ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the most painful religious and political problem facing Ukraine at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries has been the issue of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the associated schism in the ranks of Orthodox Christians. Neither the state nor society could have been prepared for such large-scale internal migration; Ukraine enjoyed a surprisingly long peaceful period between the Second World War and 2014. The revolution powerfully challenged the Orthodox Churches in Ukraine with moral, political and identity dilemmas. The concept of a ‘Russian World’, an ‘imagined community’ based on Russian language, culture and Orthodoxy categorically denied the very foundation of the Ukrainian nation-building project. The resolution was the first international document designating the Russian Federation as an occupying power and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol as a temporarily occupied territory.
