After His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) in January 2019, the Moscow Patriarchate severed communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate and began efforts to undermine the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s unique status among the Orthodox Patriarchates, attempting to supplant it as the Church with the unique responsibility, which the Ecumenical Councils granted to the Church of Constantinople, to settle disputes among the Churches and to grant autocephaly to Churches as needed.
A key element of these efforts is the Russian state’s employment of Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) to spread negative and false information about the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The East Stratcom Task Force, “a team of experts with a background mainly in communications, journalism, social sciences and Russian studies” and who are part of the European Union’s diplomatic service, emphasize that “Russia’s disinformation campaigns are not a loose collection of random lies; they are the product of a carefully engineered system.”
This system includes not only propagandists who are featured on Russia’s state-funded TV channels, but also “websites, blogs, social media accounts, influencers, and pseudo-commentators.” These mouthpieces of the Russian state “amplify, contradict, mock, spin, question, and confuse – all in the pursuit of the Kremlin’s broader goal of dominating the information space.”
One of the chief among these, oddly enough, has been Moscow Patriarch Kirill. In a serious departure from Orthodox tradition in April 2026, Kirill, speaking at the building of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and standing next to Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov, an uncanonical attack on the special responsibilities of the Ecumenical Patriarchate within the Holy Orthodox Church.
Inter-Orthodox relations, said Kirill, are “currently being tested in terms of their adherence to the canonical order of the Church.” He added that “a teaching alien to Orthodoxy is being imposed externally, concerning special authoritative powers of the Patriarch of Constantinople.” He claimed that this allegedly alien teaching had formed “the basis for the intervention of the Phanar in the ecclesiastical life of Ukraine, contributing to a prolonged crisis in inter-Orthodox relations.”
The teaching he claimed to be alien to Orthodoxy was the idea that the Ecumenical Patriarchate had the responsibilities to resolve disputes. “Any attempts,” Kirill said, “to present one of our brothers as having special authority over the entire Orthodox oikumene are sinful from the point of view of violating church laws.”
This is a flagrant denial of the established canonical procedure of the Church. The Holy Mother Church of Constantinople exercises a responsibility that was bestowed upon her under the guidance of the Holy Spirit at the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which was held in Chalcedon in 451. The Council decreed: “If a bishop or cleric has a disagreement with the metropolitan of the province, let him appeal to the Exarch of the Metropolis, or to the throne of the Imperial City of Constantinople, and let him be tried there.”
The Ecumenical Patriarchate, as the First See of the Orthodox Church, also has the responsibility to grant autocephaly (independence) to national Churches when it is no longer appropriate for a particular Church to be under the authority of another. The Ecumenical Patriarchate has granted autocephaly to the Orthodox Churches of Russia (1589 and 1917), Serbia (1920), Romania (1925), Bulgaria (1961), Georgia (1990), Greece (1850), Poland (1924), Albania (1937), and the Czech Lands and Slovakia (1998). Most recently, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew exercised this authority in granting autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine in January 2019.
Patriarch Kirill also decried what he said was “discrimination against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church” (under Metropolitan Onuphry), and claimed that “pressure from the Ukrainian authorities has taken on the character of open religious persecution.” The reality is exactly the opposite, as the June 15, 2026 Russian drone strike on Kyiv’s Dormition Cathedral illustrates. The canonical Orthodox Church in Ukraine is facing increasing pressure and persecution in areas of Ukraine that Russia controls as a result of its unjust, unprovoked, and fratricidal war in Ukraine.
Patriarch Kirill’s remarks, significantly, received considerable attention in Russia’s state-owned news agency, TASS. Even more significantly, and underscoring how these attacks serve the agenda of the Russian state, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), not the Moscow Patriarchate, published an earlier scathing attack on His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on January 12, 2026, calling him an “antichrist in a cassock” and “devil in the flesh.”
The statement accused His All-Holiness of having “dismembered Orthodox Ukraine” for ending the schism there and granting autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and of a plan for “ousting Russian Orthodoxy from the territory of the Baltic states.” The SVR railed against the Ecumenical Patriarch in the most indecorous terms, referring to his “evil eye” and claiming that he is “mired in the mortal sin of schism.”
Yet the Moscow Patriarchate is the real schismatic. The Foreign Policy Research Institute reports that in violation of canonical order, “in Africa, Moscow has built a new Patriarchal Exarchate since 2021, establishing over 350 parishes across 32 countries. The official purpose is to serve Orthodox believers who allegedly felt ‘abandoned’ by the Patriarchate of Alexandria after it recognized the independence of the OCU. Yet Ukrainian intelligence reports describe the project as a hybrid influence operation, blending religious diplomacy, propaganda, and soft-power projection under the guise of pastoral care.”
Spravdi, a center dedicated to exposing and countering Russian disinformation, notes that Russia’s attack on the Ecumenical Patriarch quickly spread far and wide: “Within a week from the start of the operation,” that is, of the publication of the SVR’s statement, “monitoring tools detected over 1,800 publications mentioning the SVR statement.”
That is a chilling example of how the Russian state is weaponizing FIMI against the Ecumenical Patriarchate. All these efforts are designed to disrupt the unity of the Orthodox Church and weaken and ultimately destroy our Holy Mother Church of Constantinople, so as to further Russia’s global political ambitions. The Archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and all those who love and support the Holy Mother Church of Constantinople do not have the sophisticated propaganda tools that are at the disposal of the Russian state, but we do have something even more powerful on our side: the truth.
