by Pawel Wroblewski, PhD*
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 brought into sharper view a mechanism that had long operated less visibly: the use of Orthodox Church structures as instruments of pressure and as a form of cover for Russian state policy. Within this broader pattern, the Polish Autocephalous Orthodox Church (PAOC) occupies a particularly sensitive position, not least because it is a recognised Church with genuine influence within Poland’s religious landscape.
Autocephaly that never quite became freedom
When the Ecumenical Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the Polish Church in 1924, the underlying principle was straightforward: after the collapse of the old empires, ecclesiastical structures were to reflect the new political map. Constantinople also reaffirmed that Moscow’s takeover of the Metropolis of Kyiv in 1685 had been canonically dubious, a judgement that Moscow never accepted.
After the Second World War, in a Poland firmly incorporated into the Soviet bloc, Moscow pressed the PAOC to distance itself from the 1924 tomos and to accept a new ‘autocephaly’ from Russian hands. Research in post-1989 archives indicates the cost of that arrangement: most post-war primates of the PAOC were registered as secret collaborators of the communist security apparatus, and the Church publicly supported the martial law imposed against the Solidarity movement. The freedom that autocephaly was intended to secure was thus drawn back into a system of subordination.
The long shadow of old loyalties
A particularly revealing illustration of this continuity is Metropolitan Sawa, Archbishop of Warsaw and all Poland. Declassified files of the communist Security Service record him from 1966 onwards as a ‘secret collaborator’, providing reports on the life of his own Church.
This provides the background to what may be described as an ‘agentural succession’: the transmission of loyalties and political reflexes even after formal obligations have lapsed. The reception in Warsaw in March 2024 of Archbishop Viktor Kotsaba, representing Ukrainian structures of the Moscow Patriarchate, took place at the same time as Russia was organising a network of ostensibly ‘Ukrainian’ parishes in Western Europe which, in practice, remained answerable to Moscow.
Money and the story it tells
In December 2021, only weeks before Russian troops crossed into Ukraine, representatives of the Foundation for the Support of Christian Culture and Heritage arrived in Warsaw to meet Metropolitan Sawa. The Foundation is financed by Rosatom, a key Russian state corporation, and works with the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate.
The Polish hierarchy’s opposition to the autocephaly of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine coincided with visits from Russian benefactors closely linked to the Moscow Patriarchate. Financial support and key ecclesiastical decisions thus appear to align in ways that reinforce a longer-term pattern of loyalty.
Talking about war without naming the aggressor
The PAOC’s response to Russia’s war against Ukraine sharpened these concerns. For weeks after 24 February 2022, official statements were confined to general appeals for prayer ‘for peace’ and ‘for the victims’, while avoiding any indication of who had launched the war. Only later did the Church describe the conflict as ‘evil and incomprehensible’, still without explicitly identifying Russia as the aggressor.
While calling for reconciliation, Metropolitan Sawa also accused the Ecumenical Patriarchate in May 2022 of ‘sowing division’ in Ukrainian Orthodoxy. This produced a striking paradox: the PAOC itself owes its canonical status to Constantinople rather than to Moscow, yet it refuses to recognise an almost identical act of autocephaly for the Church in Ukraine and, in some parishes, denies its faithful access to the sacraments. Statements concerning Constantinople tend to be markedly sharper, whereas references to the Kremlin remain carefully hedged.
Vilnius: a small stage, a big script
On 26 April 2026, a conference in the Prechistensky Cathedral in Vilnius provided a small yet revealing stage on which the Moscow-aligned narrative could be performed. The timing was not accidental: weeks earlier, the Lithuanian State Security Department had published a report identifying the Lithuanian Orthodox Church as remaining within the orbit of the Moscow Patriarchate and as a possible conduit for Russian intelligence activity. Rather than engaging those concerns directly, the conference sought to redirect attention away from security and towards a story of ‘persecuted Orthodoxy’ confronted by an overbearing state.
At the centre stood Archimandrite Philip Vasiltsev, Patriarch Kirill’s representative in Damascus. Before Syria, he had served the Moscow Patriarchate in several European countries where Russian ecclesiastical presence dovetails with Russian state interests. In Damascus he maintains regular contact with the Russian ambassador and military officers and appears as the face of the ‘humanitarian dimension’ of Russia’s military deployment. His connections with the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society, headed by former FSB director and Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin, underlines how narrow the gap is between his ecclesiastical role and Russian state structures.
The invitation extended to Vasiltsev sent a clear signal. It suggested that Moscow-aligned Orthodoxy was not retreating, but was prepared to defend its position through appeals to history, culture and canon law. His paper on the supposed ‘errors’ of Constantinople in fourteenth-century Eastern Europe was not a neutral excursion into medieval Church politics; rather, it anchored present-day claims in a longer narrative in which Moscow appears as the natural guardian of order in the East.
The remaining speakers fitted neatly into the same script. Serbian publicist Ognjen Vojvodić referred to the invasion of Ukraine as a ‘special military operation’ and cast Russia as a reactive, defensive power. Belarusian priest Fr Aleksei Khoteev sketched a Vilnius in which Orthodox believers had, since the Union of Brest, been almost permanently wronged by the ‘Latin’ West. Czech priest Protoiereus Václav Ježek concentrated on the ‘canonicity’ of jurisdictions tied to the Moscow Patriarchate, while studiously avoiding any mention of tanks, missiles or war crimes.
The message was straightforward: wherever states in Central and Eastern Europe attempt to push back against Russian influence, Orthodoxy is portrayed as being unjustly ‘securitised’, while Moscow presents itself as the only defender of tradition.
Where Poland enters the frame
In this setting, the presence of Bishop Andrzej Borkowski of Supraśl, representing the PAOC, mattered more than any individual sentence in his address. He came from a country widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s closest allies. Speaking to the participants, he expressed gratitude for the opportunity to strengthen ‘the unity of our local Churches, not only when there is joy, but also when difficulties arise’. Taken in isolation, this might sound like a conventional ecclesiastical pleasantry. In context, however, it reads rather differently.
Those ‘difficulties’ were not internal tensions or spiritual crises. They referred to concrete actions taken by the Lithuanian state: intelligence assessments, proposed legal changes designed to limit the influence of figures linked to Russian structures, and debates over the status of the cathedral itself. Against that background, the public presence of a Polish bishop strengthened the organisers’ hand. If even the Orthodox Church in Poland stands openly for ‘canonical continuity’ with Moscow, then warnings from Lithuanian security services can more readily be dismissed as irrational Russophobia rather than as an attempt at state self-protection.
In many respects, what happened in Vilnius encapsulated what observers have been seeing in the PAOC’s relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate more broadly. Historical entanglements, financial support and carefully calibrated language converged in concrete acts precisely where religion, identity and security meet. Autocephaly could have served as a shield, allowing the Polish Orthodox Church to maintain some distance from Moscow’s political projects. In practice, however, it has all too often functioned as a bridge, transmitting the rhetoric — and, with it, the strategic interests — of the ‘Russian World’ deep into the centre of Europe.
*Pawel Wroblewski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy of Man and Culture, and Head of the Centre for Prognostic Research on Religious Transformations at the University of Wroclaw (Poland).
