the five historic seas of ancient Orthodoxy. The others being Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome. Now of course there was an issue between the Orthodox and Roman Catholics which led to a schism in 1054 or splitting in 1054 AD. So there are four you might say remaining ancient seas. And Constantinople is primus into power as the first among equals among those four seas. So that is one reason why they have the authority to take the decision they took. The other reason is of course that this part of the world, Eastern Europe was once all the canonical territory of Constantinople. So that's one factor. The other related factor is that while in a sense Constantinople is the senior among the Orthodox seas, it is by no means the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most influential. Those honors go to Moscow. Constantinople, I mean I call it the Patriarchate of Constantinople which is what it calls itself but it's located in Istanbul. And there may be a few hundred thousand believers under the direct authority of the Constantinople Patriarch whereas there are many millions under the Moscow Patriarchate. And of course a lot of wealth and power has accumulated with those people and especially, excuse me, with the Moscow Patriarchate, especially because it is an ally, a close ally, a subordinate ally of the Kremlin which acts on its behalf. Needless to say in the normal course of human events, it would be unusual for there not to be tensions between the senior brother and the more powerful brother. And of course that exists and that has played out on numerous issues over the past decades. So in some sense, if they could do it, it was in the interest of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to take down the Moscow Patriarchate of Peg or two. And this certainly does that. I've described that a little bit already, I'll come back to it in a minute. But that doesn't end the factors that play into this decision. There's another very important factor. Its name or his name is Erdogan, the President of Turkey. The Turkish government historically, since it took Constantinople in 1453, has exerted substantial influence over the Patriarch of Constantinople. And if you know anything about Church history, Orthodox Church history in Eastern Europe, you'll know that one of the Moscow's claims, the Moscow Patriarch claims to being the leading light of world orthodoxy was that poor Constantinople was under the thumb of the Muslims, right, the Turks. In any case, if Erdogan wanted to stop this from happening, I am fairly confident in saying that it would not have happened. And that matter, I was a skeptic. As recently as April, I was a skeptic because I didn't think that Erdogan would go along. But not for the first time in my life I was wrong. And Putin saw Erdogan in Tehran a week or two before the decision from Constantinople. There was, of course, no reporting on this, but I think it's highly likely that Putin was urging him to stop it. And I had heard from reasonable sources about previous meetings between Putin and Erdogan where this was on the agenda and near the top, if not at the very top. Why would Erdogan not do this? Because in fact, Erdogan has moved closer to the Russians. Putin has assiduously courted the Turks since within a few years of him becoming president in 2000. But even while he's courted them, he has not been averse to rubbing their faces in it when it suits his purpose, especially relating to Syria. Whether it's when he kept sending his jets into Turkish airspace in the fall of 2015 or more recently because the Turks and the Russians are on different sides in Syria. In any case, Erdogan let it happen. And so it's happened. All right, impact of the decision. Amazing, I'm gonna use up my 20 minutes. One, it's a major blow to the MP in Ukraine. I think it's safe to predict that once you have this Sabor in which they'll create the single Ukrainian Orthodox Church, once you have the Sabor, I suspect that at least 10, maybe 20, MP bishops will come over straight away. And they will presumably bring their parishes with them, although it's more complicated than that. I suspect as well that once it becomes clear to those who wanna be safe that this church is gonna last, you'll see another 20 or 30 or 40 come over. And at a certain point, five to 10 years after you have the single church that the homeless is granted, you'll probably have a majority of MP bishops who've switched to the single Ukrainian church. Beyond that, it hasn't to make any predictions. So this means that the MP's influence in Moscow is seriously reduced. And let me give you one anecdote that sort of highlights this. I'm in Ukraine all the time. I travel there too much. Always tired. I met on a recent trip with a senior, I'll be no more transparent than this, a senior figure from the East, a name well-known in Ukraine who said to me the following. I was baptized in the MP. I still go to the MP. Once the single Ukrainian church is created, I will take my whole family and be re-baptized in the new church. This person also said, and I'll come to this a little bit later. I'm concerned that there'd be no force used to take church properties. It's very important to not be. And he then said, and to make sure it doesn't happen, out of my own funds, I'm only to build 10 new churches for the new Ukrainian church. So what he said is, multiply that by several thousand, or several hundred among people of that level in Ukrainian society, and millions among all Ukrainian believers. So the MP influence in Ukraine is going to be broken. And this decision has an impact in the Orthodox world well beyond Ukraine. Because Ukraine will suddenly become a true rival in terms of size and wealth to the MP. And of course, from the standpoint of poor little old Constantinople, that's a welcome sign. Because it's not just Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria, Jerusalem are all churches which don't have much in the way of adherence, much in the way of resources. So this will be important in the broader Orthodox world. And just to finish up, and I guess I will be a few minutes under to 20. This has an impact on Moscow's political position in several ways. Moscow is pretty good at hard power. It's not so good at soft power. Without a doubt, the MP was the greatest instrument, or is the greatest instrument of Kremlin soft power. And you've just dealt a serious blow to that instrument. It also introduces collateral damage on the Russian meme of a Ruskinir, which is there also soft power play to pull people towards them on the basis of religion, language, and culture. So this is a big blow to the Kremlin, which is why the day after the decision taken by the Patriot Constantinople, the Russian National Security Council met. Okay, I think I've just about covered it. Except for this, except for this. The dangers in the months and year or two ahead is one, will personal ambition get in the way of the creation of the single Ukrainian Orthodox Church? And I think it's wise to never rule out the influence on historic events of ego, stupidity, and incompetence. So watch that space. The other is the whole issue of properties. In Ukraine, and this is a positive, this is a positive, the property, church properties belong to parishes. So it's not like the key of patriarch owns all these churches throughout Ukraine and the MP. No, no, belong to the parishes. So that provides the way for a democratic and peaceful transfer of properties as the, well, I can't think of the Russian word, but I can't think of the English word, the option of the, like the parish community. Yeah, right, right, right, thank you. They decide they want to switch, in theory the property shall come with them. But even though that's how it should play, and even though the president of Ukraine and the first high rock of Ukraine are calling for a peaceful transfer, there are some extremists in Ukraine whom I try to seize it, although it's not overstate that. Ukraine is a very moderate country, and I can go into that at great length, but not here. So that's one danger, well, I'm pretty confident that the authorities will crack down hard on it, on such adventurism. The other thing which is much more likely is Kremlin games. They will send people who are quote unquote Ukrainian nationalists to seize properties to get photo ops of nastiness at churches. So that's something that needs to be watched, but there'll be some of us in the West who'll be watching for Kremlin games. So thank you very much. Thank you so much, Ambassador Herbs. That was an excellent sort of political analysis, if you will, of how the decision of autocephaly for Constantinople relates to or responds from the Maidan, but also helps us to understand the significance of the decision for Ukraine and orthodoxy, as is. But I hope that Dr. Koyer, you can help sort of shed some additional light and help us to analyze the situation of how the religious communities are responding to the decision, how to approach the threats that Ambassador Herbs mentioned and any additional thoughts, so over to you, Dr. Koyer. Thank you. My presentation overlaps with some of what they've said, and I agree with the presentations, they're wonderful. I have a brief joke that I thought of when the ambassador was speaking about Russian heart and soft power, that I tell it always gets a lap because there's a bit of truth to it. The Russian heart power is when they have invaded you. Russian soft power is when they're threatening to invade you. However, it is clearly true that the Russian Orthodox Church is and has been the branch of the Russian state's, you know, it's soft power. So, national identity and religion are many times closely interrelated. One major and obvious reason for this is that religion is one of the most important shapers and definers of culture, and culture of a given nation is one of the things that defines a people as a nation. A shared culture that defines the values that society shares in common, with those values being more often than not religiously informed. Yet they, and interestingly, I should say too, that these four different branches, the Ukrainian Orthodoxy, the Metropolitan, the Moscow Patriarch, the Kevin Patriarch, the Autosophilus, and the Greco-Catholics, all share a common understanding of their origins in history, the 988 baptism of the Ruths, et cetera, and numerous other things, but they also diverge in their interpretation to that history at an important point, which complicates matters. And that's an important point, I think, to make, that history is a complicated thing. I'm a historian. It's rarely, if ever, cut and dried, even though some historians and Hollywood tend to paint it that way. As much as religion plays a major role in national identity, and therefore, given the contested historical and cultural linkages between Russia and Ukraine, religion is almost inevitably part of the Ukrainian-Russian confrontation. And again, as Ambassador Herb said, this is a Ukrainian-Russian confrontation that needs to be underlined. On the issue of Autosophily, in addition to being an obvious issue in the national identity and a statement of national cultural sovereignty, Moscow is, of course, concerned about this transfer property issue that the ambassador raised. According to the Jamestown Foundation, the Moscow Patriarchate has been bleeding adherence and clergy for quite some time. It, of course, accelerated with Maidan. But between 2000 and Maidan, the proportion of Ukrainians who were members of the Kevin Patriarchate approximately doubled. So that shows that the trend was preexisting. Patriarchate Filaret was here in D.C. about a month ago where the ambassador hosted him the Atlantic Council. One of the things he said there was that he expected that the Moscow Patriarchate, within a relatively short period of time, after a grant of the Tomos, would lose about half of its adherence and clergy. The ROC, Russian Orthodox Church, Church's position within Ukraine, in terms of its moral authority among Ukrainians, has steadily, of course, lessened since 2014 for obvious reasons. Particularly with a flood of credible reports following the Russian annexation of Crimea, of the closing of Kevin Patriarchate Churches, of Unite Churches, Greco-Catholic Churches, under the widespread persecution of Jews, Tatar Muslims, evangelicals, another Protestant groups, et cetera. The ROC's statement of support of the Kremlin and its persecution of all others who are not ROC has made it for obvious reasons into a pariah in Ukraine. My colleague here on the panel talked a lot about the positive role that was played by religious communities in Maidan. Unfortunately, my presentation is gonna be a bit darker because I'm gonna be focusing more on the Russian role, which hasn't been so positive. A large part of the reason why religion has played a major role in this conflict is, of course, related to Russia's long history of self-identification as third Rome. As an example of traditional Christian values on Earth, as well as his belief that Russian and Ukrainian, Russians and Ukrainians are one people linked by the baptism of the Rus. The sacralized vision of Russian national identity that sees Russia having a global mission in defense of traditional Christianity, and the dispute about the distinctiveness of Russian and Ukrainian national identities has meant that a religious component has basically been baked into the conflict. The partnership between the Kremlin and the ROC, as the ambassador mentioned, has been close and aims not only at articulating the sacralized vision of Russian national identity to the domestic audience, but also in advancing that mission globally, especially in what Russia has called its near-broad, a phrase you're all familiar with, I'm sure. And the manner in which the Russian state and the church have been cooperating, however, which is obviously quite heavy-handed, has been undermining their jointly stated goal of building a Russian world defined by the centrality of Russian culture at the foundation of which lies Russian orthodoxy. So not just Ukrainians, but many others around the periphery of Russia in the orthodox world see the ROC as a neocolonial tool of the Russian state and resent that fact. Because the ROC has significant influence within the former Soviet states around Russia's periphery through its branches in those neighbors, this fact of ecclesiology gives the Russian state political leverage over its neighbors in which the ROC plays a major role. This is why the Belarusian Orthodox Church, for instance, which currently answers also to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow, has appealed to Moscow for greater autonomy in terms of church governance. This isn't because Alexander Lukashenko cares about piety for obvious, that should be obvious to everybody, but rather because he cares about having greater autonomy for Moscow. So that just underlines the political linkages to Moscow, Patriarch's influence. The ROC also provides a vast network throughout the post-Soviet space that allows for intelligence work aimed at advancing the Kremlin's geopolitical goals through the conduct of influence operations, the collection of information, and the spread of misinformation, as has taken place in relation to its campaign against ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, which I'll discuss again a little bit more in a minute. As another example, just one example of how this has taken place in the run up to the Dutch referendum years ago at the Ukrainian EU Association Agreement, ROC representatives from both the ROC proper and the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine arrived in the Netherlands and undertook for several weeks a misinformation campaign aimed at undermining Dutch public support for Ukraine by advancing the story that there was widespread, violent, and systematic religious persecution within Ukraine of, of course, Russian Orthodox. An ironic claim given the record that the Russian Orthodox Church has in Ukraine. Turning to the overlapping Russian Orthodox and Kremlin interests abroad, Putin, noting the interrelation of the strength of the ROC's moral and canonical authority abroad with his own goals in the post-Soviet space, has argued that the revival of the ROC Church unity is a crucial condition for reviving, revival of the lost unity of the whole Russian world, which has always had the Orthodox faith as one of his foundations. Putin justified his annexation of Crimea in predominantly spiritual language as well, asserting that Crimea has, quote, sacred meaning for Russia, like the Temple Mount for Jews in Jerusalem. And that Crimea was, quote, the spiritual source of the formation of the multifaceted but monolithic Russian nation. It was on this spiritual soil that our ancestors first and forever recognized their nationhood. Again, very contested views, obviously, of national identity here. Because of the way in which Moscow has betrayed the conflict in these sorts of religious terms, religious allegiances has been as important as and closely correlated with political allegiances. This resulted in the Russian authorities in Crimea and the pro-Russian, their allies in Eastern Ukraine conducting a holy war, basically is what it is, against all non-Russian Orthodox seeing them as enemies of Mother Russia. In Crimea, under Russian rule, beginning in the spring of 2014, severe restrictions on religious practice were quickly imposed on all non-ROC religionists. Many religious leaders reported surveillance from the security services and questioning from the FSB. Jewish synagogues, numerous Muslim mosques and Christian groups seen as Western or pro-Ukrainian all experienced police raids and other forms of not-so-subtle pressure. One thing the Russians are not usually good at is being subtle, and you could see this here. The leader of the Salvation Army in Crimea fled after reported harassment by security officers and the home of the Bishop of the Greco-Catholic Church was burned down. Of the 1,546 religious organizations that were registered in Crimea prior to the Russian takeover, under the new rules they all had to re-register and as of about a year or so later, only 1% had been allowed registration status and that hasn't improved a lot since then, the position. Muslim Tartars, similar things have happened with them. They make up about a little over 10% of Crimea's population but they had their last television station in Crimea closed down at the beginning of April, 2015. The approximately two dozen Turkish Imams who'd been working in Crimea before the annexation were all expelled within about a year of that as well. Jews too have experienced persecution with synagogues being defaced with Nazi Swastikas, the prominent reform rabbi Mikhail Kapustin being expelled from Crimea after his outspoken opposition to the annexation. In rebel-held parts of Eastern Ukraine or Russian-occupied, more accurately to state, ROC priests use apocalyptic language to describe the struggle and bless Russian soldiers fighting as they see it for the very soul of humanity. As one priest articulated shortly after visiting Russian troops in Donetsk, Ukrainian forces and their Western supporters are fighting for, quote, the establishment of planetary satanic rule. He went on to explain that, quote, what's occurring here is the very beginning of a global war, not for resources or territory, that's secondary. This is a war for the destruction of true Christianity, orthodoxy. Speaking of those who control policy in the West, the priest known as Father Victor went on to explain that, quote, they are intentionally hastening the reign of antichrist. With apocalyptic views such as this, dominant among pro-Russian combatants and spread by the ROC, it's perhaps not surprising there are widespread