The 2018-2019 Tomos and Its Aftermath

In December 2018 a unification council in Kyiv merged Ukraine's previously unrecognized Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and Kyivan Patriarchate bodies into a single new Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and on 6 January 2019 Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I granted this new church a Tomos of Autocephaly, formal recognition as an independent, self-governing church. The Ecumenical Patriarchate's own churches, along with the churches of Greece, Alexandria and Cyprus, subsequently recognized the Orthodox Church of Ukraine as canonical; the Moscow Patriarchate did not, and broke communion with Constantinople itself over the decision, a rupture other Orthodox churches have responded to differently and that remains unresolved across the Orthodox world.

The competing body, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had remained under Moscow's jurisdiction, declared in May 2022, following Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine that February, that it was severing practical ties to the Moscow Patriarchate and adopting full independence. Whether this declaration constitutes genuine autocephaly, a status only a recognized autocephalous church or the Ecumenical Patriarchate can properly confer, is itself disputed: the church's own statutes and canonical relationships remain contested both within Ukraine and among outside observers, and Ukrainian civil authorities have separately moved to restrict the Moscow-linked church's legal operation. This entry describes both positions rather than adjudicating between them; the underlying dispute over recognition and canonical status remains genuinely unsettled.