As Ukraine’s defense falters amid wavering commitment in Washington, the country’s defenders depict its fight as a front-line defense for the rules-based order. If Ukraine falls, the logic goes, so too does the liberal order. Such concerns are valid. Russian President Vladimir Putin makes little secret of his disdain for liberalism and his desire to reconstitute the Soviet empire.
Ukrainians fight for not only democracy and political freedom but also religious freedom. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was born Jewish. Ukrainian Minister of Defense Rustem Umerov is a Muslim. Other Cabinet members and army leaders are Ukrainian Orthodox or Catholic. In Kyiv and across Ukraine, there is separation of religion and state.
Contrast that with Russia. The chief difference between Putin’s vision as a KGB agent and as Russia’s president is consideration of the Russian Orthodox Church. Whereas his Soviet paymasters professed atheism, Putin simply co-opted the church.
He pushed for its unification with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, founded a century ago to ensure ecclesiastical independence after the Bolshevik evisceration of Russian institutions. Putin used the reconstituted institution to launder and endorse dictatorial state policies. For the Russian Orthodox Church; its subsidiary, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate; or any registered or unregistered lobbyist to suggest that Putin or his rubber-stamp church represent anything other than a corruption of religious freedom is backward.
Unlike Ukraine’s Cabinet, where ministers shape policy, Putin’s is for show. Still, Putin’s ministers embrace Russian Orthodoxy to prove their loyalty. Indeed, when nationalists criticized President Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, Medvedev assured them he was Orthodox and that rumors of Jewish blood were calumny. Likewise, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu rebutted rumors of Buddhist or shamanist heritage by referencing his baptism at age five into Russian Orthodoxy.
Enter Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer whom Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan once hired to conduct lawfare against his political opponents. Today, Amsterdam represents Moscow’s puppet in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and bashes religious freedom in Ukraine to delegitimize the elected Ukrainian government.
Amsterdam’s argument? Because of laws countering Kremlin interference in religion, Ukraine represses rather than protects religious freedom. It is a falsehood Tucker Carlson also embraces. For Amsterdam to claim the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is independent of Moscow is like saying South Ossetia, Abkhazia, or the Donetsk People’s Republic are not Kremlin proxies.
Amsterdam also represents Vadym Novynskyi, whom he calls a “Ukrainian religious figure” but in reality is a Russian oligarch. While Novynskyi acquired Ukrainian citizenship in 2012 at age 45, he did so to support Russia’s platform from within Ukraine’s then-pro-Kremlin government. Indeed, Forbes called Amsterdam’s client “one of Ukraine’s most Putin-friendly billionaires.”
While Ukraine’s actions against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church may appear on their face to be a violation of religious freedom, such an assessment would be naive. Having fled Ukraine, Novynskyi is now a deacon of a Moscow-affiliated Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Switzerland. In that church and in other Moscow Patriarch churches, congregants bless Patriarch Kirill, “Patriarch of Moscow and all Rus.” Kirill promises Russian soldiers that God will wash their sins away if they die fighting Ukraine.
That is not religion — it is heresy. To suggest Kirill’s bastardization of Orthodoxy is religion is akin to suggesting that the Islamic State’s diktats against Yezidis also deserve religious freedom protections. Indeed, Pope Francis, a leader in Catholic-Orthodox reconciliation, called Kirill “Putin’s altar boy.” Then again, perhaps Amsterdam believes Francis also stands against religious freedom.
It is page one from the dictator’s playbook: Create moral equivalence between independent Western institutions and autocratic surrogates. Naive Westerners project liberal principles onto the corrupt and cynical. Equally naive would be acceptance of the claim that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church broke ties with Russia, a falsehood lobbyists peddle.
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The West should not fall for the Kremlin-manufactured calumny that Ukraine is a religious freedom violator undeserving of Western support. Cutting Moscow’s control over the Ukrainian Orthodox Church does not shutter the congregations, rather, it unshackles them.
Members of Congress can debate weaponry for Ukraine, but they should do so with open eyes: Ukraine’s fight is not a selfish one, but will shape 21st-century religious freedom norms.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.