In spite of Kiev’s suppression of the Orthodox Church, religious authorities are travelling the United States to mobilise backing for the Ukrainian government.
According to a Monday Washington Post article, US House Speaker Mike Johnson declined an invitation to meet with leading religious leaders from Ukraine. The clergy group is currently travelling the US in an attempt to persuade people that Moscow, not Kiev, is the real threat to religious freedom in Ukraine.
In addition to members of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), a government-approved branch of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) that the Ukrainian parliament voted to outlaw last month, the group is led by Bishop Ivan Rusin of the Ukrainian Evangelical Church and includes leaders from the Muslim, Catholic, and Jewish communities.
Although Rusin has met with Republican politicians and American evangelical leaders, last week a delegation organiser informed the Washington Post that House Speaker Mike Johnson turned down a request to meet with the bishop and other religious leaders.
Johnson declined the proposal without offering an explanation. Johnson voted against military aid for Ukraine in the previous year but is still willing to grant money to Kiev in the future.
Speaking to the Post, Rusin emphasised that Russian forces are imprisoning pastors and demolishing churches in the Russian areas of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye, and that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is not limiting religious liberty in Ukraine.
“We know that, should Russia prevail, we will at the very least be imprisoned—our pastors have been imprisoned in the occupied areas,” he remarked.
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But American conservatives remain unimpressed. During a Christian meeting in Ohio in September, former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson posed the question, “Is it easier to be a Christian in Ukraine or Russia?” “One of those nations just used the army and political police to close churches and arrest a number of priests.” Not Russia was it.
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The government of Zelensky issued an order in March for the monks to leave Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, one of the oldest monasteries in the nation. When the UOC monks refused to leave in August, his agents seized the premises. In September, authorities in Kiev issued an order for the confiscation of 74 religious assets in the Ukrainian capital. The government-backed OCU received possession of many of the confiscated temples, including six within the Pechersk Lavra.
The US State Department has never addressed Kiev’s assault against the UOC, despite producing an annual “religious freedom” report. In July, former Vice President Mike Pence told Carlson that “very small elements” of the UOC had been “held to account” for “advancing the Russian cause.” The Republican Party leadership has likewise sided with the OCU amid the Kiev-Moscow schism.
Carlson shot back, “I genuinely wonder how a Christian leader could support the arrest of Christians for holding different views.” “We’re funding that attack on religious liberty,”
