One recent Sunday morning in the western Ukrainian village of Ptycha, a battle for control of the church between rival Orthodox factions forced parishioners to worship in unusual places.
To the left of the building, dozens squeezed into the caretaker’s lodge, above which a small Ukrainian flag fluttered.
To the right, and a short walk down the road, a second service took place in the priest’s packed garage. People spilled out into the garden where they shared the space with the occasional stray chicken.
The 106-year-old Holy Assumption church itself was padlocked and three police officers were nearby to guard it.
The standoff is the upshot of a tussle that pits a church aligned with Russian Orthodoxy — widely referred to in Ukraine as the Moscow Patriarchate — against a breakaway rival called the Kiev Patriarchate.
Religious divisions deepened in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea by Russia and subsequent conflict between Ukrainian and Russian-backed separatist forces over the Donbass region in the east.
Those tensions are back in focus after Petro Poroshenko, the pro-Western president who faces a tight election race next March, stepped up efforts to create an independent, or “autocephalous”, national church.
He says the move is designed to bring religious and social unity as well as to blunt Russia’s influence in Ukraine.
“This question goes far beyond the ecclesiastical. It is about our finally acquiring independence from Moscow,” Poroshenko told parliament in April.
The Moscow Patriarchate considers its Ukrainian rival illegitimate, and fiercely opposes Poroshenko’s proposal.
The Kiev branch, which broke away in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union, supports it.
Critics of the Moscow Patriarchate call it a fifth column for the Kremlin, used to harbor pro-Russian separatist fighters, store weapons, justify Russian expansionism and spread anti-Ukrainian propaganda.
Mykhailo Voytyuk, a leader of the Kiev Patriarchate community in Ptycha, says Moscow Patriarchate priests treat them as second-class citizens and broke an agreement to let both sides take turns to hold services in the church.
“We are nobodies and they are everything. We are the unblessed. We are the dissidents,” he said.
“The Moscow Patriarchate is the fifth column, with which the FSB brainwashes and influences the state of affairs in every village, including ours,” he added, referring to Russia’s state security service.
The Moscow Patriarchate rejects such accusations. It says it is autonomous from the Russian Orthodox Church, and many of its followers feel they are unfairly cast as “stooges” of Moscow.
Archbishop Kliment, spokesman for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the official name for the Moscow Patriarchate, denied his church was a security threat and said it had done much for peace in the east.
