Ukraine Is Dangerously Close to a Religious War - Bloomberg

Ukraine Is Dangerously Close to a Religious War - Bloomberg:

For several centuries, since the fall of the Byzantine Empire, Moscow has pretended to the role of a “Third Rome” — a political and religious capital that would unite the Orthodox world, or at least its Slavic part. To that end, in the 17th century, the Russian church subsumed its Ukrainian neighbor. Even after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, most Orthodox believers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus remained united under one spiritual leader, the Patriarch of Moscow. In 2016, Putin inaugurated a colossal statue of St. Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kiev who established Russian Orthodoxy, next to the Kremlin — indicating that Russia aspires to be his true heir.