rumors of non-ROC religionists being targeted by pro-Russian militias and Russian troops themselves, kidnapped, tortured and killed. I can go on for a long time talking about this. I think we've heard enough where you get the point. A grant of autocephaly to a unified Ukrainian church would obviously, as the ambassador has mentioned, be a death knell to Russian pretensions. Both the leadership within global orthodoxy as well as to his dream of Ukraine holding a central place in a revitalized Russian world. Under Moscow's leadership, 12,000 parishes, again as the ambassador said, or approximately a third of the ROCs, about 35,000 parishes are in Ukraine. There are about 30 million Ukrainian orthodox believers, so autocephaly clearly would make Ukraine a rival of the Russian Orthodox Church within globally orthodoxy. I want to talk for a minute about the ROC's relationship with both the ecumenical patriarch Bartholomew as well as Pope Francis as the way in which the Russian church has managed both these relationships reveals quite a bit about its alliance with the Kremlin. The ROC has used this position as the largest orthodox church in order to lay claim to a unique position within orthodoxy. Viewing Bartholomew as its primary rival for leadership within the orthodox world, Russia has undertaken a widespread misinformation campaign with the ROC and Russian intelligence services apparently cooperating in an effort to undermine Bartholomew's moral authority. The February 2016 meeting in Havana between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill, I'm sure you all remember that over two and a half years ago, was treated by the Russian media and government as if it were the meeting for instance between the head of orthodoxy and the Pope with dismissive references made to Bartholomew. Russian nationalist Igor Komogorov, a former politician now journalist with close ties to the Kremlin, provided an important insight into Kremlin thinking in an online article he wrote at about the time of the meeting. He wrote that Kirill hoped to use the meeting to boost his status at Bartholomew's expense, creating the impression that Kirill and not the quote insignificant though aggressive Bartholomew is the quote undoubted leader of the orthodox world whose Russian church operates on the unqualified authority and sincere symphony with great Russia, particularly since Moscow views Bartholomew has quote absolutely Western oriented and pro-American. In June of that year, a few months later, Russia sought to undermine Bartholomew again by refusing to attend the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church in Crete and trying to incite others not to attend as well. Later in 2016, an article appeared in the Moscow based online journal, The Oriental Review, which made the claim that Bartholomew had been supportive of the quote Gulenite conspiracy that Erdogan alleges was behind the coup attempt against him. As the ambassador mentioned, there's that dynamic there and Russia's tried to play on that and try to create divisions between Bartholomew and the Turkish government. The article claimed to have been written by a former US ambassador to Yemen named Arthur Hughes. When Ambassador Hughes heard about it, he said, I have no idea what you're talking about. I didn't write this. It got taken down, but of course the damage was done and that's all they need to do. They need to plant the thought and then we all know the internet, it's full 99% of true things, right? And so as soon as something gets posted, it goes viral, it gets spread and that's all the Russians cared about. They knew as long as they planted that poison seed. It didn't matter if it was debunked afterward. At the same time, the Russian Orthodox Church has attempted to build a relationship with Francis and to use that relationship to get the Vatican to tap down on the Greco-Catholic support for Ukrainian autocephaly and opposition for Russia's activities in Ukraine. The Moscow Patriarchate blames the Greco-Catholics for supporting the bid on the part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for autocephaly status. That was one of the goals of the February 2016 meeting as well between Kirill and Francis and Havana. According again to Komolgorov, Moscow hoped to convince Francis to take a stance in neutrality of vis-vis the current conflict over autocephaly in Ukraine. And indeed it worked to a degree. Francis issued a statement and if any of you read that statement, do you remember any of that? He, the Russians got Francis to actually take a swipe at the West, at the United States. He talked about the Russian Church overseeing a revitalization of Christian culture in Russia about Russian's ability to live out their faith in the public square unlike some people, i.e. the United States. When this came out in 2016, of course the Obama administration was being criticized for restricting the rights of some Christians and Russia of course tried to shrewdly point that out. And of course they made a reference to the Greco-Catholics in that Francis said we are gonna remain neutral and all Catholic churches stay neutral in this conflict. Clearly that didn't hold a lot of sway with the Greco-Catholics as persecuted as they'd been by Moscow not just in the last five years, but for decades. But he also said that clearly there is one patriarch in Russia and that is in Moscow. He, with his Jesuit mind, outsmarted Hilarion and said part of what Hilarion wanted to hear but he said it in such a way that left Ukraine a question mark. Good point. And Francis is a very bright guy. I mean anybody who's trained among the Jesuits is a brilliant person. I've never met a dumb Jesuit I have to say. But my point is that the Russian Orthodox Church keeps trying and they met, I think Hilarion again met on May 30th of 31st with Francis and tried the same thing. As the likelihood of Ukrainian Autosephyli has gained ground reports indicate that Russian hackers have targeted religious leaders with a connection to Ukraine's push for Autosephyli, including the Vatican's Apostolic Nuncio to Ukraine, senior clergy of the Greco-Catholic Church as well as Orthodox Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Bartholomew's senior aides have continued to be targeted, of course they have been for several years now. I thought it was gonna go half an hour like you, I'm surprised I'm wrapping up at about the right time. Autosephyli when it formally occurs will mark a major cultural decoupling of Ukraine and Russia. And a strengthening of Ukraine's claims to an independent national identity which is of course what they seek. Now with his decision Bartholomew's decision on Ukraine and Autosephyli apparently made, the Russian Orthodox Church has declared the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarch canonically void. And as of two weeks ago you probably have seen this as broken ties with Constantinople. I'll just end with this, it looks to me as if Russia not only has Putin, a lot of people, a lot of commentators in the last few years have talked about Putin as a brilliant strategist. I don't think he's a brilliant strategist. I think he can be a very smart tactician at times. He is not a brilliant strategist, he has really mucked it up. And this is one area where I think that he has. Russia now is isolated strategically, politically, economically and it appears with this decision is going to become increasingly isolated culturally and canonically and I'll end there. Thank you very much Dr. Koyer. We'll turn it over to the audience in just a minute. I think Dr. Koyer you've really showed how Ukrainians can sort of step forward in strengthening society but we've also seen a number of issues on the panel today. Issues of identity, of politics, of geopolitics and on top of all of that, well not to forget faith but on top of all of that we have disinformation sort of rising to the surface. So that being said, if anyone has questions please stand up and identify yourself and we'll aim to take two to three questions. See one over here and red tie. Hi, I'm Austin Dohler, I'm with the Center for European Policy Analysis. Now we talked about a lot how President Poon used the Russian Orthodox Church both for soft power and to kind of legitimize and almost baptize his regime domestically. Now are there any perceptions, are there any faithful remaining in the Russian Orthodox Church that might see the ROCs break with Constantinople as a bridge too far and kind of like this is the breaking point where the use of their church for over nationalistic political purposes is finally going to make them like maybe not support the regime anymore or will maybe disincentivize their political engagement with the regime. Do you see any sort of political consequences for the ROCs decisions on Putin? Thank you. Inside Russia you're saying? Yes, amongst like Russian voters and the ROC faithful in Russia. Okay, we'll take maybe two more questions. We have one up here in the front and I thought I saw one there in the aisle as well. I'm Cyril Hovorun, I'll be speaking in the afternoon and my question goes to the ambassador. You mentioned the role of Erdogan in this whole situation. Still, I think it was a bit unclear why Erdogan decided not to interfere this time because he interfered certainly in 2008 when there was the first attempt to run the deceitful to the Ukrainian church. So what happened, what prevented him apart or in addition to the situation in Syria not to interfere nowadays? Okay, and one more in the aisle please. Hi, Larry Lerner from the Union of Councils for Jews in the former Soviet Union. Talking about misinformation, it appeared to me that the Russian misinformation was been used to claim as in an Aritz article that Ukraine was the most anti-Semitic country in the world which was unfortunately picked up by the Israeli ambassador who confirmed it in the Aritz article and was fought by our organization which cited the facts about true anti-Semitism in the Ukraine and you'll see our report on anti-Semitism in the back here which we've given to you to indicate that that wasn't the case. I wonder what your view has been about how that's being picked up in the fight over the Russian, the Moscow and Kiev organizations and how they have reacted to those allegations. Okay, thank you very much. Would anyone like to start off with any of those three questions? Okay, maybe I'll address the number one. The question of will the Moscow Patriarchate lose credibility inside Russia? Well, you know the biggest loss that Russia faces right now is their total historical myth, their total identity. The mother of Russian cities. Says, no, we're the mother of Rus' cities and not Russian cities. You have an indirect connection with the baptism of the Kievans whereas we have a direct one. Well, the myth has always been that it is, that's Moscow's, it belongs to Moscow, that's Moscow's property. That history, that there's a continuity from Kiev to Moscow and suddenly this posits a major discontinuity. What I would say is gonna be happening in the Russian Orthodox Church and in government supported journalism and even academia is some way to make sense of this for the average Russian who's gonna say what? So wait a minute, I thought that they were part of us and who are we actually? Where do we come from? And I think it's gonna be a big shock to people and maybe not at first, but as this continues, if it survives, my greatest fear is that Putin will just go nuts when the Tomas is delivered and launch a full scale invasion of Ukraine. That's my darkest fear. But I think the average Russian is gonna say, well, what do you mean? So all that stuff that you taught us, that's not the way it really is. We're not the mother church to Kiev, it's the other way around. Wow, what's going on? Now, attendance, church attendance in Russia is about half of what it is in Ukraine. So that might take a further decline when people say, we don't know what you're talking about because I bet the rhetoric of the ROC and the government is gonna heat up enormously but then people will look at the reality and start thinking. I think people are gonna start thinking. Okay, first I'll address the question that came straight to me. To be honest, I don't know precisely why Erdogan decided what he decided. I know that he had been a block before on Ukrainian efforts to get this decision from the patriarch of Konstantinopoul, which is why I was skeptical about the whole enterprise until about May of this year. The only thing that I am aware of that has been a real point of difference between Erdogan and Putin in the last year or so has been Syria. That doesn't mean there may not be something else but that's what I've seen. But it's also true that Erdogan is a mercurial guy who will jump in one direction and then jump in a different direction for reasons we don't always see. Regarding the first question on the Moscow Patriarchate adjusting its positions as a result of its failure in Ukraine, I don't see that happening unless the Kremlin permits it. Because they can't simply just make their own decisions. And regarding anti-Semitism in Ukraine, there's no question that the Russian media and some voices in the West picking up the Russian media are putting out the nonsense that this is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. They're confusing the president with maybe 100 or 140 years ago. And so it's wonderful that organizations like yours are setting the record straight. I know that I think it was Pew did a poll of anti-Semitic attitudes across Europe. And Ukraine came in with something like 5% of the people could be characterized in some sense as anti-Semitic which was the lowest or the second lowest of all the countries in Europe, notably lower than France and a few other places. Yeah, I can speak to that a bit just my time in France. And there was a video that I saw recently of a Jewish gentleman walking down a French street and the camera followed him for quite some ways is to see what the reaction would be. And there were people literally spitting at him. And partly this was because there were some Muslim migrants who didn't like the fact that he was clearly Jewish. I think he was Orthodox and it was quite visually apparent but you're absolutely right, that's the case. And also you can see that the Jewish communities have voted with their feet as to which side of this conflict they trust more. They have flooded out of Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea and were pushed out of there and went to areas Ukraine control by the Ukrainian government that tells you something related to the issue of Russian national identity and history, the Kievan Rus and all that. There are a few historians of Russian medieval history that you can check out that discuss how the Russian version of this is to be questioned. One is, and I'm blanking on the gentleman right now. He was a Harvard historian of Russian medieval history. He died three years ago. Do you know who I'm talking about? Big, big, big name. I just can't remember it now. But anyway, and he was active until up until his death. He died at the age of 70, something. And he did a lot of work in medieval Russian history and talked about the fact that, and there's many of them in this writings, about the fact that the Russian perspective on Ukraine and Russia being one people, about the city and the state that evolved out of Muskovy being exactly the same is fallacious and that is meant as an ex post facto justification for Russian imperialism under the czar in the intervening few hundred years. Ewa Thompson of Rice University has written similar things about how many Western commentators have just accepted Russian historiography in this area and she does a great job of delving into the nitty gritty of the history and showing that that's to be questioned. Thank you very much. I think we have enough time for another round of questions. Maybe we'll take two back up here in the front. Hello again. What keeps people in Ukraine in the MP and what might keep them there for five or 10 years or longer? Anyone else? Got one in the front. I'm wondering what is the situation in the rest of the Orthodox world? The Serbs, the Bulgarians, the Greeks in Greece, how are they looking at the situation and what side are they taking? Okay. Well, if I can address that second question. We don't yet fully know what's gonna happen in some of the churches that have traditionally been influenced by Moscow, especially those that did not attend the Holy and Great Synod in Crete a couple of years ago under pressure from Moscow. I think that there are a lot of churches in the Orthodox world that will breathe a sigh of relief that Russia won't be able to push people around anymore. As well as they have been until now. And then that they can just settle down and the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople can try to lead consensus building without this 300-pound gorilla in the room. So that weakening, I think a lot of people will sigh a sigh of relief. But we don't know yet because right now I am sure, I'm positive that Putin is spending money left and right on trying to convince these other Orthodox churches to side with the Moscow Patriarchate and against the ecumenical patriarch. I just think that a lot of them will say, you know what, it's not worth it. No, we're not gonna do it this time. This is our chance to be free of that giant. I'll just say something really quick added on to that. The Serbian, head of the Serbian Church has been aligning with Moscow. And of course, the reason why, as you know, is because he's worried about Auschwitz and Macedonia and Montenegro. So he's got a vested interest. On this question, my understanding is with the exception, I guess, of the Serbian Church, no other church has spoken out on the issue at all. Yes, the MP and the Kremlin too are working overtime. And statements coming out of the MP have said, this is just the Patriarch of Constantinople who could not legitimately act by himself, which is not true, there's still a controversial issue within the Orthodox world. And Antioch traditionally has depended upon the MP for resources, but they still have not come out in favor of the MP position. And it's interesting, the MP is clearly not so confident of its position because it has not urged the other Orthodox churches to not commemorate and be in communion with the Patriarch of Constantinople. If they were confident that the response would come, they'd be pushing on that door. Regarding the first question, why do people stay in the MP churches in Ukraine? Well, one, certainly, historically, there have been a large swath of the population of Ukraine which looks culturally and other ways towards Moscow rather than towards the West. Although that group has become smaller by slice as a result of heavy-handed Kremlin policies, which I saw during the Orange Revolution. But also, the canonical issue is very important. So that issue just disappeared with the decision by the Patriarch. And again, over time, we will see a steady and maybe even a spectacular move of people from one church to the other. And they'll be, I think it's safe to say, almost no counter-flow. But, excuse me for differing on the idea that the canonical issue has been resolved. As long as Moscow says that Constantinople acted uncanonically, you're going to hear a lot of rhetoric in the Moscow Patriarchate in Russia and especially in Ukraine saying, no, they're still uncanonical. And as a matter of fact, Constantinople has become uncanonical and they acted unilaterally. And everybody knows that only Moscow was allowed to act unilaterally. You're right that the Kremlin and the MP will continue to make this point. And it's also true that there'll be some in Ukraine for whom that will make sense, but there are