I am staying as much as I can at the hospital with my mother Veronika. She cannot take food anymore. Thank you for your prayers for her and me. On March 6, 2022, immediately after the Russian Federation began its military action against Ukraine, I issued a personal statement. In it, I said that historians have to be all about the “big picture,” which it takes a fact-based perspective to understand. The historian must not succumb to outside pressure to issue hasty condemnations of the actions of certain public figures or political leaders. That said, I do have some conclusions to offer about our new reality. In 2023, one year later after this statement, some hard facts have emerged about this conflict: on one hand, the International Criminal Court in the Hague concluded that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine; on the other hand, the United Nations noted concerns that the Ukrainian government has discriminated against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. I would like to steer away from political analysis here and focus on theology and ideology. Both in Russia and in Ukraine, Orthodoxy has come to be perceived as a philosophy of opposition to civil society. In Russia, it is a matter of the restoration of Russian imperial Orthodoxy; in Ukraine, it is a scenario familiar from the history of the Orthodox Church in the twentieth century: the imposition of a “one state–one church” solution. The recent past shows that when the Church is integrated into the apparatus of Empire, it has to “pay the empire’s dues” when the latter ceases to exist. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that in Patriarch Kirill’s view, the frontier of the conflict now is about Russia, as an imperial power, not ceasing to exist and becoming a self-sufficient civilization with a system of moral and ethical values in which Orthodoxy would occupy an important place. There is little concern shown for human rights in Russia, and little resistance to President Putin’s domestic and foreign policies. The collectivist ideology currently preached in Russia has its strengths, in that it consolidates society and strengthens the position of the Church. But it also has serious shortcomings: the absence of dialogue and de facto rejection of the system of “checks and balances,” without which a state can devolve into tyranny. All of the Ecumenical Councils took place in the Eastern Roman Empire. Our whole way of life is imbued with Byzantium. But the world has changed, and in this, Russia is no exception. Under these conditions, the first three centuries of Church history, when Christians lived in a non-Christian society, might serve as a more promising point of reference for us in seeking answers to the challenges of our times, than the imperial, “Constantinian” period in the history of the Church, which ended in Russia in 1918. The Beatitudes from the Lord’s Sermon on the Mount are based on self-renunciation. Individuals may implement them in their personal life, but no society could afford not to defend its property rights in its legal system. Orthodox Christians may attract others to join the Church by their life and by the force of argument, but not by coercion. The times in which we live in can teach us to be philosophical, especially if we adopt the “long view” of history. On the one hand, the Russian Church Abroad now finds itself in the shoes of the Moscow Patriarchate parishes during the Cold War. (Notably, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh [d. 2003], while condemning the Moscow Patriarchate’s statements against Solzhenitsyn, never ceased liturgical commemoration of the Patriarch in London.) On the other hand, in canonical terms, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church now has the same status as the ROCOR during those years. Apparently, the political climate in Russia is not conducive to conciliarity, but rather fosters support military-style discipline, even within the Church. The Russian Church Abroad exists in a different environment, and we have no excuse for delaying a thoughtful, conciliar conversation about the times in which God has led us to live. | 
