Liquidation, the Catacomb Years, and the Return

After the Soviet annexation of western Ukraine the church was suppressed as an institution. Its bishops were arrested in 1945. In March 1946 an assembly convened in Lviv, without any of those bishops present, declared the Union of Brest annulled and the church reunited with the Moscow Patriarchate, and the parishes and buildings were transferred accordingly. The church itself calls that assembly a pseudo-sobor and does not recognise it; accounts of its standing differ sharply between the churches involved, and the atlas records the dispute rather than resolving it.

What followed was four decades underground. Priests were ordained in secret, liturgies were celebrated in flats and forests, and the church became one of the largest banned religious bodies in the Soviet Union. Josyf Slipyj, the metropolitan arrested in 1945, spent eighteen years in labour camps before being released to Rome, where he continued to lead the church in exile and was made a cardinal.

Legalisation came in 1989 and 1990, and the return of parishes to a church that had been erased from the register produced serious and sometimes violent disputes over buildings in Galicia, which the Moscow Patriarchate has cited in ecumenical discussions ever since. The seat of the major archbishop was moved from Lviv to Kyiv in 2005. The church today has eparchies across Ukraine and a large diaspora structure in Poland, North and South America and Australia.