others for whom the canonical issue has been lifted. And I think that number will grow. I think it's interesting to note too that the Russians now are saying that it's not a canonical act, but they were more than happy to accept the 1686 decree on the part of the Ecumenical Patriarch. And for many, many decades before that, they were trying to lobby hard a series of Ecumenical Patriarchs, even to the point of trying to bribe one, which bribe was accepted, which then became public, which then he had to give it up. So I mean the Russian church, frankly, has always been a bit underhanded in this area. Well, I mean, the Tsars were actively involved in getting the Patriarch of Moscow established. And it was gifts were an important part of the game. Right, and they declared themselves out of Cephalus just on their own five years before the fall of Constantinople in 1448. Nobody remembers that. We've got maybe two minutes if we wanna take a last question here and then I'll close out for us. I know it's a typical question in light of the midterm elections that are coming next Tuesday. But does the United States government have any involvement in these issues? What do we expect our government to do and to interface to some of these issues? Or are we gonna be completely silent on this subject and act like it doesn't exist? According to the Kremlin narrative, this was a CIA operation from start to finish. And in fact, someone sent me just this week a really pathetic piece written by the former head of the Russian Orthodox Church of America, Metropolitan Jonah, which said what I just said and a lot more, which was just completely nonsense. By and large, the US government has stayed out of it and consistent with our, we don't do church state stuff, we stay away. Though it is true that Ambassador Brownback, who's our ambassador for religious affairs, was in Kiev and said things which I would call very, very, very mildly encouraging. But all those adverbs are important to put in there. But where the United States, the people, not the government, the people of the United States could play a role is if the National Council of Churches of Christ reached out to the new Autosophilist Orthodox Church of Ukraine and said, we want to have relationships with you. I'm sure that in the International Orthodox Catholic Dialogue, this is gonna be like a nuclear explosion because Russia's always thrown its weight around there. Suddenly, the Ukrainian Orthodox will be admitted to the table and there is gonna be different discussion. And the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics have been waiting a long time to be able to have an open and serious ecumenical dialogue with their Ukrainian Orthodox counterparts. But the question of the canonical question and the question of Moscow's interference always got in the way of that. And my great hope is that it will end and a very interesting ecumenical dialogue within Ukraine could take place and various organizations in the United States that are interested in those kind of things should invite these churches and assist them and help them. That would be great. I think these last few questions and remarks have really helped us to an opening for panel three and four in the afternoon today on religious freedom, conflict and international actors. Thank you all. Thank you to the panelists. We do have one hour for lunch. Our next panel will start in this room at 1.30. Lunch will be served on the second floor, so one floor down, please come with an appetite. There's plenty to eat. To those on the live stream, we'll pick up here at 1.30. Thank you all. All right, we'll get started in about one minute. If you can begin to take your seats, we'll get started here in about one minute. All right, welcome back from lunch and look forward to an afternoon where we will begin to turn the table, yeah, turn the corner to the implications for this on religious communities and then our concluding panel for the day on what to do. So it's my privilege to invite up to the stage His great Archbishop Piaf Strati, the Archbishop of Cherniev and Secretary to the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the key of Patriarchate and Archimindrite Cyril Havron is the acting director at the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Maramont and the moderator for this panel, Dr. Sufian Zemukov of the George Washington University's Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies. So look forward to this panel on the impact on Russian on the religious communities and Dr. Sufian, take it from here. Well, it's a pleasure to see you all here and we had two great panels, one of which covered the history of the question and the other one focused on the Maidan and the Ukrainian revolution developments and the impact on a religious community. And now we, at this panel, we will talk about impact of Russia, Ukraine conflict on religious communities and our two panelists actually, they also, besides this question that they will cover, they also teach at Archbishop Yves Strati teaches at the Academy and Archimindrite Cyril Havron teaches at Loyola University and maybe if you have broader questions, they will be able to talk about them as well. Archbishop Yves Strati focuses on dogmatic theology and Archimindrite Cyril focuses on political orthodoxy. So maybe they will also kind of help us to look at these implications of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict from their research and from their activities. So let's go in the order which is in the program and His Grace Archbishop Yves Strati, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. And first of all, I would like to thank Institute of Peace and all organizers who prepare such a program a wonderful and important event. I remember I was here two or three years ago and we discuss about possibility of such a conference and at that time it was just idea and now we all see how it's important and how many people have a special interest to this topic and I'm sorry, I never leave in the West and never be a student of Western University and sorry for my poor English. If you have some questions, I'd like to clarify after my presentation. First of all, what is impact of this conflict on religious picture and inter-religious, inter-confessional situation in Ukraine? I thank Father who remember us about existence of Ukrainian Council of Churches and religious organizations because it's one of good fruits of our cooperation. In Ukraine we not just coexist Christians, Jews, Muslims, Christians of different denominations also those Catholics Protestants but we fruitfully cooperate and we try to be an example for all our society that we are different. We are different, we have different face, we have different views, we are different by nation even by nationality. Current chair of our Council is a chief rabbi of Ukraine, Yakov Doblykh who was born here in states and as he described himself, I am Brooklyn guy but he is one of most respective religious person in Ukraine and he is one of father's founders of all Ukrainian Council at the time more than 20 years ago. Conflict between Russia and Ukraine is a conflict about future. Russia through all their history with exception of very few moments try to grow as authority have no experience of democratic existence and freedom there for society in general for government, for country is just idea, not reality. Freedom is not a basis and the state is a core of existence and people, what father mentioned people just ground for growing of the state and church itself is a part of state mechanisms and unfortunately Russian Orthodox Church have no real experience of free existence without control by the state, especially now. Ukraine and Ukrainian nation, Ukrainian people have different historical way if I may use this definition Ukrainian tradition of society, political tradition religious tradition is more European is a part of great European heritage and in Russia we see much more Asian of socracy and freedom for this model is challenge. When we saw pictures from Maidan I remind that at that time in Russia many politicians, many officials talk about American project all those people just a part of American project CIA wasting money on Maidan and these people just actors who playing by scenario from Washington in Moscow they don't imagine how people have their decision by themselves very interesting example from Soviet history was a little time after World War II when Anna Akhmatova was not for being banned from Soviet authority and in Moscow was gathering and there Akhmatova came there and people who saw her rise up and big applause for her heritage and so on and when Stalin received report about this event he wrote resolution you must investigate and find who organize these applause and this is a little drop but it's like a mirror of mind people not acting by themselves must be anybody who must organize them and this is a difference between Moscow, Russia, Kremlin tradition and Ukraine especially if we talk about religious life in Russia they try to have organized space religious space, organized and controlled by government religious activity not controlled by government not controlled by officials it's a danger in Ukraine we really have religious freedom and if we compare with all our history now we have wonderful time for any kind of religious activity uncomparable with all previous centuries of Ukraine, Ukrainian history and our freedom is a challenge for Russia, is a challenge for Kremlin if we will have success in our development this shows to Russian church to Russian believers, to Russian citizens that democracy really works not in countries far, far away but in neighboring country Ukraine in Russia they still believe that we are part of great Russian nation and great Russian heritage and if we will have success in our attempt to have a freedom to have a free church independent church, independent not just from Moscow but independent from government independent from oligarchs and so on real part of civil society maybe more and more people inside Russia have inspiration that in Russia it will works too concerning current development of Autosapholy and receiving of Thomas of Autosapholy from Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and we heard many times from Russian propaganda about violence, about bloodshed and so on and so on I talked to Father Serial I have no idea why we as Ukrainian Orthodox believers or someone else must use violence or prepare bloodshed because all next decades and centuries is a time for Ukrainian church we don't need to use violence against anybody because if they decide to join Ukrainian church in next 5 years or next 10 years or next 20 years sooner or later when majority of Orthodox believers in Ukraine will understand that Ukraine exists and will exist Ukrainian church is a real church canonical, recognize it and will exist not in next few years but through centuries they will be part of this church but if they not decide in Ukraine we have more than 100 different denominations and here was mentioned Russian Orthodox church outside Russia and you know that in 2007 major part of this church unified with Moscow-Paturk but small part of this church still exist as a Russian Orthodox church outside Russia as independent part and global center of this church is in Odessa in Ukraine Russian Orthodox church abroad, Russia in really abroad in Odessa and they still, as a Russian church they still exist there and Moscow-Paturkate will be in Ukraine but this structure not will be a tool of Kremlin policy of destroying our statehood our identity as Ukrainian people and it's, I'm so excited and it's very valuable for me to have many people here who try to understand and to help to help Ukraine in our way, our returning to European and European space and to the real free world Thank you very much and I apologize for some... Thank you Well thank you very much for providing such a clear distinction between how you see the different churches will develop now and also providing kind of this positive vision of the future because you said all this conflict is about future not history and not maybe even contemporary Thanks for that and now the floor is I give the floor to Archimandreat Cyril Havarun and please Good, thank you Well it's a bit hard to speak after almost every speaker covered the topics that I wanted to touch and you did it very well, much better than I would do that's why let me try a bit different approach to the topic that we are discussing actually there are many hermeneutical ways to deal with the Ukrainian issue more narrowly with the issue of the Ukrainian church I would suggest to approach this issue from the perspective of recognition of reality Well we could put... we could interpret the winners and the losers in this situation, this situation related to the Ukrainian church in terms of succeeding or failing to recognize the realities that we in Ukraine face primarily it is the reality of war it has been mentioned already that it was mentioned very clearly, particularly by Ambassador Herbst that it is not a civil war it is a real war between Russia and Ukraine and this is a harsh reality that we face on the everyday basis I myself had a chance to visit the front line just a couple of months ago and it was a kind of an astonishing experience an experience of real war, real conflict we were driving across the minefields the crossfire of snipers and we were exposed to the risk of being shot by snipers and by the Russian artillery it's an everyday experience for those people who live there of course some of them they enjoy this kind of experience this experience makes them high somehow but still it is a war and exactly this reality of war of conflict, of bloodshed, of lost lives is at the core of the issue that we are discussing here because the failure of the Russian church to give a solution to the Ukrainian issue to the Ukrainian ecclesial issue and the failure of my own church which is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate to recognize the reality of the war made them failing the Ukrainian people that's exactly why they are not hurt anymore why they are not respected anymore as they used to be respected there are either silence or endorsement to the war contributed to a dramatic fall of their reputation in the Ukrainian society among the Ukrainian people even among their own flocks the people who belong to those churches even they were diverted from those churches eventually as a result of this silence, of this collaboration and collaboration sometimes very open collaboration with the aggressor I would explain the decrease of popularity of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine by this failure to recognize the reality of the war and the only church in the Orthodox Ecumenia that has recognized this reality that has faced this reality and has consoled the Ukrainian people about this reality is the Ecumenical Patriarchate and that was exactly the winning point for the Ecumenical Patriarchate a tremendous support among the Ukrainian people even though who in Ukraine knew about the Ecumenical Patriarchate before that well, only a bunch of people a very kind of tiny group of people knew more or less about the Ecumenical Patriarchate now many in Ukraine, the Ukrainian society even secular people would know words like Otto Saferli, Thomas and would know the personality of Patrick Bartholomew and the support towards the Ecumenical Patriarchate is tremendous and one of the reasons one of the main reasons I would say why this support has emerged is the fact that the Ecumenical Patriarchate has recognized the tragedy of the Ukrainian people the war, the conflict it doesn't call it civil war it doesn't call it with all those euphemisms that were invented by the Russian propaganda that have become a part of the Russian narrative well, I should say properly that this recognition of the war is not as clear cut as probably by for instance the US government or by the international institutions but still it is there it is at least something because we didn't receive any support from any other church whatsoever the only decision of an orthodox church related to the Ukrainian situation in my memory is a decision it was a petition from the Holy Synod of the Greek Orthodox Church which was made I think in summer 2015 when the Greek Orthodox Church petitioned the Archbishop of Athens to ask Mr. Putin to lift embargo on Greek olives that is the only church issue document related to the Ukrainian conflict in my knowledge against this background I mean the decision of the Ecumenical Patriarchate is tremendously important and it has been appreciated very much by the Ukrainian people so those who failed to acknowledge the reality of violence the reality of humanitarian catastrophe the reality of the war in Ukraine those churches and people and groups failed Ukraine those who have recognized that they won Ukraine Ukrainian hearts I would say and here is I think that strength of the US position if I am allowed to reflect on the political position of the US because we had such a clear statements from the United States about the war and no other country would made it more clear that is the reason why people in Ukraine are really on the side there I think most of them are friends nowadays of the United States so the recognition of trauma the recognition of sufferings it is important and it has played a crucial role in the entire Ukrainian issue the issue of the Ukrainian tocephaly and I believe this recognition is also a way towards peace and reconciliation it's not just about winning and losing it's also about making peace in Ukraine I believe that if we apply to Ukraine the general description of the truth and reconciliation process the famous process that has affected many countries which were torn and tormented by divisions like South Africa, like Canada like countries of the Eastern Europe truth constitutes the first steps the first step towards reconciliation you cannot achieve you cannot reach reconciliation without telling truth about what has happened first the truth should be acknowledged then the Christian forgiveness should be applied as a next step but you cannot apply forgiveness without telling what has happened without revealing what has happened and that is exactly what we are talking about through the process of granting tocephaly to the Ukrainian church some important truths have been told by the Communical Patriarchate by the churches and this exactly paved a way towards reconciliation quite surprisingly that's why I believe the way towards the tocephaly of the Ukrainian church it's also a way towards reconciliation in Ukraine and of Ukraine with other countries I could imagine that if let us imagine that Russia has recognized its crimes that would be the first step towards reconciliation with the country we are not against Russia eternally we don't want to be at war with Russia for centuries we want to reconcile with that country but that country first has to recognize what it has done and that's why I again I want to stress this the process of granting tocephaly to the Ukrainian church is connected with the process of peace and reconciliation in Ukraine that is the most important point that I wanted to raise another point which is a bit different from what I've said is about the effect the way how this process affects the religious communities it has been said in many discussions that this is a political process and indeed it is a political process this process of granting tocephaly to the Ukrainian church has become a part of the political agenda so the political discourse and so forth but it remains for the people of the church it remains a pastoral issue primarily and what the Ukrainian community has done was to address the pastoral issue which