On Jan. 5, some 150,000 people lined up in front of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. They came to see a single document called a tomos, issued a few days before by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. There, on a piece of parchment, written in ornate Greek, English and Ukrainian, were words that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had dreamed about for centuries: The document made the Ukrainian Church autocephalous, meaning it is now fully independent from Moscow.
Russia's War Against Ukraine
OP-ED
Michael Khodarkovsky: Putin’s dream of godliness, holy Russia
Metropolitan Epiphanius, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, leads the Orthodox Christmas service in St. Sophia Cathedral on Jan. 7, 2019, in Kyiv.
