Critics say Kyiv is attacking religious freedom in its efforts to break the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s ties with Moscow. Ukraine says it’s acting in self-defense.
By Catherine Belton and David L. Stern
September 6, 2024
The Washington Post
When JD Vance became the Republican nominee for vice president, a speech he gave in April condemning the Ukrainian government for what he claimed was an “assault on traditional Christian communities” became a rallying cry for lobbyists hired by a lawyer of an ally of the Russian Orthodox patriarch. “We commend Vance for taking a strong position on this issue and urge you to follow suit,” said a July 17 email sent to lawmakers on Capitol Hill by one of the lobbyists.
The email was just one of dozens in a campaign portraying Kyiv as anti-Christian that six congressional staffers say is aimed at undermining military support for Ukraine — an effort that is set to intensify after the Ukrainian parliament passed a law on Aug. 20 that bans religious organizations with ties to Russia. The legislation establishes a legal framework that, according to religious experts, could effectively close down the Ukrainian branch of the Orthodox Church connected to Moscow.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, or UOC-MP, has deep historical ties to the Russian Orthodox Church, which many U.S. and Ukrainian officials say has been an instrument of Russian foreign policy. The war has brought the church’s deep sympathy for Russia into stark relief, and Ukraine has launched criminal proceedings against dozens of UOC clergymen for allegedly assisting Russia, including collecting intelligence on the Ukrainian military and on the movement of weapons, according to Ukraine’s Security Service.
A key element of communications between the lobbyists and lawmakers was the suggestion that the lawmakers should make further aid to Ukraine conditional on preserving the UOC, according to three Republican congressional staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Vance had made the connection explicit in his speech. “That will be our shame for refusing to use the hundreds of billions of dollars that we send to Ukraine as leverage to ensure and guarantee real religious freedom,” he said. Asked about those remarks, a spokesperson for the senator said that Vance “has made clear he is concerned by the persecution of Christian communities anywhere in the world.”
The government of President Volodymyr Zelensky has said it merely wants to see an independent Orthodox Church in Ukraine, one that is not beholden to a government and hierarchy in Moscow that is trying to destroy the Ukrainian state.
But the law has drawn criticism both from the pope, who said last month that he felt “concerned about the freedom of those who pray,” and from the Kremlin, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov
saying last week that the law was “a blatant attack on religious freedom, an attack on the Orthodox Church and, in general, an attack on Christianity, on real Christianity.”
Leading the campaign in the United States against Kyiv’s efforts to create what it says is a Ukrainian Orthodox Church free of Moscow’s influence is Robert Amsterdam, a Canadian American attorney whose firm has offices in Washington and London.
Amsterdam claimed in an interview, without providing evidence, that Ukraine’s Security Service is “torturing” Ukrainian Orthodox priests for speaking Russian. There hasn’t been anything like this “since the Nazis,” he said.
Amsterdam’s arguments about Ukraine were similar to a propaganda campaign laid out by Kremlin political strategists in internal 2023 Kremlin documents, part of a cache obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The campaign called for portraying Ukraine as having “turned into an anti-Christian society,” while those in Zelensky’s administration were to be portrayed as behaving like “Nazis” in their efforts to subdue the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
Amsterdam, who was brought in to work on the issue by Vadim Novinsky, a Russian Ukrainian tycoon with close ties to the top leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, says he is focused solely on the issue of religious freedom, not Moscow’s agenda. “You can’t ban a church. It’s completely contrary to the rule of law,” he said. “I never got involved in funding arguments. I never spoke against Ukraine.” In the emails to lawmakers, while condemning Ukraine for what they said was the “persecution of Ukrainian Christians,” the lobbyists have spoken of their “steadfast support” for Ukraine “against Russian aggression.” Amsterdam said part of his work for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was financed by Novinsky, but he declined to specify who else was financing him.
Ukrainian institutions and Ukrainian evangelical and Baptist leaders have responded with their own lobbying effort to influence U.S. lawmakers and the Republican base. They point to Russia’s actions oppressing Protestants and other faiths outside the Russian Orthodox sphere in the occupied territories.
Pavlo Unguryan, a Ukrainian evangelical leader, met with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on several occasions earlier this year, while evangelical and Baptist chaplains have provided witness testimony about Russia’s closure of Christian churches outside the Russian Orthodox faith in the territories it has seized in Ukraine. They also provided documentation on the killing and jailing of evangelical and Baptist priests there, as well as the jailing and torture of Catholic priests. A spokesperson for Johnson did not respond to a request for comment. In a public Q&A at the Hudson Institute on July 8, Johnson spoke of how he met “multiple times” with Ukrainian religious leaders and pastors and said Russia had targeted them “specifically.”