remained pending no other church wanted to touch on this issue no other church wanted to give a pastoral solution to the problem that tormented many people for millions of people I would say it was an issue of consciousness they realized that they belong they belong to non-recognized groups I don't want to call them schismatic groups to non-recognized groups for some it was not a problem for some it was a problem and they didn't have any other alternative way to go any other canonical alternative way to go or legitimate alternative and this was an issue of pastoral and an issue of consciousness an issue of freedom of consciousness if you want the very issue of the schism in the Ukrainian church is an issue of consciousness of freedom of consciousness because people were not free to go to a church which would be canonical on the one hand and on the other hand would be free from the influence from Russia therefore I believe establishing a parallel jurisdiction parallel canonical jurisdiction in Ukraine is a solution to the issue of freedom of consciousness which was given by the Communical Patriarchate it has solved the issue effectively the issue has been solved that is very important it has been solved also for those people thousands of people who had to leave the Moscow Patriarchate after 2014 because they could not stand they could not digest you know either silence or words promulgated and uttered by the Russian church or the Ukrainian church of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine and they had either to leave altogether the church or to join other jurisdictions and still they were tormented still it was a huge pastoral issue for them again this issue has been solved so it is a great relief for millions of Ukrainians for their consciousness religious consciousness for the issue of freedom of consciousness and probably the last point that I wanted to raise that while this issue well the decision of the Communical Patriarchate has become a solution to consciousness of money in Ukraine it became a problem to consciousness of money in Russia so they are like corresponding vessels somehow and indeed many people in Russia have perceived this decision of the Communical Patriarchate as an insult against Russia well I believe it was not an intention of the Communical Patriarchate to insult anyone but rather to give a solution to the existing problems and the fact that the Russians were insulted was the problem of the Russians it was not really the problem of the Communical Patriarchate it was not the intention of the church and indeed this caused tensions in the relations between Moscow and Constantinople as you all know I would offer my own interpretation to these tensions immediately after the decision of the Russian church to break Eucharistic Communion relations with the Communical Patriarchate on October 15th a couple of weeks ago many interpreted this break as a schism and many were feared that this schism would be a global schism would be a global divide within the Orthodox community worldwide I think it's not a schism it's not a global divide it's just a crack as it were or a rift in the relations between the churches and actually it's a unilateral crack I would say that it is an imagined crack it was imagined, it has been imagined by Russia but it has not been agreed upon that there is a problem by the Communical Patriarchate other churches also failed or refused to recognize that there is a divide between the two churches and we could speak about a global schism only in case if both sides of the conflict recognize that there is a conflict that there is a break in the relationship between the churches and more importantly if other churches recognize that there is a schism and other churches would side with one or another church would take either or one of those sides known of the churches or faithful allies of Russia took any side the most dangerous point was when the Patriarch of Antioch visited recently Serbia and met the Patriarch of Serbia those are the two kind of traditional allies of Moscow and even they did not produce any statement which would recognize a schism between the churches of Moscow and Constantinople so if they refused to recognize this reality it means even if they failed to recognize this it means that this schism does not exist as a reality it is completely imagined I would like to draw a parallel between the concept of you know imagined communities by Benedict Anderson when he described nationalism as an imagined construct this schism is a completely imagined construct it exists only in the heads of a few people in the global orthodoxy it is not shared by other people the reality the schism does not exist as reality which brings us to my initial my first point about recognition of reality so if we recognize the reality and when the churches globally recognize the reality there will be no schism there will be no schism it exists only in the imagination of the Russian church as only in the imagination of the Russian church as civil war exists so one delusion produces another delusion a delusion about what is happening in Ukraine produces a delusion about what is happening between the churches in the global orthodoxy the reality is there is a war in Ukraine this reality has been recognized by the Comanical Patriarchate and I think most Ukrainians are grateful to him and to the Patriarchate and this recognition of by the Comanical Patriarchate has not produced any split any divide in the global orthodoxy those are two important realities that we need I think to bear in mind and I'd like to emphasize those two realities in my presentation thank you for your attention well thank you very much for talking about the political aspect of it and especially taking us into the depth of the questions of consciousness and the implications of this split between Moscow Patriarchate and the Comanical Church and I wanted to build on the last part of your presentation and ask Archbishop Efstraati so all these processes that we have been observing after the fall of Soviet Union they indicated this kind of split in the Orthodox Church in Baltic states when part of the religious community were oriented toward Moscow Patriarchate and the part was independent in Moldova we have the same split when part of Moldovan Church is oriented toward Romania the same situation in Georgia so these processes were going for quite long time and some of those local churches actually applied for the same notion that Ukrainian Kyiv Church did but they were denied and this is kind of the first major development in the post-Soviet history of Orthodox Church so that's kind of one aspect that shows that there is this tendency of the processes decentralized processes going in the Russian Orthodox Church and another aspect which I actually didn't think about before and it's real mentioned it this new notion that Moscow Patriarchate also started splitting from ecumenical Church and they even decided not to pray for them like there are these dramatic developments recently so I was wondering Archbishop Yostrati what do you think about this globalization and how it will reflect on the community religious community particularly in Ukraine and also could you reflect how it would affect different parts of Ukrainian community the eastern part which was more affected by Soviet atheism legacies and western part which was more western oriented and also I was wondering I wanted to ask a question it's surreal you at one point indicated that you still belong to Moscow Patriarchate identify with Moscow Patriarchate so Archbishop Yostrati mentioned that kind of positively that Moscow Patriarchate will exist in Ukraine and so I was wondering how do you feel the developments of Moscow Patriarchate in this new environment rather probably hostile environment in Ukraine Father Kirill said about accepting reality and what kind of structure now Moscow Patriarchate have its church empire or imperial church and in 1990s in Russia politicians and church officials openly enjoys that Communist Party Gorbachev lose Soviet Union and Soviet Union was destroyed but Russian Orthodox Church still exist and this this is a foundation for reconstruction post-Soviet reconstruction and reunification post-Soviet space around Moscow as a third Rome as a holy place as a center of Russian world and Orthodox world and in reality returning to empire for Russia they try Putin and his antlers try to use just to use this imperial ideas as a tool to hold a power in Russian Federation in reality I think most of them really understand that reconstruction of Russian Empire in modern world is impossible but they try to use these ideas another very important point I have no idea do you know or not that after World War II Stalin's regime try with incorporation with Moscow Patriarchate re-establish it 75 years ago in 1943 try to gather 8 Ecumenical Council in Orthodox tradition we recognize only 7 Ecumenical Councils and last month was in 1987 and Stalin and Moscow Patriarchate try to prepare 8 Ecumenical Council in Moscow with main goal to proclaim Moscow Patriarchate as Ecumenical Patriarchate first among equal Patriarchate it's a real story with many proofs and documents and from that time until now World Orthodoxy divided really divided one part support Ecumenical Patriarch as a real leader of modern real Orthodoxy Orthodoxy oriented on values of freedom dignity human dignity and so on and other part try to re-establish medieval Orthodoxy Imperial or Orthodoxy and ideas of Orthodoxy re-establishing of Orthodox Empire or reconstruction of new Byzantine Empire around Moscow and ground for these ideas inside Moscow Patriarchate is the Moscow Patriarchate one is a bigger than all other 13 mutually recognized churches on one Moscow Patriarchate by number of believers churches and entire network but near 40% of structure of Moscow Patriarchate exists in Ukraine under jurisdiction of Russian Orthodox Church without Ukraine Moscow Patriarchate will be big but not super power church and lose ground for such global Imperial ideas you remember meeting between Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill in Havana and Patriarch Kirill just one of primates of local Orthodox churches he tried to play a role someone comparable with Pope of Rome like a leader of global Orthodoxy said we Pope of Rome and me we have global we have global responsibility we, we two leaders we have global responsibility and so on and conflicts you mentioned in Moldova, in Estonia in Georgia it's part of process of decentralization of deconstruction of empire but these examples are not danger for main idea because without Moldova without Estonia without Abkhazia Estonia Russian Empire Russian Imperial idea may leave and may go forward but without Ukraine without Church of Ukraine without Ukrainian history re-establishing of Russian Empire is impossible and last one point that Russian Imperial idea based on such imagine that Moscow is a third Rome and real success successful of Byzantine heritage successor of Byzantine heritage but Kiev Kievan history Kievan church is only one link real link between Byzantine heritage Byzantine tradition Byzantine history and Moscow history without this link Moscow statehood history starts from Ivan Kalita and Metropolitan Peter from first years of 14th century from a time of holding horde and so on and one of main symbols of Russian heritage head of Monomakh Shabka Monomakh and somebody mentioned about images of great prince Volodymyr Russian tradition of image of great prince Volodymyr head of Monomakh it's a symbol of idea that emperor Constantine Monomakh of Byzantine empire as a symbol of transition of the power grant this head crown to his grandson Volodymyr Monomakh great prince of Kiev grant this symbol to Moscow princess and this visible symbol of transition of history but in reality this is a head given by to Ivan Kalita as a symbol of his power over Moscow principality and without Kievan history Russian imperial idea impossible and may be Russia when lose these images he find strange find a spirit to reestablish their statehood their society model not and go forward with face forward not backward thank you you always bring it to positive ending thanks for that question to my question to Archimand Ritseril was about the future of Moscow Patriarchate but I was wondering if you could cover it less from political point but from the point why would Ukrainians want to stay with Moscow Patriarchate and what impact now Moscow Patriarchate would have in Ukraine well I'll try to be brief first of all yes there will be Ukrainians quite a few of them millions I would say who would stay with the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine this is another reality that we need to recognize and it's good if we recognize this reality why they will stay there is difficult to say because everyone will have his own reason probably one of the reasons will be the proximity cultural proximity to Russia for many of them were formed spiritually in the framework of the Russian spirituality for some it will be the Russian propaganda which has already began acting on them and explaining why they should stay in the Moscow Patriarchate because they say it is the only right faith that version of orthodoxy addition of orthodoxy that has remained different reasons right and wrong reasons will keep them there nevertheless I believe that it is important that the Moscow Patriarchate will stay in Ukraine and not just for the sake of the Moscow Patriarchate I will say now maybe a heretical point of view very unorthodox you may condemn me if you want we have a conciliar kind of form here but my point, my heretical point is that it is good to have alternative canonical jurisdictions in one country we have a custom in the orthodox church we have only one church and we believe that it is an ancient almost sacrosanct divine apostolic tradition which is wrong because in the period of Christian antiquity there was only one state the Roman Empire and there were several churches which existed within the same Roman milieu and with the emergence of the modern states they adopted this idea that one state should have one church it is not actually traditional apostolic it is an idea which was inspired by the modernity and now we are challenged by this idea many people in Ukraine still believe that Ukraine should have only one church probably should but it will not have it let us be realistic, let us face this reality there will be at least two churches and I think instead of just you know, humbly accepting this we should celebrate this idea of having two parallel jurisdictions because it will contribute to diversity in Ukraine and it will help both churches to be better churches if I may say this well, I will say something that probably Archbishop Yves Strati will not like but I think that both churches Moscow Patriarchate and Kyiv Patriarchate they are not very different from one another but I know you will disagree with me they are quite similar and there is no chance that they will change by themselves it is like you know, this famous German fictional figure, Baron Munchauser who tried to draw himself out of Mars by his hairs it is impossible only the coexistence of two churches may help those churches to be better to improve because there will be competition between them I hope there will be no war between them that will be a very bad scenario the good scenario will be a coexistence of two parallel jurisdictions which will compete one another which will in this way help one another to be in shape and not to become authoritarian structures because if you have competition you cannot become authoritarian because then otherwise priests and parishes would switch to another jurisdiction and this will keep those churches in good shape therefore I believe it will contribute to the diversity of Ukraine general diversity of Ukraine it will contribute certainly to the general tolerance religious tolerance in Ukraine it will help one of the Orthodox people to respect one another other Orthodox they will also learn how to respect other Christians therefore I believe this configuration even though it is not probably the optimal configuration but eventually it may contribute to a better tolerance to a better freedom of religion in Ukraine if I may say this so it's a win-win situation well thank you very much both of our presenters kind of maybe our audience will bring some negative sides so please identify yourself and keep your comment or question under one minute and I also will ask our panelists to keep your answer to two minutes and then we will have two rounds of questions our Commander I was talking about accepting reality well you know the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Kyiv and Patriarchate did not accept reality for the last 20 years and today they stand on the threshold of what they dreamed of it wasn't reality for 20 years it was a dream I doubt that Moscow will just accept the reality of their loss and I think they're going to spend a lot of energy and waste a lot of money and spend a lot of energy on trying to recover and somehow change the situation because there's so much stick I would like to hear your comment on that let's collect several questions please Austin Dolar Center for European Policy Analysis now earlier you both touched on the idea of freedom for and also feel like Ukrainian Church wouldn't just mean freedom Moscow but also freedom from Ukrainian government as well now what concrete steps would also feel like Ukrainian Church have to do in order to not become wedded to the Ukrainian government and become just an arm of soft power like we're seeing the Moscow Church acts for a poons regime thank you thank you my name is Nicholas Soi, director of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship I really appreciate your comment Father Serial about the imagineschism I'm getting emails all the time since October 15 the people saying what do I do now can I go to a Greek Orthodox Church anymore and I'm wondering if you could project forward into the future the possibilities of regularization of relations between Moscow and Constantinople what would that involve or will this end up just being an outstanding issue the way Jerusalem and Antioch schism is or is there another possibility okay thank you so let's this time go with I will start thank you I will start with the last question I don't know what needs to be done in order to normalize the relations between the two churches I think it's going to be a long lasting issue it's going to be a long lasting fantasy I would say how to dissipate this fantasy I don't know really but it has to do with the second question about the well no with the first question about the accepting reality I think well the reality for Moscow is it's not losing anything nothing has happened to Russia I mean who has interfered to the Russian soil who has infringed on the Russian sovereignty whatever no nothing nothing like that has happened it was an insult to the imagination to the Russian imagination but it was a political imagination it was not the image about the church it was the image about the ideological standing therefore this step of Constantinople I believe is not a lost for Russia it is a gain for Russia because it gives Russia a chance to realize the reality of the church the church has remained intact the church has not been split and many more people in Ukraine joined the global Orthodox Church everyone should be happy about that not to be complaining all the time it's an opportunity to celebrate and that is the reality which should be celebrated therefore it is a gain for the Russian church not a lost regarding the freedom of the Ukrainian church from the Ukrainian state I think the competition of the two churches all of them are similar