In November 2025, the German publishing house Evangelische Verlagsanstalt (Leipzig) released a set of articles called A Just Peace Examined: Texts on the Contemporary Search for Evangelical Peace Ethics. It is important to note that this book was published together with the Memorandum of the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, “The World in Turmoil: A Just Peace in Perspective: Evangelical Peace Ethics Facing New Challenges.” This memorandum replaced the significantly more pacifist vision of the ECG leadership in a similar document published in 2007, and the articles by the collection’s authors exerted a significant influence on the Evangelical Church’s new concept.
Ukrainian theologians contributed to the book with an article by Prof. Sergii Bortnyk and Rev. Dr. Andrii Shymanovych entitled “Peace in Ukraine: Opportunities and Limitations of the Church’s Contribution.” In their text, the Ukrainian scholars outlined two main narrative lines:
(1) forms of response by Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant communities in Ukraine to the outbreak of full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war in February 2022;
(2) possible ways of finding paths to sustainable interfaith peace in Ukraine, taking into account military challenges.
In the first section, dealing with inter-jurisdictional relations within Ukrainian Orthodoxy, the authors analyse the most important turning points of 2022–2024 and their social consequences:
– A strong reaction of condemnation from the Primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), Metropolitan Onufriy, regarding the start of a full-scale war, which he declared early in the morning on 24 February 2022.
– The discrediting of the UOC and its believers in the Ukrainian media, which began at the end of 2022 and has been intensifying ever since, aimed at marginalising and stigmatising a significant part of Ukrainian society based on religious affiliation.
– Numerous violent seizures of UOC church buildings, usually accompanied by beatings of hierarchs, clergy, and believers, often accompanied by legally questionable methods of re-registering UOC church buildings in favour of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
– Acceptance by Ukraine’s Parliament of Law 3894-IX “On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Sphere of Religious Organisations.” The authors express reservations about the implementation of this law, given that it contains certain elements that violate the principle of separation of church and state enshrined in Article 35 of Ukraine’s Constitution.
– Consensus support for the aforementioned law by members of the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations, and the Council’s unwillingness to take into account the position of the UOC on this issue to any extent.
The article also examines in detail the reaction to the full-scale war in Ukraine on the part of the Catholic and Protestant communities of Ukraine.
In the concluding part of the article, the authors state that one of the main obstacles to the consolidation of Ukrainians is the lack of honest and transparent communication between state authorities and many segments of Ukrainian society regarding the range of existing social problems – from arbitrary interference by the authorities into the religious life of citizens to the problematic implementation of mobilisation and demotivating corruption scandals at the highest state level. An important point made by Ukrainian researchers is that there is a clear distinction between uncritical loyalty to the state and the authorities and sympathetic solidarity with the country and its people.
Citing figures from sociological studies, the authors argue that the lack of positive communication between Orthodox jurisdictions leads to the secularisation of society. Instead of defending the predominantly corporate interests of their structures, they call on churches to actualise the foundational philosophical category of the common good, which has the potential to unite Ukrainian society.
You can read an extended summary of this publication on our website: https://www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/just-peace.pdf (in Ukrainian)
Please visit our website to read the original German version of this article: https://www.academic-initiative.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Friede-in-der-Ukraine.pdf
