Election By Council And The Church's Modern Reach

The Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus is elected by a Local Council (Pomestny Sobor), a body that in its fullest form includes bishops, clergy and lay delegates from across the church, though twentieth-century patriarchal elections were sometimes conducted under close state oversight during the Soviet period, when the government maintained significant influence over church appointments as a condition of the church's toleration.

The Russian Orthodox Church is by a considerable margin the largest Orthodox church by membership, and the Moscow Patriarchate's jurisdiction has historically extended well beyond the borders of the modern Russian state, including Ukraine, Belarus and other territories of the former Russian Empire and Soviet Union. This wide jurisdiction has become a source of serious tension in the twenty-first century: the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople granted autocephaly, full ecclesiastical independence, to a new Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, a move the Moscow Patriarchate rejected as uncanonical, producing a rupture in communion between the two patriarchates and illustrating how jurisdictional disputes between Orthodox churches, which lack a single central authority to arbitrate them, can remain unresolved for extended periods.