in the sense that they celebrate with the state because they are the churches of the Byzantine tradition and the Byzantine symphony is pretty much in the DNA of every single Byzantine church and this applies to the Kiev Patriarchate to the Moscow Patriarchate to any other Patriarchate you can imagine only the coexistence of two churches can secure somehow that no one will have monopoly on symphony with the state because there will be two churches and you cannot have two established churches thanks please Kiev Patriarchate rise up from very beginning stood on the ground of support from the people not from the state Russia and Moscow Patriarchate tried to describe that creation of Kiev Patriarchate is a political project but in reality Ukrainian state never support Kiev Patriarchate just maybe at the time of President Yushchenko in many words but very few symbolic deeds and at the time of Euromaidan and crisis in Ukraine our church have power inside ourselves to stay with the people not with government because we know that people support us and future of our church depends not to the state or government depends on people when people will support us we will exist in the future about your question when in what time it will be finished I would like to remind very interesting story after World War II in Moscow the question of attitude to ecumenical movement and officially Moscow Patriarchate have strong statement and attitude that ecumenical movement is just an imperial tool is a heresy and so on and so on and Russian Orthodox Church in this movement at all it was just after World War II at the time of Second Vatican when Soviet Government saw how important role plays Roman Catholic Church in global west and ecumenical movement Protestant churches in United States government change their mind and grant possibility to Russian Orthodox Church to be a part of ecumenical movement movement and in 1960s, 1970s Russian Orthodox Church start to be main part of ecumenical movement just after 15 or 20 years when they are totally denied this option I think after change in Kremlin change of mind or change of person this schism in mind we land I hope maybe one more question to gentlemen over there a number of times Cyril Kennedy I'm a doctoral student from Catholic University of America a number of times the former Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate Vladimir Sabodan has been mentioned and contrasted to the current Metropolitan Onufri and so I'd ask either a question about that the difference between those personalities and perhaps what they represent or put somewhat differently why was there this moral failure in the MP in Ukraine to respond to the needs of the Ukrainian people what's the root cause of that thank you let's go in the same direction again I will I will not judge the personalities I just deliberately avoided I just want to say that probably one of the reasons is a wrongly perceived spirituality it's a sort of spirituality that distances itself from the reality it despises political realities and it gives a way to very wrong political realities in this way that is the explanation of the behavior of the Ukrainian church nowadays vis-a-vis the country in Ukraine people pretend they try to live in a different world which is completely imagined and they perceive this world as spiritual the world of spirits which has nothing to do with the real life of people and this is wrong and that is the reason of failure I believe late Metropolitan Vladimir as you know took many special positions church positions in Russian Orthodox Church with big responsibility he was like a chancellor of Moscow Patriarchate before this he was exarch of western Europe he was for 10 years he was rector of Moscow Academy he was representative of Moscow Patriarchate to world council of churches in Geneva and he have big experience and he knows much clear that real world is much complicated than simple picture and Metropolitan Onufri described by his supporters or those who criticize him like a monk he is a real monk with great huge obedience to his spiritual father and maybe I think it's very good for monks but it's a it's a problem and lack of his own will it's a problem for premate of church who must decide himself not have obedience for anybody but decide himself and have responsibility himself I think it's a problem it's a difference between these two hierarchs thanks well this panel kind of showed that the diversity in Ukraine and the differences between different congregations they only contribute in the view of our panelists to the religious freedom there and that leaves us hope and maybe the next panel which is about defending religious freedom will build on the ideas that our presenters developed and please join me in giving them round of applause thank you everyone we'll take a short 15 minute break and we'll start our fourth and final panel at 3pm thank you I got my mother's alright welcome back this is the fourth session of the day my name is Charles North I'm a senior advisor here at the U.S. Institute of Peace and it's wonderful to have you all here today it's been an absolutely fascinating discussion so far so this panel is titled Religious Freedom and the Russia Ukraine Conflict with me on the panel is John Pina who's the vice president of the Mitchell firm where he has worked since 2016 his prior assignments with the Mitchell firm include serving as the vice president of development for the American University of Afghanistan managing a business innovation hub and the international center for Afghan women's economic development previously he was the executive director of the organization for societies and transition and the director of government and international relations for the American Islamic Congress so next to him is Dr. Elizabeth Podromu who is a visiting associate professor of conflict resolution at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University where she directs the initiative on religion, law, and diplomacy she is a non-resident senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and is also a non-resident fellow at the Hadaia International Center for Excellence of Excellence for countering violent extremism she served as vice chair and commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom from 2004 to 2012 and was a member of the U.S. Secretary of State's Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group from 2011 to 2015 next to me is Dr. Kent Hill he is the executive director of the Religious Freedom Institute and the director of the Middle East Action Team before joining the Religious Freedom Institute in 2016 he was the senior vice president at World Vision U.S. for six years he was vice president of the John Templeton Foundation and for eight years he was assistant administrator in the U.S. Agency for International Development where he oversaw U.S. assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and subsequently all USAID health programs worldwide. Welcome all of you thank you for being here the uh... so by this point in the day much has been said on the things we're going to talk about but bear with us I think there's actually more to be said there's an opportunity to have the last word as well as to dig in more on some of the issues that people have been raising so the what we as we see this panel is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and the religious dimensions of that conflict cannot be fully understood without understanding the geopolitics of the competition between Russia and the west and between the Moscow patriarch and the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. So this afternoon this panel we're looking at these complex dynamics and we really trying to get to what is at stake we will also explore whether autosephaly will actually lead to greater religious freedom how will autosephaly affect international financial flows and property ownership how will Russia respond we've already heard at least one suggestion that there's possibility of military intervention or the possibility that Russia will adapt it's already ongoing hybrid war to take advantage of autosephaly to again to continue to drive wedges between society and Ukraine and elsewhere around the world so this will be the question where do we go from here and how should the international community respond so with that why don't we begin John, why don't you start this one can everybody hear me, alright we all agreed to stand at the podium so it makes me feel like I'm a little bit shorter so I appreciate everybody taking the time to last this long today and to be here with my distinguished partisans here that speaking about this in this last session so I've lived and worked and studied in Russia in the former Soviet Republics for almost two decades and I've been working on the conflict in the Donbass conflict monitoring in the Donbass for the last two years conflict monitoring is a fancy term, a very vanilla term for monitoring the conflict and assessing what's going on there I think that I'm the alarmist of the group I'm going to start this off with a parable since we've talked since all these conversations I have all these notes on here so my presentation is largely changed but I'm going to start off with my experience working for the National Archives and Records Administration I worked at the FDR Presidential Library and if you wanted to do a little bit of research there on World War II you might want to take a look at the World War II file and if you went there you would see that the World War II file is very very small there's not much in there I don't know what you're thinking you're thinking FDR Presidential Library Roosevelt World War II was a big part of his presidency well everything that's under World War II is under the Poland file because that's where the war began because no one knew it was going to be a World War so that will set the tone for this this presentation because they maintain in every presidential library the files as they were maintained in that period so my concern, my purpose here today is the so what we have been listening all day to people a lot smarter than me about auto-Saphili and in true form as my mother would say I'm going to bring a practitioner's view and project the drama queen within me so I'm going to read a little passage for you start off with this so auto-Saphili in the Ukraine is a major 21st century moment initially aimed at empowering Ukrainian beliefs and practices of worship having far-reaching political, economic and social effects auto-Saphili became the basis for the founding Ukrainian Orthodox Church its religious aspects were supplemented by the ambitious political rulers who wanted to extend their power and control at the expense of the church the movement led to the eventual influence and the mist of I lost my place and the mist of the previously powerful Russian Orthodox Church people who are now able to worship as they believed and they were no longer relied on the Russian Orthodox Church for guidance and religious matters the auto-Saphili wars of religion were a series of religious wars waged in the 21st century through Europe and Asia devastating the continent and killing over 10 million people the wars were fought in the aftermath of the Ukrainian auto-Saphili and disrupted the religious order of the Orthodox countries in Europe were changed from the Reformation a summary of the Reformation so I took out Reformation put it on a Saphili and I took out Russian Orthodox Church and I put in the Catholic Church and put in Russian Orthodox Church and changed Protestants to the Russian Orthodox Church so I wanted to have a little bit of impact to set the stage here of what could happen so I'm like I said the alarmist of the group where I believe we're a pivotal part of history and as someone who studied religion and is operated in this area for years I believe that what we do right now is critical and essential and how we make sure that this does not turn into something that it shouldn't I do believe though that it is a crack like the previous panel had noted it's not a schism as I think is described through some of the media right now I think we're at a critical point where we can actually divert this into something very very positive and I was speaking with Elizabeth on the phone just earlier this week and she made this statement the devil's in the details so I'm going to try to get into the details a bit so let's start with the current war that's going on it's not religious so as we're all aware Ukraine has been embroiled in a conflict with Russia for just under five years Russia controls the area of the Donbass and Crimea and just some numbers because I think that it's really important here 4,000 Russian soldiers dead killed in action 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in action we have another 10,000 missing in action another 10,000 civilians are dead and 25,000 civilians wounded and 1.4 million internally displaced peoples and a million abroad and this war needs us to be solution minded so presently it's not a religious war but it could easily be like the passages I just read ethnic Russians could claim religious persecution as a backlash to autocephaly I would and they are prepared to do so religious persecution is farther down the line than the ethnic political and national persecution that's going on right now in conflict and there are which are the real causes for the war right now the areas occupied are in effect Russian territory so there will be religious persecution just like there would be in any controlled territory any occupied territory and that comes that's just one of the oppressions that would be executed in those regions I know I sound a little bit pro-Russian at this point but I think that in a conflict zone we need to be very very careful about dialing on a specific kind of oppression when we're talking about Maslow's pyramid when we're talking about survival so the Tartars in Crimea right now they're persecuted why? because their ethnicity and their political beliefs and they happen to be Muslim so dialing in on their specific religion may not be the right way to go about it right now that doesn't mean they're not persecuted so let's see without going too deep Dr. Coyer and the ambassador had noted on some of the history going on the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia I can say that Russia and the Russians hold their leadership in the Orthodox Church sacred as a Russian scholar as someone who studied Russian history I grew up learning about Kevin Ruse and I do have to do a shout out to my old professor Kazimir Nurkalunis who's a Russian student which makes me a second generation Pasternakian student and he would speak of the lore of Vlad the Great in 988 and the shift to Orthodoxy my professor would talk about how Vlad sent envoys all over the world and they would come back and they chose to move into Orthodoxy for various reasons one of which he said because Orthodox Christians were able to drink I don't know if that's true so then we went to the Kevin Ruse period ended with the Tartar Yoke and then Moskovite Russia Imperial Russia and the fall of Konstantinopol which transferred the symbols of authority of Rome to Moscow and this should not be overlooked the historical and mythical quality that's associated and coupled with the political legitimacy that comes with the third Rome is an important aspect of this the double headed Roman eagle to this day is the symbol of Russia and that's the authority of Rome so the context demands that we tread lightly or at least deal with this and consider it this is a history of a people that should not be diminished and should be protected to allow and nurture the Russian community I spoke with my contacts at the ROC last week and I find it hard to believe they are now in charge of parts of the Russian Orthodox Church and some of the ministries and I think it's worthwhile to express what they said to me faith, money, power was the common they see this as nothing more than nothing less than a land grab a break of authority and tradition and also a sapping of parishioners which means equals money and there is an economy behind this that needs to be considered and the ROC has almost three times as much real estate in churches than the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the economic combat behind this industry of the church will have to be addressed it's a sapping of the resources Dr. Coyer and the ambassador noted this earlier as well to quote my very good friend at the ROC I will mention his name privately money is sacred so how and who compensates the ROC for its losses so if this was a peaceful transition what would happen to echo some of the previous panels of the previous panel talking about imperial losses so if you're going to lose this real estate you're going to lose these parishioners you're going to lose these revenue sources what happens next escalating this into a religious conflict how far will you successfully extend to the region is a question that I have what are we supporting Ambassador Brownback just went over there just recently and was touting religious freedom as he should but the how, the what, the why the particulars is a question that I have and if we're inciting religious freedom or we're advocating for religious freedom and it incites violence then there's consequences to that there's also a rumor that Belarus might ask for auto-cephaly as well and we need a clear model to assure that the economic elements are addressed and the other peripheral elements are addressed too because the ROC has a lot to lose and I use the word ROC Russian Orthodox Church so the other way to look at this is that the ROC has a lot to fight for the ROC has stated that they are prepared to mobilize and assure that their status in Orthodoxy is maintained and respected and as they should they have a long history they are the third Rome and there needs to be some we talked about reconciliation in the previous panel that reconciliation might occur well this is one of the issues that I think needs to be addressed and I don't exactly know what it means when it says that they're willing to fight for their status and fight for and maintain their legitimacy so the ROC has broken from Constantinople they're unfettered essentially giving them the freedom to establish their own power power base as an authority without any oversight to export their brand this is very good for Russia they can extend foreign aid and press their authority worldwide and make no bones about it the ROC are good neo-soviets some of my mates from school were all, well all my mates were all red army and they're all in the ROC and I always argue that Lenin's plan to destroy the priesthood and then use it as a tool is still in play is in play right now you have good neo-soviets running the Russian Orthodox Church right now and I always call them soviets but neo-soviets I think is the term and they are loyal to Moscow so and the church does use their infrastructure to sway public opinion and as intelligence gathering tools but the Russians but they are Russians and Russians use just about everything for that so we can't underestimate the influence that they will have if they are unfettered and they can extend beyond not only the former Soviet republics but anywhere because they're not tied to Constantinople so as Dr. Koyer I don't know if he's still here eloquently noted so imagine independent ROC they export their brand the building of churches and foreign aid nationalist holy warriors and as a Muslim I can say that I think are much more zealous than neo-soviets and that Rusky-Mir concept is something that when I lived in Russia spent time there it's part of the internal consciousness of almost every Russian but that would be the battle cry about the