The Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Kirill, has closely aligned itself with President Vladimir Putin's government since the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, with Kirill publicly endorsing the war in religious and civilizational terms and describing it as a defense of a shared Orthodox Russian world, a stance that has deepened an already sharp split within global Orthodoxy following the 2019 recognition by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople of an independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church, a move the Moscow Patriarchate condemned and responded to by severing communion with Constantinople.
Millions of Ukrainian parishes that had remained under Moscow's canonical authority have shifted allegiance toward the newly independent Ukrainian church or the historically separate Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church since the war began, and Ukraine's government has pursued legislation to restrict the Moscow-linked church's property and legal status domestically, framing it as a national security matter given the church's ties to Russia.
Within Russia itself, the 1997 Law on Freedom of Conscience formally privileges Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism as the country's four traditional religions while imposing significant registration and missionary restrictions on smaller Protestant, evangelical and new religious movements, a framework the US State Department's International Religious Freedom Report has repeatedly criticized as restrictive of religious minorities.