On November 6-7, 2024, the international conference “The Orthodox Church in Estonia – independence: opportunities for development, risks, consequences” was held in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. On the invitation of the organizers of the conference, Sergii Bortnyk, the head of the “Academic Initiative” Foundation, had a speech on the situation in the Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
The reason for the conference was the crisis situation in the state-church relations in Estonia in the context of the support by the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate of the aggressive war against Ukraine. The ban on further residence in the country from February 2024 for the head of the Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Yevgeniy Reshetnikov, was indicative of this confrontation.
The organizers of the conference consciously turned to the experience of Orthodox structures associated with the Moscow Patriarchate in other European countries – the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Archdiocese of Western European parishes of the Russian tradition. Several participants from Germany spoke on the topics related to freedom of conscience and religion – Regina Elsner, Natallia Vasilevich and Nikolay Mitrokhin.
Sergii Bortnyk delivered a report on the division in Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the possibilities of its healing. In particular, he described a geopolitical approach to the problem that considers Ukrainian Orthodoxy an object of external influences. Its alternative can be the current position of the UOC leadership, which can be called “silent preaching”. At the same time, the speaker emphasized that the situation of the crisis of state-church relations and the aggressive war aimed at the destruction of Ukrainian statehood requires nowadays a more active dialogue and flexibility of the UOC for the sake of the public good.
The text of Sergii Bortnyk’s report at this conference can be found here – https://www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/SB-Tallinn.pdf .
