HMM: Ukraine’s Spiritual Split From Russia Could Trigger a Global Schism. “For Moscow, the crisis is geopolitical as well as religious.”

“This is a victory of good over evil, light over darkness.” That’s how Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described the announcement Thursday that the Orthodox Church’s Istanbul-based leader, Patriarch Bartholomew, will grant Ukraine’s Church independence from Russia.

In televised remarks, Ukraine’s president dubbed this a “historic event,” which it undoubtedly is: For more than three centuries, Ukraine and Russia have been religiously united within the Russian Orthodox Church. It was a union Poroshenko characterized this summer as a “direct threat to the national security of Ukraine,” given his view that the Russian Orthodox Church fully supports Kremlin policy; he said then that it was “absolutely necessary to cut off all the tentacles with which the aggressor country operates inside the body of our state.”

Now, four years after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, Ukraine is asserting its territorial independence by demanding its own national Church. For Russia, the crisis is geopolitical as well as spiritual. The stakes are so high that in order to protest Ukraine’s religious autonomy, Russia may respond harshly enough to trigger a deep schism in the Christian world.

“Little green men” and assassins can’t fix this problem for Putin.