In a "major blow to Putin," the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) has formally split itself from Moscow Patriarch Kirill, a key friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
More than 100 Ukrainian churches have rejected the UOC in favor of the Othodox Church Ukraine (OCU), based in Kyiv, which broke away from Moscow in 2019. On Friday, though, the UOC declared "complete independence" from Moscow.In comments on Sunday, Kirill seemed to play down the transfer.
"We fully understand how the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is suffering today," the Russian Orthodox Church's head declared in central Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. He warned that "spirits of evil" were attempting to separate Russia's and Ukraine's Orthodox populations, but that they would fail.
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Nonetheless, former DIA intelligence officer Rebekah Koffler, author of "Putin's Playbook," hailed the move as a "major blow" to Putin.
"This is a major setback for Putin," said Koffler on Fox News Digital on Sunday.
"Kirill and Putin are buds," she said, adding that Putin "has militarized Russian Orthodox church as a geopolitical tool."
"The idea of Putin uniting the Russian world, including Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, is based on the idea that Russia is the center of Christianity and the unique Eurasian civilization that the Russians believe is exceptional, just as Americans believe America is exceptional," Koffler added. "When the church separates, the whole idea of divinity vanishes."
According to the analyst, the newly autonomous UOC joining the OCU was implausible. She did forecast, though, that some UOC parishes would choose to stick with Moscow over the denomination's wishes.
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"They have to balance their parishioners' interests while Russian forces gradually but surely consolidate authority over Eastern and Southern Ukraine, which is Putin's principal purpose at this stage of the war," Koffler stated. "Some priests may decide to stay with Moscow in order to endure a possible new regime if Putin is successful in gaining complete control of Donbas and establishing the so-called 'Novorossiya' (new Russia)."
Putin's military policy, according to Koffler, entails directly striking civilians and civilian infrastructure in order to put pressure on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to cease the suffering.
"As a spiritual person, you can't condone civilian fatalities," she added, regardless of which side you're on or whether you believe Putin's reason for why he's doing it.
"At the end of the day, the separation rips a hole in Putin's narrative that Russians and Ukrainians are spiritually and ethnically one people, and so Ukraine should not exist as a separate country," she concluded.
According to a 2018 poll, 67.3 percent of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians of one kind or another, with 28.7% belonging to the Kyiv-based OCU, 23.4 percent simply "Orthodox," and 12.8 percent belonging to the UOC. Another 7.7% of the population is Christian in general, with 9.4 percent of Ukrainian Byzantine Rite Catholics, 2.2 percent Protestants, 0.8 percent Latin Rite Catholics, 2.5 percent Muslims, and 0.4 percent Judaism. Another 11% said they were neither religious nor affiliated with any religion.
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