“The Ukrainian Schismatic Church”, “The Phantom of the Kyiv Patriarchate”, “The so-called ‘New Church’ of Ukraine” – in the wake of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church declaring autonomy in 2019, this is how Crimea’s leading media outlets describe the Church’s branch on the peninsula.
The head of the church, Archbishop Kliment of Simferopol and Crimea, has been called “the leader of the Ukrainian Schismatics in Crimea” and “the self-styled Archbishop”. Some media outlets particularly hostile to the church accuse it of Nazism and incitement to violence. Crimean government websites, meanwhile, print “pure facts”, claiming that followers of the Church “gave their blessings for the murders” in central Kyiv during the 2014 Euromaidan revolution.
More than five years since the annexation of Crimea, the peninsula’s Ukrainian Orthodox diocese is now the only public institution which links Crimean residents to mainland Ukraine. But systemic pressure on clergy and parishioners from the local authorities has brought it to the brink of extinction.
