On 15 December 2018, a unification council met in Kyiv to merge two previously unrecognized Ukrainian Orthodox bodies, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyivan Patriarchate and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, into a single new structure. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, which had held sole internationally recognized canonical jurisdiction in Ukraine, was invited but declined to participate. The council elected Metropolitan Epiphanius Dumenko as primate of the newly unified church.
Weeks later, on 5 January 2019, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I signed the Tomos of Autocephaly at the Phanar, the Ecumenical Patriarchate's seat in Istanbul, in a formal ceremony granting the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine full ecclesiastical independence. The Tomos set out the terms of the grant, including that the new church would initially receive holy chrism from Constantinople, and it listed the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as the newest addition to the diptychs, the formal list of autocephalous churches in communion with one another that Orthodox liturgy commemorates by name, placing it after the previously most recently recognized autocephalous churches.