region so I realize this is an exaggeration and I realize that my purpose is to get us thinking about some action steps because I read a passage about the reformation with some word change in the beginning and I thought it might be appropriate to describe what could happen which is a stark contrast of the previous positive panel we just had but it makes me nervous the Russians did push across in World War II to defeat the Germans they lost 18 million people and they took the full import of the German war machine for four years so what do we need to do, what action steps are there we need to engage civil society I think if the ambassador for religious freedom Ambassador Brambeck goes over there it needs to engage the multiple levels of the community I do believe that there should be a round table of all the parties and they should all sit in the same room at one time for at least one session to discuss all these issues as they pertain to autosephaly I think that the issue of the Russian Orthodox Church being the leader of the Slavic world should be discussed openly I think economic elements relating to compensation of the ROC should be negotiated also that the conflict how the conflict and how it will play in autosephaly and in the occupied areas is an issue and then we have other issues and I guess I'm out of time here but we have the power struggles within the Eastern Orthodoxy all 14 patriarchs must agree on the autosephaly what does that look like I don't know if the ROC has a lot of influence when it comes to the Serbian Orthodox Church and how will that come to bear the debate on autosephaly the poorly exacerbated leadership power struggles between Moscow and Constantinople what's the end result of that is the Russian Orthodox Church actually independent and I think one of the most important elements that to note is the Ukrainian government accused Moscow, the Moscow Patriarch of being a tool of the Kremlin and the current president is a proponent of autosephaly and the elections coming up in 2019 so I just wanted to bring this stuff up and like I said I am the drama queen of the group so I appreciate everyone listening and I'm happy to answer your questions thank you John please so John you certainly got us the blood going a little bit there a little bit of the alarmist with the dystopian view of the world at the beginning but I think in many ways you're actually actually talking about caution and about the need for bringing people together to talk about the way forward so it's not an unknown that we can find a way to move this in a reasonable way that everybody comes away without having to go to the dystopian model if you will so thank you for that so let me turn to Elizabeth okay great thank you Charles thank you to the conference organizers and also for your gracious introduction to all of us and thanks for the great start I've been actually working on orthodox Christianity and global and comparative context for the last 25 years I can't believe I can say that but since writing a dissertation on church-state relations in the 1980s in Greece at MIT so it's heartening to see this kind of interest in orthodoxy complex and volatile context I'm used to both as an orthodox Christian and a scholar of orthodoxy to comments like oh there are people with the funny headgear so this is a refreshing change to hear this kind of really complex and sophisticated conversation much has already been said today so I'm going to try to avoid repetition but I do, I will return to some of the points that have already been raised and I'm going to try to focus specifically on the topic that we were instructed to address which is defending religious freedom and the Russia-Ukraine conflict the remarkable religious pluralism of Ukraine's ecosystem I think has been dealt with beautifully by previous speakers so I'm not going to elaborate on that other than to remind all of us of the diverse religious communities that should be part of any conversation about how to encourage a robust religious freedom reality in Ukraine and in the process moving forward with the eventual granting of the Tomosovatocephaly by Constantinople today we've heard about orthodox, Ukrainian and Russian Roman Catholic both Latin and Greek were in the language of today Greco-Catholic we've heard about Protestants Muslims and Jews so all of these various communities make up their religious freedom potential religious freedom ecosystem of Ukraine and I think as we move forward and think about policy specifics it's important to just keep a single word in mind engagement, oh that's three engagement, engagement, engagement of all of these communities now as I began thinking about the question of religious freedom I asked myself, has religious freedom been part of the calculus by which the key actors both states and churches have approached the Russia-Ukraine conflict and now the issue of orthocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and my answer with some qualifiers is no religious freedom really hasn't been a central part of the calculus when it comes to the issues that we've been talking about today and that answer of no has two implications I think that means that there's a lot of immediate risk when it comes to the religious freedom conditions in Ukraine and for those other actors who are involved but there's also a lot of potential upside when it comes to encouraging that conditions for positive religious freedom and I'll come back to all of this in my conclusion so what is the question of whether or not religious freedom has actually figured into the calculations of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and that now they move towards orthocephaly why does that matter? Well we're now 16 days into the announcement of the official rupture of relations by Moscow with Constantinople following the decision of the Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate regarding orthocephaly for Ukraine so put another way where now 21 days into what one of the earlier speakers referred to as some of the millennium and I think John you asked us to think a little bit more about whether the term schism is useful or not. Father Cyril I think in his previous panel's presentation asked us to really think about whether or not that term does describe what's happened thus far between Moscow and Constantinople but whether we call it a schism or a proto-schism or a rupture I think again the key point for us is regarding religious freedom issues it's imperative that this and I'll just use schism for a shorthand this nascent schism be as contained and as temporary as possible and I think that containment and a short time horizon are imperative not only for the Orthodox Church as a whole for its ecclesiological unity and its health but also for the religious freedom needs of Orthodox Churches all over Eurasia as well as for the capacity of those churches to be positive net contributors to the religious freedom environments in which they live. I also would submit to you that a little less than one month into the schism there's been very little discussion either by the Orthodox Churches themselves and especially by the state actors most involved whether directly or indirectly about religious freedom there have been some narrative flourishes there have been some footnotes but for the most part my proposition is pretty straightforward that the language and the calculus by which the Russia-Ukraine conflict has evolved and by which the autocephaly developments have unfolded have been overwhelmingly geopolitical in nature and it's been geopolitics that has instrumentalized religion for the purposes of the conflict and now as we begin to see the autocephaly question begin to develop and I would argue then that there's a need to recalibrate we have time to recalibrate and we must recalibrate if we're going to think about religious freedom so let me say a little bit now about the hegemony of the geopolitical framework for decision making and for narrating the Russia-Ukraine conflict when I use the term geopolitics we all use it but I think it's instructive for us to again think about its origins because it makes it very evident why it is that we're sitting here talking about Ukraine on a late afternoon in Washington and about autocephaly for the church there. If we think about the origins of the term geopolitics geopolitics originates as a term in the late 19th century mid-late 19th century and it's really made famous by in the 1904 article by Halford MacKinder in which he talked not only about geopolitics the relationship between geography and politics geography and power but he used the term geopolitics to make an argument about the linkage between geography and politics with regard to Eurasia and he was making a very straightforward argument arguing that in order to achieve hegemony global hegemony was necessary to achieve hegemony in Eurasia and most importantly hegemony in the heartland of Eurasia and so the connection between geography and politics for MacKinder was about control over land roots. Earlier this morning there was a question about that. Later on Alfred Mann responded and argued that it was really about control over maritime roots but nonetheless in both of these architects of the school of geopolitics arguments the connection between global hegemony and Eurasia hegemony was about control over geography and politics in the heartland and Ukraine is the heartland of the heartland and Kremia is a great example of this and I think the comments that have come out of Moscow have reinforced that theirs has been an overwhelmingly geopolitical approach. Controlling the heartland is the way to control all of Eurasia the world island and then global hegemony. So let me say a little bit more then about this specific regard to Russia and Ukraine using this kind of geopolitical lens. All of the conceptual apparatus that we associate with the Putin regime Ruskymir the Russian world and the instrument of spiritual security have necessarily made Ukraine a kind of testing ground for Russian geopolitical objectives when it comes to controlling the heartland, controlling Eurasia and what else for revitalizing Russia's lost great power status okay the Russian perspective also on geopolitics hasn't only been about controlling the physical geography and territory of Ukraine it's also been about narrating the religiocultural geography of Eurasia and the heartland. Therefore we get Ruskymir kind of post cold war twist on panslavism okay and a definition of the religiocultural prerogatives of Russia and its geopolitical interests in terms of an identity for this particular space and that's where we see then the instrument of spiritual security being used as part of Russia's foreign policy and strategic toolbox and again where is the critical space that this needs to be narrated and that hard power also needs to be applied, it's Ukraine I would submit as well that notwithstanding the conversations this morning about the U.S. not being so directly involved in the autocephaly issue and I'll come to that in a moment the same geopolitical lens with Ukraine at the epicenter of the calculations about Eurasia has been applied by Washington and we've seen this since the end of the cold war first of all in the discussions about NATO's gradual eastern enlargement up to Russia's western border Ukraine was critical in terms of whether or not there would be full membership in NATO, our partnership for peace membership we've seen it in the discussions about the EU's enlargement and Ukraine's eventual still waiting membership in the European Union and if not full membership then a special status for Ukraine and again even the notion of special status although one could argue it had technical and mechanical reasons behind it ultimately reinforces the notion that there's something so particular about Ukraine the heartland of the heartland that even special status needed to be achieved so both in terms of the key transatlantic architecture of NATO and then also the European Union Ukraine emerges within this geopolitical calculation about controlling the heartland to control Eurasia to have a unipolar U.S. world we also have seen Washington use critical geopolitics not just classical geopolitics the application of hard powered material interests but we've seen critical geopolitics as well the narration of the Ukrainian space in civilizational language and we actually heard some of that here today that Ukraine is at the fault line to use the huntingtonian language is at the fault line east and west or Ukraine is a torn country torn between west and east and both the orange revolution and the Maidan events were narrated in Washington policy and chattering class discussions in terms of this critical geopolitical perspective and religion figured very centrally into that eastern Christianity versus western Christianity for good eastern Christians and bad eastern Christians now for Ukraine everyone here about how Ukraine has made a geopolitical calculation but I do think that it's instructive that the language for example of President Poroshenko has largely been focused on the language of national independence and territorial integrity when it has come to his discussions about the autocephaly question he he has been in many ways the face of the autocephaly question perhaps not surprising since after all he's the president of the country he traveled to Constantinople I'm using the ecclesiastical term here he traveled to Constantinople to meet with his all holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and most of his statements since the Ecumenical Patriarchal Synod's decision have largely focused on the decision about autocephaly is one that is going to reinforce the territorial independence and integrity and national identity of Ukraine so again the language of geopolitics whether you know deliberately or as a shorthand has been foregrounded at the expense of any kind of discussion of religious freedom the only evidence that I could find in terms of the political space the discussion about religious freedom was Ambassador Brownbeck's visit to Kyiv which was you know his visit was cycled through all the various language presses where you know I have a quote here I think where he talked about the U.S.'s support for the religious freedom of all Ukrainians and again depending on which press reported it that keyword all was removed from the sentence so the religious freedom of Ukrainians fill in the content of Ukrainians finally the last other actor that has played I think an important role perhaps secondary but nonetheless important was mentioned this morning and that has been Turkey and from the perspective of Turkey the Ukraine war and also the autocephaly issue has been a geopolitical gift that keeps on giving Ukraine conflict has presented an opportunity for Turkey to play the role of disruptor within NATO in terms of the recalibration of the Ankara Moscow relationship everything from arms purchases to energy and Turkey has instrumentalized religion for geopolitical purposes and in this regard earlier this morning there was a question about why it is that President Erdogan would have agreed to allow ecumenical patriarch both all to take the decision on autocephaly and you know that sort of question gets my own hack tackles up since I belong in the language of the trade to the ecumenical patriarchate but nonetheless I would say that the answer is a pretty straightforward one Turkey has masterfully used the situation to encourage internal conflict and disintegration in the Orthodox Church by virtue of its own geopolitical relationship with Russia those two articles that came out in August of September of 2016 immediately following the attempted coup attempt the attempted coup against the Erdogan government one by US Ambassador Hughes the other by Zhbigny of Brzezinski both of which were forgeries they originally came out in the Russian blogosphere the rest of that story is they were quickly recirculated and translated into Turkish blogosphere but most importantly into Erdogan controlled state owned newspapers in Turkey when on the weekend of the September 1955 pogrom events inciting in the Turkish press to go into churches because after all we know where these coup plotters lie so you know it's been very easy for Erdogan to support the autocephaly machine because after all it brings tension and fragmentation in the Orthodox world and ultimately gives him another tool in his own toolbox and finally am I okay on time? Okay and then finally regarding Turkey and the yes the tacit yes let's think about the timing this was the time the eve of the eventual release of Pastor Andrew Brunson Turkey's main focus was on negotiating that release in a manner that both saved face for Erdogan and could be repackaged as a win for Turkey for example lifting Magnitsky sanctions and lifting congressional blocks on the sale of F-35s to Turkey so if there was a message direct or indirect from Washington to Ankara don't hold up this train you know that's an easy decision so that's the end of my brief treatment of the geopolitics and the geopolitical actors and let me say a few things now what does this mean for religious freedom if religious freedom has largely been trumped by the geopolitical imperatives of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and autocephaly what can we do to kind of recalibrate our focus first of all I would say that we need to be reminded that the formation of the new Ukrainian Orthodox Church the mechanics of the process therefore deserve support in terms of peaceful transfer of properties I know we've heard competing arguments about whether there may be civil unrest it's classic provocation 101 on the part of those opposed to this move in the transfer of property so I think being vigilant that there may be provocations associated with property transfers and doing everything to counsel a low level response and to counsel caution and maturity and the response to any provocations the second and to prevent any kind of escalation I think the second point in terms of the fraught process of creating this new church is to keep in mind that there are going to be many challenges for religious freedom for the various communities under the control of Moscow especially in Crimea and then also non-Orthodox and Orthodox elect and then also thinking about whether there may be challenges for those who choose who belong to the Moscow Patriarchate who choose not to go over to the new Ukrainian church ensuring that their own religious freedom rights are respected and here again I think Father Cyril's comment about competitions sometimes a good thing because it teaches everyone to have their A game going and therefore to everybody to behave properly so I think watching that process and trying to step or trying to support trying to support any kind of escalation and potential violence second question about religious freedom I think the single greatest actor as we heard also in the previous panel on behalf of religious freedom has been the Ecumenical Patriarchate the Ecumenical Patriarch has talked in pastoral terms about the decision on auto-assefalian Ukraine freedom of conscience and the healthfulness of the church I know there's been a lot of discussion about a kind of zero sum approach that Moscow's loss is Constantinople's win that doesn't make sense I don't think for a lot of reasons not the least of which is that his entire tenure as Ecumenical Patriarch has been Bartholomew's has been dedicated to the project of orthodoxy unity I was one of four women at the Holy and Great Council in Crete in 2016 so I saw this thing firsthand I was on the delegation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate the decision of Moscow not to go at the 11th hour and to use its leverage to encourage three others