«We will not cast pearls before you, Muscovite swine. You are a powerless biomass. We will not only take this church from you, but we will also take everything. We will kick you out from our land and from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra.»

-Greek Catholic priest Nikolai Medinsky, Kolomyia, Ivano-Frankovsk oblast, Ukraine, October 27, 2017. He made this statement following the capture and an attempt to expel the Orthodox from the Annunciation church built more than 100 years prior to the establishment of the Greek Catholic Church in Galicia.

In 2023, the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, an important historic site for Orthodox Christianity, is under siege by the Ukrainian government. Its Metropolitan Pavel has been charged with “inciting religious hatred” and placed under house arrest. Yet the state’s persecution of the canonical Orthodox Church is the culmination of the brewing clash involving politics and identity since the establishment of independent Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its causes are far more complex and go back centuries when the Ukrainian territory was part of multiple states (Russia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire).

Indeed, when the new Ukrainian state emerged in 1991, it was based on two conflicting identities of the western minority and the eastern and southern majority, respectively. These identities were part of different geopolitical entities for centuries, in which culture, language, and religion played a key role. This is not to say that new states cannot be successfully formed, or that different identities within them cannot coexist. But the latter requires state mechanisms to facilitate such coexistence such as federalization and recognizing more than one state language.

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