Moscow Patriarchate and Christianity More Generally Losing ‘Commanding Heights’ in South Caucasus to Islam, Moscow Scholar Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 9 – For the last three decades, Anastasiya Koskello, says, the Moscow Patriarchate “has steered political processes in the Caucasus through key allies, the Armenian and Georgian churches as well as via its own branches, the Baku and Yerevan dioceses, and church structures in Abkhazia and South Ossetia that are de facto linked to Moscow.”

            But that system, the Moscow Institute of European Studies graduate student says, which “allowed officials to act as if the collapse of the USSR had never happened has now collapsed across the South Caucasus and ceded the influence of Christianity on politics there to Islam (ng.ru/ng_religii/2026-06-09/7_9513_christianity.html).

            The death of longtime Georgian Patriarch Iliya last month, the defeat of pro-Russian political forces in Armenia this week, and tensions between Moscow and Baku mean that the Russian church can no longer act with the effectiveness it did earlier, something that affects both the church itself and Russian policy more generally.

            This weakening of Moscow’s position via the Armenian and Georgian Orthodox churches is already clear, Koskello says; what is now increasingly “in doubt is the position of the ROC MP’s dioceses in Yerevan and Baku where the governments view them as ‘organizations’ controlled from abroad.’”

            As a result, the Moscow scholar says, “it is possible that in the foreseeable future, they will face the same fate as the Estonian Church of the Moscow Patriarchate” and be ordered by the courts to change their subordination from Moscow to the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Turkey.

            That is especially likely in Azerbaijan where Russian Patriarch Kirill has offended local officials by his insistence that he does not need to seek a compromise but can continue to act as he has in the past, a position that has only made Baku increasingly angry.

According to Koskello, “the fate of the unrecognized church structures in Sukhumi and Tskhinvali also hangs in the balance: local elites have grown weary of the long-standing ecclesiastical games played between Russia and Georgia, and of their attempts to turn Abkhaz and Ossetian Orthodoxy into a bargaining chip.”

“In religious terms,” Koskello says, “the outcome of all these processes is the same: a weakening of the position held by all forms of Christianity in the South Caucasus,” something that has opened the door to the near certainty that “Muslim Azerbaijan is destined to become the leading political force in the coming decades.”

Indeed, she concludes, “the influence of Islam is growing in every single South Caucasian republic, including even in South Ossetia where historically not a single mosque had ever existed. And that in turn further serves to strengthen the influence of the Turkish-Azerbaijani bloc in the region.”