Congressional staffers interviewed by The Post said they are nonetheless concerned by the degree to which Amsterdam’s campaign has influenced views among the Republican Party base, especially after Tucker Carlson aired interviews with Amsterdam about the issue, first in October 2023 and then again in April of this year.
Moscow or Constantinople
The Trump administration actively encouraged the Orthodox community in Ukraine to break with Moscow, according to two U.S. officials involved in the process. Concerns had emerged after 2014 about the role played by elements of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in assisting Russia in the illegal annexation of Crimea and the occupation of eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists.
As a result in part of efforts spearheaded by the State Department under Mike Pompeo, the Ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, the most senior in the Eastern Orthodox Church, granted autocephaly, or autonomy from the Moscow hierarchy, to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in 2019. That created a church that would come under the authority of Constantinople — a historic name that Orthodox believers use for Istanbul — rather than Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin bitterly opposed the move, but at the same time, the original Ukrainian Orthodox Church, with its connections to Russia, continued to exist. Under the newly elected Zelensky administration, individual parishes were given the right to choose which church they wanted to join — the one under Moscow or the OCU under Constantinople. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, it became clear that these measures were not enough, officials in Kyiv said. “People understood [the UOC] was a fifth column of the Kremlin,” said Orysia Lutsevych, deputy director of the Russia and Eurasia program at Chatham House, a think tank in London.
Metropolitan Kliment, a spokesperson for the UOC, denied this, saying the fifth column was made up of “those who divide Ukrainian society into right and wrong citizens.”
The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, praised the Russian invasion as part of a “holy war” and said Russian soldiers killed in the war would immediately go to heaven. In an attempt to officially distance the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, its head, Metropolitan Onufriy, said three months after the invasion that the church was severing relations with Moscow and that its priests would no longer mention Kirill in public prayers.
An expert report commissioned by the Ukrainian government, however, found the measures were cosmetic and that critical canonical connections continued. “Essentially, all the decisions made by Onufriy are reversible,” said Cyril Hovorun, a former chief of staff to Kirill. Hovorun was defrocked by the Moscow patriarch in January after he took part in a liturgy with a Bishop from the church under Constantinople. “In case Putin wins the war, then everything can be restored to how it was.”
In addition, 26 UOC clergymen have already been convicted of assisting Russia, the Ukrainian Security Service said, and another 50 have been notified they are under investigation, officials said. In one instance, a priest in Bucha, the small town outside of Kyiv known for the atrocities committed by Russian troops during several weeks of occupation, was found to have assisted Russian troops in identifying locals likely to resist.
Amsterdam said UOC priests and bishops are being charged and arrested merely for “saying anything that sounds like something Putin might have said.” He raised the example of Metropolitan Theodosy, a bishop under house arrest for a series of lectures at the Theological Academy in Kyiv in which he laid out the ecclesiastical position of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.
The authorities in Kyiv said the bishop “incited inter-confessional hatred” and had also sought to create a website under the emblem of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In interviews, and in videos posted on a website called savetheuoc.com, Amsterdam has claimed that Ukrainian authorities’ “persecution” of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has led to the forced closure of 1,500 Ukrainian Orthodox churches.
Religious experts, however, say many of the congregations moved voluntarily to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the one independent from Moscow, in protest after the invasion, with over 2,000 former UOC congregations joining the OCU in the past two years, according to Lauren Homer, president of Law and Liberty International, a D.C.-based religious freedom advocacy group.
‘God’s grace’
From his office in London’s upscale Belgravia, Amsterdam portrays himself as defending religious freedom amid a mainstream Western discourse in which “it is dangerous to be thought of as anything other than aggressively Russophobic.” Amsterdam also claims he is an enemy of the Putin regime, banned from Russia because of his high-profile work in the early 2000s defending Kremlin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Documents reviewed by The Post show that in mid-2023, Amsterdam was discussing a $1 million annual contract to work for a powerful Kremlin-linked lobbying group, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs (RSPP), against Western sanctions imposed on Russia. The RSPP was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury on Aug. 11, 2023. “Amsterdam & Partners is ready to represent Russian business in the procedure of contesting sanctions, initiating a broad public discussion about the sanctions policy of Great Britain,” states a June 28, 2023, memo by the RSPP, which was obtained by the European intelligence service. “The lawyers are ready to take on the reputational risks and public disapproval inevitably connected with active criticism of the sanctions.”
Amsterdam said he doesn’t represent the RSPP and didn’t sign the contract because they could not agree on the conditions. He said he refused to contest sectoral sanctions connected to Russian technology and the military because he was against Russia’s war, but added that he was ready to campaign against sanctions imposed on individuals who, he claimed, had been “wrongfully targeted solely on the basis of wealth.” The RSPP declined to comment.