Antioch, Georgia and Bulgaria not to go was a real blow to the project of orthodoxy unity and so I believe that the Ecumenical Patriarch does not see this in zero sum terms having said that I think the short term risks for retribution against him and also for religious freedom violations against him and the 1700 Greek orthodox Christians left in Turkey are high and it would be useful to kind of keep a watchful eye on that and then finally the whole question of orthodoxy unity and schism again I think the issue of containment and the issue of the temporary timeline of the rupture is something that will also have religious freedom implications many of the orthodox churches in the Eurasian space all four of the eastern members of the pentarchy live under conditions of profound violation of religious freedom weakness amongst the orthodox churches a whole reinforces weakness amongst those individual churches so I think again that ensuring that this schism is as temporary and as contained as possible is something that's in the interest of the religious freedom community international religious freedom community and whatever they can do to you know ensure that thank you thank you Elizabeth a hard look at the geopolitics of what's behind the conflict as well as the religious dimensions of it and the warning of the need to make sure we're taking account the religious freedom if it's not being looked at now we need to be making sure we're looking at it going forward so thank you for that let me turn to Kent I hope you don't mind I just left my 14 pages of notes on my chair it's been a long day we've heard a lot and I think it'd be a lot better to just perhaps talk to you in light of what we've heard today and what we've heard these last few minutes and I can't resist saying that I'd like to spend some of my time dethroning the drama queen here and taking on these issues one at a time I have a different filter different prism for looking at what's gone on but at this time of day in the conference I much prefer to have somebody like John say some provocative things to get the discussion going it did remind me though of a movie that's out right now which is called goodbye Christopher Robin any of you seen this you know the children's story about Christopher Robin and E.R. and Tigger and all of that most popular children's book of the time it was written by a man in Britain after World War I by the name of Milne he was so traumatized by the trench warfare and the millions and millions of the bloodletting were killed where one was he stands up when he gets back to England one of the few to survive in his generation and he says to this pack group at a social event you know can somebody explain to me why millions and millions of our comrades are buried in Europe because one second rate Hapsburg Prince was killed and in a sense you raising the issue of could autocephaly or something like that a conflict like that could it tip the scales and start a terrible conflict is of course true in history but when you look back on history it isn't that event that caused it that's just the spark and it won't be autocephaly that causes this it will be much deeper problems that I think you have to find by looking at the history of Russian history what I have to address is what are those things that any little spark will touch this off so we're asking the question today what's really going on we've heard two different theories it's sort of out here even on the title of the conference one is we've heard it here on this panel too one is that this is primarily to be understood in geopolitical terms and the other of course what is the religious dimension or is it primarily a departure from religious freedom and pluralism my question would be why in the world would you have to choose between those alternatives why can't it not be both a geopolitical conflict and why may that not also have not just implications for religious freedom but some factors in it which deliberately cut at and strike at pluralism and religious freedom I think they're both there they're both there in spades and I would say also that my own thinking about all of this is shaped by my own background for 30 or 40 years I've worked on Russian history I've taught in the Soviet Union I've taught church-state relations in the Soviet Union and Russia in the year after the Soviet Union collapsed and it's very interesting now to look back when I looked at these materials because I've been working on the Middle East lately not so much on Ukraine and Russia when I reviewed over the last few days in preparation for this it came to mind for me I've seen this movie before I've seen this movie before anybody who knows Russian history knows exactly what all this represents it's just a new manifestation of the situation so let me get at that a little bit and tell you why that is my conclusion if you look at Ukraine all of Ukraine and eastern Ukraine before early 2014 what did you see? to cut to the chase you see a religiously pluralistic situation amazingly good the OSCE took a look at their constitution and said this meets all the criteria some things are a little ambiguous but it meets all the criteria for the international religious freedom agreement that was the situation before Russia intervened invaded the Ukraine and invaded the Donbas fast forward in the 2014 2015, 2016 I've read the reports they're much more gruesome than I even remembered from just watching the headlines I mean it's really been a terrible thing that has happened since then it's been mentioned of course the 10,000 lives that were lost but from the standpoint of religious freedom which is the focus on the dimension for our topic here today it's been catastrophic dealing with the crimes of ISIS over the last few years the torture, the murder the confiscation of church buildings to loot them and to stop the worship there to read the signs that these paramilitary troops put up when they came through there no sex and it wasn't SEX they were talking about SECTS no sex, no protestants they hated the Catholics they didn't want any orthodox that didn't do just what they wanted they were going to create and they said so an orthodox state and they used all the language that Vladimir Putin has been using since 2006 with Rusky Mir and if you read what Putin said in 2006 it's very clear what he was about he said it would be a sin for us in Russia to not realize that what we are about is Belarus and Ukraine we are responsible for them they are us, this is orthodoxy people who invaded in eastern Ukraine they took that in you know, completely and the rhetoric, everything they say it is about ending religious pluralism there there may be a geopolitical context to all of this this is the expansion of Russia after all but it's the it's the expansion of Russian influence but in a particular way in the 2017 the United States international religious freedom context I'll talk to my wife later in that report the first paragraph of the report about Russia said this is the only country in the world that every single year since this report has been getting it's been going out and it's gotten worse and it is exporting the religious intolerance that is growing in Russia to neighboring countries so this has this is obviously geopolitical but it's also a particular kind of geopolitical expansion that leaves no room for religious freedom and its wake now here is, and by the way this business about the goal being an orthodox state in 2014 in an open letter from the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Ecumenical Patriarchate he said this is a religious war he saw it as a religious war now within a year he's taken that off the website and he's talking about it being a civil war and they're using all the disinformation and the misinformation and the propaganda that says we had to act we were being attacked nobody who's looked at the evidence would say that the response to any problems they were having was that nobody believes that we took the letter off the website changed the rhetoric a little he calls for everybody says we're neutral and all this but everybody knows that that's not what the evidence shows on this with respect to what's going on and what the motivation is and what these troops think they are doing now let me now move to why I said that when I studied this a little bit it occurred to me I've seen this movie before and it's because of things that I said today that really acts at this point of course there's the reminder about the 16th century and you know the third Rome there's that that very strong feeling in Russian history I studied that for many many years we all know about it to some extent the Russian world Rusky Mir is a you know a new embodiment of many of the ideas that are there but here are the two points I really want to make what I see when I look at Russian history are two factors when it comes to church-state relations the first factor is the willingness of the state long before Peter the Great it certainly since Peter the Great to utilize religion as a tool in Russian foreign policy I mean there's no question that's been said over and over today the reliance with the Orthodox Church was part of that and being a psychoanalyst about what Putin's religious views may or may not be he certainly sees that as Stalin saw in 1943 the reason to have a rapprochement with the Russian Orthodox Church and re-established the Patriarchate was because he needed support for the great patriotic war so there is this this element in Russian history that goes back a long ways but that's not the whole story the second part of the story is that there's a long history of the church using its alliance with the state to diffuse any religious competition that's there in spades throughout Russian history so it's not just a geopolitical context conflict because that alliance in the move into Ukraine is an opportunity to advance a particular vision of Russian Orthodoxy and I make it very clear this is not the only vision of Russian Orthodoxy but it is a particular vision of Russian Orthodoxy that isn't crazy about competition would like to wipe it out and that's where you get all of this all the areas that the occupation takes place you get the all of the tremendous strikes against religious freedom so what do you have going on here the same thing you have going on in Russian history often the state using religion or the church is a tool to advance its own political agenda and you have the church using the state to advance its agenda which is often not a very ecumenical agenda and you say so where do we go from here in the midst of all this academics and people who love peace often I understand the skepticism about academics and folks who want to say let's write the report and it's going to go away when you deal with naked political aggression I think we all know it's a little trickier than that to put an end to something that's causing tremendous pain and suffering and the demise of pluralism we know that it's complicated what do you do and yet you don't want to go to war John is absolutely right we're sitting on top of something that whenever you try to draw a line and NATO gets active you don't know what's going to happen so it's really tricky even if you know that force is sometimes necessary what do you do so you try all the things you can think of first you have the UN do its reports you turn the matter over to the international criminal courts all those things can be useful it can isolate somebody there's a lot of evidence that doesn't always work people are doing bad things you have to try something you need to do something a lot of people have said this particular war is the unknown or the forgotten war of Europe right now we don't pay a lot of attention to it we're distracted by a lot of things maybe making it more in the public arena would help and put pressure on to stop some of the worst sorts of abuses maybe that would help with respect to the part of the equation it has to do with the Russian Orthodox Church or part of the Russian Orthodox Church being so intolerant not putting, not protesting things that are happening in their sphere people in their name you could ask the question, can you have some kind of a document like Dignitatus Humanae that came out of Vatican II that was a robust, in this case Catholic statement about religious freedom the Catholics had a history of not always being terribly tolerant towards those who were different and yet they evolved into a very magnificent statement on this is there anything quite like that in the Orthodox Church could there be something like that and if it was there would it be more likely that there could be forces there that would say it's okay for there to be pluralism it might even be healthier for the Orthodox Church if there was that kind of pluralism but these are the kinds of things I think we need to look at when we examine what's going on right now learn some lessons from history and ask ourselves the question really pragmatically what can we do that might help the situation because right now the empirical situation is not good and it could get a lot worse and I think people are right to know that all this stuff with autocephaly it could give the Russians the occasion to say somebody's trying to take our wealth these churches aren't going to be given to us so we're going to have to figure out how to diffuse that but we can't just run away from it and say it's just not something we can't do anything about to do something there's a lot of suffering here and it could get a lot worse Kent, thank you I think if the last panel was particularly positive this one is challenging us a bit Kent, thank you for taking frankly what we've been talking about both the geopolitical aspects and the religious freedom and bringing it together and then coming at the end and saying what do we do and how do we go forward so before we go to the audience I just want to kind of put it to the whole panel we've been talking about the impact of the war on religion and on religious freedom we've talked about whether religion is a part of the conflict and what role it plays in furthering the conflict my question is how can religion or religious faith help end the conflict all three of you have talked about the caution about what happens if we don't find a way forward that avoids spinning out of control that avoids the butterfly wing that ricochets across the world in some way we don't know what that impact might be what is the role of the church or faith communities in bringing an end to this conflict or is there an opportunity here question thoughts I think very easily it's a great opportunity for the Orthodox community with some international facilitators to come together and have one of those big ecumenical councils and discuss really the tactical items of autocephaly and the war itself and it could be the solution and to my knowledge that hasn't happened as of yet but if you had Bartholomew in the room with and all these other guys and they all come together and they spend some time noodling over and being honest with what they need to noodle over what's going on here it gives it a chance of them discussing turning things in terms of theology in terms of the geopolitical situation but also the faith communities and how they need to react and interact with the current conflict and the post-conflict it's such a great opportunity I know I'm a doomsday guy but it's such a great opportunity for a faith community to put faith in action and I know that's a term we use here it's such a great opportunity for that to happen and I don't know how that would happen we need some guys here that have much more authority in the church to come to bear but also I think that we would have to be the operational people some of these guys in uniform to spend some time and make sure that what they're talking is actually actionable and realistic Elizabeth? I think that's a great idea that's what the Holy and Great Council is supposed to be about but then you have those four spoilers boycotted but be that as it may that doesn't mean that has to be a one-shot effort I think one of the primary constraints though that we oftentimes forget when we're talking about how Orthodox churches can contribute to this kind of conversation is that most of the, a lot of the key actors don't live they're not free churches and I was glad to see that Patriarch Kedil has a sense of humor after he visited Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on August 29th he gave an interview the next day to the Russian press and said we're the only free church in the Orthodox world but I think we oftentimes I do think as Kent said there's definitely a reflexive relationship between church and state but we should make no category errors Patriarch Kedil of Moscow is in the driver's seat when it comes to that relationship and so I think part of the problem is that the space by which these churches can act independently is relatively limited having said that, again I go back to Constantinople living probably the most precarious of any condition of all these churches and Bartholomew is out there taking the lead I think encouraging the kind of inter-Orthodox conversations you're talking about in the ecclesiastical space is important having very putting things on the table about religious freedom conditions and I also think that in terms of the political space, the political and cultural diplomacy programs that the US government sponsors that other governments sponsored side meetings at the HSTEM, OSCE at the UN at any occasion where it's possible for these church leaders to speak to one another is useful but not just limited to the men in black include those who don't wear the headgear and that means men and women so a more robust ecclesial participation and then finally I would say that we can't look for big changes, we're going to have to see this really incrementally and it's going to be real bricks and mortar and so providing echo chambers for the positives and trying to have a more careful non-doomsday approach to the negatives and then just as a footnote again I think the behavior of the Moscow patriarchy vis-a-vis Constantinople has been just absolutely unjustifiable and horrific but having said that I think the tendency which is easy in the current neocold war geopolitical climate to villainize the Moscow patriarchy and therefore every single Russian Orthodox believer is really not helpful because we have seen that story before and it's called the wars in the Balkans and that didn't turn out well and you know I think we should learn from that kind of essentializing language approach so that we deconstruct these churches because you know what we may hear from the senior most person doesn't necessarily reflect every single person in those institutions so searching for those actors and institutions that have a different perspective and giving them voice is something that I think is really really in both the interest of we're talking us in the interest of the US and you know consistent with the values of the US. One of the dangers in looking at 20th century Russian Orthodoxy and the Soviet Union or Russian is of course to come to the unjustifiable conclusion that there must be something about Russian Orthodoxy that is inherently intolerant or lacking in courage etc the reason a book I wrote about 30 years ago about this I dedicated to Russian bishops and priests the ones that had been taken to the island and the Baltics and executed the ones that wouldn't go along with the new regime and left I mean a lot of them were killed and then the only ones that were allowed to stay were ones in fact that were compromised or felt like they had to live to fight another day but if you don't know the whole story you draw the wrong conclusions but you're absolutely right and John's