Moscow Patriarchate Acts as If the USSR Still Existed, Creating Unnecessary Problems for Itself and the Kremlin, Religious Affairs Specialist Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 26 – There have been some significant personnel changes in the hierarchy of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department for External Church Relations which manages ties with Orthodox communities outside the Russian Federation and serves as the foreign policy arm of the Russian church.          

            The current patriarch and most of his predecessors sprung from this body, and it is out of it that key ideas which define the Moscow Patriarchate’s thinking about the proper relationship between Moscow and the former Soviet republics, Anastasiya Koskello, a graduate student at the Institute of Europe, says (ng.ru/kartblansh/2026-04-26/3_9483_kb.html).

            These ideas, which the scholar says can be summed up under the notion that “we must live as if the collapse of the USSR never occurred” and include the idea of “canonical territory” which does not exist in canon law. Instead, it was dreamed up by the External Relations Department to justify claims of exclusivity across the former Soviet space.

            Because of the way Moscow has acted on the basis of these ideas, the ROC MP has created problems for itself and for the Kremlin that could have been avoided had the church diplomats performed more “diplomatically.” And now there are signs that it may be taken even more directly under the state than has been the case.

            According to Kostello, the Department “in its current form faces either abolition or comprehensive reform for one simple reason: its diplomatic apparatus proved professionally incapable of navigating the post-Soviet era effectively.” It has lost Ukraine and is leading other republics whose Orthodox never thought about breaking with Moscow to do just that.

            There is already on the horizon a group of experts who are ready to take over or at least play a much larger role in the Department: The Higher School of Economics has created a new master’s program entitled “Religious Diplomacy in the Modern World” whose first students are to be admitted this year,

            Prospective students, Koskello continues, have been promised employment as “international relations specialists within religious organizations, including their offices outside the Russian Federation.” That is a clear attack on the Moscow Patriarchate’s diplomacy and would have been unthinkable as recently as two years ago.

            Patriarch Kirill can be counted on to resist the injection of such people into his foreign relations body, but he has been so weakened by failures in Ukraine and elsewhere that he may not be able to do so successfully. And if he fails, more than just the External Relations Department of the ROC MP will be changed. Instead, the entire hierarchy will as well.