Soon after his discussion with the RSPP, on Aug. 22, 2023, Amsterdam said that he was hired by Novinsky, the Russian Ukrainian oligarch, first to represent him over sanctions imposed by the Ukrainian government, a role that has expanded to include Amsterdam’s work on the Orthodox Church.
Novinsky made his fortune in the oil trade in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, together with a close associate of Putin’s. He later expanded his business into Ukraine, becoming a citizen of that country and a prominent supporter of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. He was often seen alongside Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, during the patriarch’s official visits to Ukraine and during Novinsky’s visits to Russia, reports and photographs show. Amsterdam said Novinsky would not comment for this article.
To lead the campaign on Capitol Hill, Amsterdam hired the law firm of Nelson Mullins and its senior policy adviser Ron Klink, a former Pennsylvania congressman, according to filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and emails to congressional staffers seen by The Post, and William Burke-White, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former adviser to the State Department during the Obama administration, according to filings under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Amsterdam also took part in some of the meetings with the staffers of lawmakers, according to interviews with congressional staffers.
Amsterdam initially said his firm did not register its work under FARA because of an exemption in the law for representation of religious organizations. One lawyer specializing in FARA law said the exemption extended only to purely religious activities. “The exemption generally does not apply unless your activities are purely religious and do not also involve what the law calls political activities. The definition of political activity includes any attempt to influence the U.S. government with reference to U.S. policy or to influence any segment of the U.S. public with reference to the public or political interests of any foreign nation,” said Joshua Ian Rosenstein, a partner at the Sandler Reiff law firm, which specializes in FARA and other lobbying-registration questions. “I think they would have an uphill battle demonstrating it is purely religious and non-political as defined by the law.”
Amsterdam’s law firm later told The Post that the firm’s work was also covered by separate FARA exemptions for representing clients in legal proceedings and engaging in “activities not serving predominantly a foreign interest.”
Rosenstein said the validity of these exemption claims would depend largely on the specifics of the engagement, such as the “content and messaging of the lobbying activities” and the extent to which the activities are directed by a foreign government. “All of those are factual questions,” he said.
Amsterdam maintains that the firm’s work is strictly limited to protecting religious freedom. “We have never spoken out against Ukraine on any other issue,” he said. “Our firm’s representation is compliant with all relevant laws.” A spokesperson for Nelson Mullins said the firm did not comment on clients.
Burke-White registered under FARA as acting for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and in an initial filing dated Nov. 5, said he was paid $7,000 by Amsterdam’s law firm to make contact with senators including Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), as well as with the White House, staff members with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom. He said in an email that $7,000 was the total he earned for that period and added: “Banning a church outright through legislative acts and, thereby, denying individuals from worshiping in the church of their choice simply cannot be reconciled with international human rights obligations and the freedom of
religion.” In a later filing on May 31, Burke-White said he was terminating his registration due to the religious exemption, the legal exemption and the waiver for activities not directed by or directly promoting the interests of a foreign government.
In response to some of the criticism of the law, a Ukrainian government commission will first determine whether the UOC is affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church before it can make a legal filing that could effectively close the church down. It also grants the UOC a nine-month grace period in which it can choose to fully sever relations with Moscow.
Some UOC parishioners, however, say they could not join a church under Constantinople that they view as “schismatic” and created as a political project, fearing they would not remain in “God’s grace.” “We can’t join with the thieves who have betrayed canonical law,” said one UOC supporter, Nikolai Moisiienko, in an interview.
Ukraine, in the meantime, has been ramping up its efforts to court American Christians, with Kyiv Global Outreach, a non-profit organization affiliated with the Kyiv School of Economics, hiring the Washington PR firm DCI Group and contracting it to spend $3.6 million on outreach throughout 2024, FARA filings show. Gary Marx, a prominent evangelical and Republican strategist who was hired by DCI, has dispatched Ukrainian evangelicals to present their case across the United States, speaking at the Republican National Convention, the National Association of Christian Lawmakers and the Southern Baptist Convention. “The pendulum is starting to swing back,” Marx said in an interview. “Those voices that had started to buy into the Russian narratives are realizing they are not on the winning side of that argument.”
Catherine Belton is an international investigative reporter for The Washington Post, reporting on Russia. She is the author of “Putin’s People,” a New York Times Critics’ Book of 2020 and a book of the year for the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Belton has worked for Reuters and the Financial Times.follow on X @CatherineBelton
David L. Stern has worked for news outlets in Russia, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia. He has lived in Ukraine since 2009, covering the 2014 Maidan revolution, war in the country’s east and now Russia’s 2022 invasion.follow on X @loydstern