Ancient monastery at heart of centuries-old struggle between Ukraine and Russia

Ukrainians often talk about justice, and their eastern neighbour gives them plenty to say on the subject.

Sixteen months into Russia’s all-out invasion, not a day passes without a missile, suicide drone or shell killing or injuring a Ukrainian civilian. Every new victim adds to the debt in justice that Ukraine is owed.

That debt keeps ticking higher and sometimes takes a sickening lurch deeper into the red, as when a Russian rocket hit a restaurant in the city of Kramatorsk last week, killing 13 people and injuring 60. Among the dead were twins Anna and Yulia Aksenchenko (14), 17-year-olds Yevheniya Holovchenko and Valeriya Simonnik, and writer Victoria Amelina (37).

Amelina’s death was announced on Sunday night, hours before Kyiv and its Western allies opened a centre in The Hague to collect evidence for future trials against Russian officials accused of committing the international crime of aggression against Ukraine.

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But Ukraine’s desire for justice reaches far back, beyond Russia’s current invasion, through the Soviet era when millions of its people died in the man-made “Holodomor” famine, its intelligentsia and culture were repressed, and some 200,000 Crimean Tatars were deported to Siberia and Central Asia – to the founding years of the Russian Empire.

Peter was incensed by Mazepa’s ‘betrayal’, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him, and his name became a byword for treachery in Russia

The 1709 Battle of Poltava, in what is now central Ukraine, was a turning point in European history, when Tsar Peter the Great’s forces crushed the Swedish army and its Cossack allies. It led to Russia winning the Great Northern War in 1721, replacing Sweden as the region’s major power and declaring itself an empire.

Sweden’s King Charles XII fled to today’s Moldova, which was then under Ottoman rule, with Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack chief or “hetman” who had switched allegiance from Russia to preserve his own power and Cossack autonomy from the tsar’s tightening grip.

Peter was incensed by Mazepa’s “betrayal”, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated him, and his name became a byword for treachery in Russia, where Alexander Pushkin made him the villain of his 1829 poem Poltava – a retort to Lord Byron’s romantic depiction of the hetman as the eponymous hero of his poem of a decade earlier.

Inspiration

Yet just as many Ukrainians view the Cossack hetmanate as the forerunner of their own state, and see its resistance to outside rule as inspiration for the nation’s struggle for independence, so Mazepa is widely regarded as a kind of freedom fighter against Russia – and the Moscow church’s 300-year repudiation of him as another wrong to be righted.

It was in this spirit that worshippers gathered last month at Kyiv’s Pechersk Lavra monastery for its first official memorial service for Mazepa. It took place in the All-Saints Church, which was built during an architectural boom in Kyiv that was funded by the hetman’s donations and is known as the Ukrainian, or Mazepa, Baroque.

“On the territory of the Lavra, this is the first time that formal prayers have been said for Mazepa,” says archpriest Heorhiy Kovalenko, rector of the Open Orthodox University of St Sophia the Wise in Kyiv.

“That is why this is a momentous moment. This is a sign that the Lavra is becoming the centre of the Ukrainian world – not the Russian world – in a religious sense and in terms of the heroes that the state is honouring.”

It felt like a moment when you touch history, and an act that restores the spiritual unity of Ukrainians

—  Archpriest Heorhiy Kovalenko

Moscow claimed control over Ukraine’s religious affairs for 330 years, until in 2019 Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, regarded as the “first among equals” in the Orthodox Church, granted independence to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).

Many priests and parishes have joined the OCU from the so-called Moscow Patriarchate, which insists it is loyal to Kyiv but is widely regarded as still being too close to the Russian Orthodox Church – a vocal supporter of the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine.

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The 1,000-year-old Lavra is at the centre of this power struggle, and the complex has been searched by the security services, Moscow patriarchate monks have been ordered to leave, and their abbot, Metropolitan Pavlo, has been placed under house arrest for allegedly inciting inter-religious enmity and justifying Russian aggression.

‘Spiritual unity’

The Kremlin is furious over the dispute and condemned the prayers for Mazepa.

“This was the restoration of historical and spiritual justice,” Kovalenko says of the service in the Lavra.

“It felt like a moment when you touch history, and an act that restores the spiritual unity of Ukrainians,” he adds. “This is a connection to our ancestors and to those who, like Mazepa, helped forge the history of Ukraine by defending its independence.”