absolutely right that this is an opportunity that everybody knows that religion can be a negative force in the world we know that but Doug Johnson is right too he was a nuclear sub captain and worked at USIP not USIP the US Institute what is that the Center for International Relations he was the Vice President there and founded this faith based diplomacy stuff he was very adamant that we not forget the fact that religion at its best is frequently the only thing in the political situation forward it's the only place you can find the resources for forgiveness and to move forward in that way we've got to work and we have to pray and we have to believe that that's what our religions are capable of that's what the Orthodox and the Catholics and the Protestants and the Muslims the Jews we have to believe that we at our best can make a positive but we have to work at it and we have to neutralize those in our own groups that are using religion for other purposes or who have a perverse understanding of our faith so this is up to believers to take advantage of the opportunity so that we can make a contribution Kent thank you alright taking questions got two up here and then one in the back so over here first yes in 2020 there's going to be a world expo in 2025 and one of the candidates for the world expo is Ekaterinburg Russia decision will be rendered probably in about a month the question is if the Russian Orthodox Church is looking to have a monocultural control in Russia elsewhere is that something that I guess is that something is the Russian Orthodox Church have any role in trying to get the world expo in 2025 to Russia if knowing full well that the following the other expos I've been to there's been Evangelic Protestant, Mainline Protestant Catholic Islamic Arab, Atheist Communists and LGBT Viewpoints and Bavarians presented at these expos if the rock and Putin looking to have a monocultural control over Russia do you see do you see them trying to think about how to say this are they having is a church having a rock church having any role in trying to get the expo to Ekaterinburg or are they trying it seems like it's contradictory if you want to control a certain culture of your country the best thing you probably want to do is have a cubanical world expo in your country I'm just trying to think whether they if there's any you see what I'm saying, yeah thanks so I appreciated the drawing of an analogy with what sparked World War I but I think that catastrophizing and believe me, as a Ukrainian I know catastrophic thinking because Ukraine lost World War II about three times and same thing happened in World War I and the Holodomor and everything and it just reminds me of the old Soviet anecdote the difference between a Soviet optimist and a Soviet pessimist the Soviet pessimist says oh, things just can't get worse than they are now and the Soviet optimist says oh yes they can so catastrophizing I don't think is that helpful I think we should take things seriously but we shouldn't catastrophize actually all of this that is happening now will happen in the months ahead already happened in western Ukraine in the early 1990s the most generous and part of the Russian Orthodox Church was in western Ukraine the most locations came from western Ukraine and when on December 1st 1989 as Mikhail Gorbachev was walking into the Vatican to get his photo up with the Pope to prove to the world that he's a kinder gentler Bolshevik and Pope John Paul the second said well yeah okay but you got to do something for me and that is decriminalize the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church suddenly the Soviet media says okay from today on the Ukrainian Greco-Catholics can register their parishes and suddenly and nobody knew how many there would be not the CAA not the KGB not the Vatican no one knew and some thought it would be in the tens of thousands some thought it would be in the hundreds of thousands you know how many would move your addictions same stuff that's happening now and what happened well five million people identified themselves as Ukrainian Catholics and the Russian hold on Galicia and western Ukraine their most productive area they lost an enormous amount of churches and what happened there were a few scuffles but there were also local solutions where in some villages the Orthodox and remember there's the Greco-Catholics and now they're all of a sudden two or three Orthodox churches also competing for it so what do they do in some places they decided well we'll share one church and you have a liturgy and then we'll have a liturgy in other places they said ok we're not going to be able to pull that off so one group ended up building another church in that village or town or whatever and it worked out now for 20 well it's almost 30 years now the Moscow Patriarchate has been coveching about how the Ukrainian Catholics destroyed their three western Ukrainian aparchies but no war no explosions and this guy did not fall in let's give the local people some credit that they who actually do have a pluralistic view of religious freedom that they'll be able to work it out ok thank you we have one in the back we were planning to start a religious freedom round table in Ukraine working with the Ukrainians as the leaders in setting it up but I listening to the discussion today I wonder A whether it's possible and B whether we become provocateurs for some of the dastardly things that were raised by some of the speakers here that would occur as a result of pressing for a religious freedom discussion among the various elements of the Ukraine would we be creating a situation where the the ROC decided to take action to prevent this from escalating against them ok great thank you let's get quick comments from the panel and see how much time we have left and see if we can go back for another round I mean I can just you can't underestimate the power of civil society and the local populations I mean I think I deal with Muslim communities all the time and there's a lot of news you don't get because the local communities and civil society handles it so and I deal mostly with one of the most profound questions of our time Islam and security right I just I do think that there's and to talk to Larry's comment I think that the power of civil society and unifying civil society around maybe you wouldn't call it religious freedom I think you'd probably call it human rights and that would probably be a good way to characterize it would be the right move for a round table in the Ukraine of course we have to socialize that with the Ukrainians so that they can make a comment on that I think there's no question that would work the surveys have shown that 75% of the Ukrainian people support religious freedom for all that's what the surveys show we heard today from Ambassador that his experience with the Ukrainians were that they were indeed a moderate group I'll give you an example from a week ago a week ago they had a press conference in Kiev which released a major report and when they released the report present were the representatives of all of the groups except the Russian Orthodox Church Moscow Patriarchate they weren't there but all the other groups Protestant Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses Jews, Muslims, they were all there they all said the same thing and we also heard today if I recall correctly that there were a lot of Russian Orthodox who are connected with the Moscow Patriarchate who actually are favorable to this too now they're in a tough place right now but so I think there's every reason to believe a religious round table would work you've got the equivalent with the Council of Churches is that right now that already exists all Ukrainian Council of Churches I would echo what you've said invite everybody it's like having the slumber party in seventh grade you've got to invite everybody people can choose not to go and be the spoilers but then no one can ever accuse you of not inviting everyone and then you create space for those who really especially from the Moscow Patriarchate who want to be part of it and then it's a calculation on their part On the World Expo I just want to comment there I don't know what role the Church is playing there but Russia has taken on the World Cup the Olympics and so the opportunity to bring people to Russia to showcase what Russia is about is certainly something that they clearly have wanted to do so how that relates to the Church my guess is that you can show that Russia is actually a great place you'll not demonize the Russian Orthodox Church for example so we had a question here and it's a comment about the occasion the opportunities we have there is a unique opportunity to establish three churches in Ukraine one of them under Rome one under Constantinople one of them under Moscow the three Rooms to live together peacefully but of course the question is there's the Moscow Patriarchate who will accept it this is the issue you are saying yes the rock we have to take it seriously so as your question have you ever met a Russian intellectual who accepted who accepted the independence of Ukraine please tell me if you have found it because I have not ever met yet one so unless of course Russia accepts that Ukraine has a right to exist and that these two churches have a right to exist in Ukraine of course there will be a problem but please let's point out where is the real problem great and we have a question back there in the blue important elections are upcoming next year and do you think this topic will be used by politicians and what impact it can have on election results and will this be a topic raised by voters before elections this has been a wonderful panel and a whole wonderful day but we really have not discussed the major problem and the major problem is how do we get the conflict is not Ukrainian conflict it is not a crisis made by Ukrainians it is not an attempt of Ukrainians to export their ideas of their various Kazakhs, kings religions what do we do with Russia and how do we work peacefully with Russia Russia has been spending sending money to the United States to the Ukrainian Orthodox and the Ukrainian Catholic Churches under Pobya Donostsev in the 1980s it is still doing that are we discussing the right country three questions panel go ahead Elizabeth in terms of the both of these questions go together I agree where we may not be discussing the right country I think it's difficult to discuss them separately so the main issue is how do we get the two countries in the same room but I have a more specific question that I'll throw back if we assume that because again we've heard a lot of this conversation that this the autocephaly decision is going to deal a body blow to the soft power of the Putin regime and that may well be true but I don't know I think that the incentives financial all forms of incentives which have been used in order to build a kind of soft power base everywhere from the Balkans to the soft underbelly of the Middle East to to the United States those have been at least two decades in the making and much longer I should just point it out so I'm not sure if that's the case I think we have to watch that carefully and then secondly is what would that mean a weakened Moscow patriarchy for I think the real issue here which is whether or not the Putin regime is willing to play ball according to international standards and I think we've been sort of drawing not a direct line but definitely a heavily dotted line between weaker Moscow patriarchy weakened Putin and I'm not sure if assessment is accurate that doesn't answer your question but it's part of I think your question and I think needs to be examined and also in the short term I think we should anticipate that that could produce real pushback in terms of a kind of defensive response and be prepared for that well the big question always is how do you get a bad ruler to change their positions we all know that sometimes it comes to war and then they lose it'd be interesting if we had some really great examples of strategies that have actually persuaded a bad ruler or a bad government to go in a little different direction we don't have we don't spend enough time asking that question about how to do that short of war knowing that war sometimes comes but I do think I think we have this big question at the Religious Freedom Institute all the time we write all these magnificent things on the values of religious freedom how it promotes human flourishing the economy goes up every measure we know this empirically that free societies religiously free societies are better societies so you make the arguments but if you make those arguments to people whose primary concern is not flourishing societies but something else and something else is a problem you got to figure out how do you how do you neutralize that and academics tend to go this direction we love to do studies and make our arguments for way it should be and how it is we don't spend nearly enough time on trying to figure out how we're going to move the needle dealing with folks who aren't interested in our arguments and I mean short of pulling the trigger too I mean we need a lot more thinking about I don't have a good answer for exactly how to do it here but the problem indeed is how we're going to if your image of yourself is you're not going to have success unless you restore the Russian Empire how do you change that view I mean you've got to address that the short answer is we don't know I mean I agree with you about the Ukraine I don't know a Russian that's ever sort of accepted the Ukraine as it is yeah and I think the conflict that we have right now it's it's ongoing and it's tragic and what's the solution because we're doing conflict monitoring right now and that's not the solution I think it does play a role in the elections I think absolutely there's a nationalistic element to it and it's issue-based and constituency-based mobilization but that's I think the conversation though that we're having is that we need to kind of get a brain trust together and I'm big on having practitioners involved not just the academics not just the government people so forth professionals and bring them all together so that we can actually discuss what would be the how to be solution minded about this and that was part of the presentation that I gave how do we be solution minded I think we do need to be sensitive to Russia I mean I think it's there's well exactly I mean I grew up in upstate New York and there's a Ukraine a very healthy Ukrainian community there all the signs are in Ukraine and there's a deep rooted embedded Ukrainian identity that needs to be respected as well so how do you do that and I think the how yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so I know I agree so we just I think we're at the beginning here and the challenges is that we cut part of the reason why we don't know is we're two weeks away from the decision that Moscow made and the ongoing war is the war is ongoing so I think we just need to now really start to think about what the strategic and tactical elements are associated with the autocephaly and looking at the risks of where it could go folks we're out of time but I so I want to thank the panel for a lively discussion at the end of a long day so thank you very much turn it over to Ken to just make some very quick final comments and I've been in this town for several decades and been to an awful lot of conferences and not just because I was involved in this with USIP and George Washington University I must honestly say that the quality of the discussion was very rich today the wonderful folks that we've had speak really have brought perspectives that have been very very helpful I've learned an enormous amount just being here I was just thinking of some really obvious points I mean it's been pretty clear that what we're talking about here in terms of the Ukraine-Russia conflict that it's both a geopolitical conflict and it is a religious conflict it is quite clear that the consequence of these two conflicts has been on the altar of these geopolitical conflicts religious freedom for the peoples in these lands has been severely compromised and that's just it goes without saying that that is the question and I think it does illustrate that we're going to have to look at history and look into our own hearts to figure out what we can learn about the seeds which produce this and ask the questions as Charles just raised a moment ago about you know where do we go from here to think about a way forward I'll tell you one story right when the Soviet Union collapsed I was in Moscow the day that the flag came down in the Kremlin and I was speaking at Moscow State University and it was a very awkward time for the former communists you know and I was with the delegation one time meeting at the party headquarters for the school that trained the leadership and they were all lined up on one side of the the long table as they always were and this delegation was on the other side these were all communists these were the atheists and now their whole world had collapsed their identity as communists and etc etc and they've been told that they needed to move in a different direction you could just tell they were on edge and angry and so one of them just broke all the protocol there's supposed to be a time of Glossnost and Petostrika he got mad and he stood up and he gave an old-fashioned communist speech and everybody just got so tense it was so terrible and we had translator but I knew Russian so I didn't know what to do I picked up the mic and I spoke to him in Russian I said let me tell you something about myself I fell in love with Russian culture when I was a student reading Brothers Kedermazov I fell so in love with the way Russians thought about theology and philosophy as they expressed not in philosophy books but in literature but I wanted to learn Russian about Russian culture and my wife and I are here for the next seven months I was there on a fulbright because we care about Russian culture all the air just went out of that room and he smiled and we were able to sit down and talk again the Russian identity is very important and John is right about that we talk to anybody and they've got some things you'd like to correct you have to start with something else the Russians had one of the greatest have one of the greatest cultures in history the end of the 19th early 20th century the greatest writers the greatest musicians, the greatest artists the greatest ballet folks they just happened to be Russian Germans changed their names they had Russian names for their resumes so there is tremendous amount here if we can find within that culture and within that literature and within that deal and you can with Alexander Schmayman these great Russian thinkers you can find there what we need to move forward in a very different direction but we have to figure out a way to find it talk about it and if that gets going that will undermine the parts of their culture like any culture which need to be addressed but I want to end with this thank you this man here Charles Charles North dreamed up this with a fellow by the name of Father Deacon Andrew Bennett who unfortunately couldn't be here as you know who would have loved to have been here and he's the one that invited many of you to come and he's stuck in Ottawa today but they're the two to be thanked and USIPs to be tanked and a lot of other folks who have spoken today and for you there's in Russian history there's a story of the old believers you know about the old believers you are the true believers you've stayed to the bitter end so I end with a thank you to you for coming and we'll have to collect and continue to do our work to see if we can make a difference in this situation so God bless you, thanks a lot for coming