Ukraine

National context

Every question about religion in Ukraine now runs through the war. The population stood at roughly 34.8 million in mid-2023, against some 43.5 million before the full-scale invasion; around 7.8 million people had left the country and about a million had returned. Religious communities have been displaced, divided, and in many places physically destroyed: one count recorded more than five hundred places of worship and burial sites damaged or destroyed in the first fourteen months alone, and a second put the number of religious buildings and sacred sites destroyed, damaged, or looted by Russia’s occupying authorities above six hundred. What is striking is how much has continued regardless. Congregations have gone on meeting, clergy have gone on serving communities carrying heavy humanitarian and psychological burdens, and dialogue between religious and secular actors has gone on being organized — through displacement, bombardment, and moral injury among those doing the work.

The country is religiously plural, and more so than its Orthodox majority suggests. A November 2023 survey by the Razumkov Centre found around 61 percent of respondents identifying as Orthodox and 11 percent as Greek Catholic, alongside Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim communities. Islam is the country’s second-largest religion; Muslim leaders and independent estimates put the Muslim population at 500,000 to 600,000, where before February 2022 some estimates ran to two million, with around 300,000 Crimean Tatars. The scale of that demographic change illustrates how profoundly the war has reshaped Ukraine’s religious landscape. The history behind those communities is the subject of a recent monograph by a Ukrainian scholar published in the Panel’s Reports.

Within Orthodoxy the ground has moved. In the same survey, affiliation with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine rose to 42.2 percent from 36.4 percent a year earlier, while affiliation with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church fell to 5.6 percent from 6.5 percent. The two contest parish registrations; the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has reported threats and attacks on its congregations and accused the Orthodox Church of Ukraine of seizing its churches, while the latter maintains that parishioners themselves decide where a parish belongs.

The most contested question is legal. In October 2023 parliament gave a first reading to legislation authorising the state to investigate and act on religious organisations subordinate to governing centres located “in a state carrying out armed aggression” against Ukraine; the State Department recorded at the time that the legislation “would not prohibit religious practices.” The government and some religious leaders described it as tailored to genuine national security concerns and to countering Russian intelligence and disinformation while preserving due process. Some leaders of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — which stated in 2022 that it had severed ties with the Moscow Patriarchate — called it a ban on their church. The measure has since been enacted as Law 3894-IX, and in October 2025 a group of UN special procedures experts, among them the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, said that by “equating religious affiliation with threats to national security, this law establishes a framework for State control which is incompatible with international human rights standards,” and urged the government to review it. The Panel does not adjudicate that disagreement. It records that a state at war has acted against what it regards as a channel of hostile influence, that the church concerned regards the action as directed at its existence, and that independent human rights experts have raised the question of proportionality — and that all three of those things are true at once.

Then there are the occupied territories. The United States does not recognise Russia’s purported annexation of Crimea in 2014 or of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia in 2022, and the UN General Assembly has held the Crimean referendum to be without validity. In the areas under Russian control the pattern is not contested at all: clergy detained, communities stripped of legal status, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Protestant congregations prohibited outright, Crimean Tatar Muslims prosecuted under extremism provisions. Ukraine, like Moldova, contains two religious freedom environments — one governed by a state whose choices can be argued about in public and in court, and one where that argument is not permitted.

The Panel’s focus in Ukraine

What Ukraine contributes to the Panel is practical knowledge of sustaining social trust, religious freedom, and multi-faith cooperation under the conditions of full-scale war. Its experience shows how relationships, institutions, and local leadership continue to function when communities are displaced, infrastructure is destroyed, and security concerns shape every public decision. No other member country can supply that experience, and every member country has something to learn from it.

That direction of travel matters. Ukraine is not only a country the Panel supports; it is a country the Panel learns from, and the learning is not deferred until the war ends.

The Panel’s principal partner in Ukraine is Dialogue in Action, a Ukrainian organization co-founded by Dr Tetiana Kalenychenko, who has led it since 2021, and by Denys Brylov. It is less a local implementer than the Ukrainian expression of the same philosophy — reflecting the Panel’s builders approach, in which trusted local partners lead national engagement rather than receiving a program delivered from outside into a country at war.

Engage. Dialogue in Action’s own practice is the engagement. It convenes religious leaders and secular civil society actors who would not otherwise meet, acting, in Kalenychenko’s description, as “guides into secular society” for religious communities and as interpreters for secular organizations trying to understand faith-based ones. Ukrainian participants also took part in the inaugural Panel across civil society, religious leadership, and academia.

Research. Ukrainian scholarship, not outside reporting, carries this phase. Brylov’s history of Muslim communities in the territories of Ukraine is published in the Panel’s Reports; Kalenychenko has published studies on the religious dimensions of armed conflict for the United States Institute of Peace and PAX. The evidence base here is being written by Ukrainians about Ukraine — and written during the war rather than after it. Field-generated knowledge of that kind is rare, because the conditions that make it valuable are the same conditions that usually prevent it being gathered.

Equip. Cross-Cultural Religious Literacy (CCRL) has been taken up and adapted to wartime conditions rather than imported intact. Writing on what CCRL has to address in Ukraine, Kalenychenko names mistrust between religious and secular communities, moral injury among clergy, institutional resistance, fragmented communication, and gaps in religious understanding — a diagnosis drawn from the work rather than from the framework.

Ukraine’s experience reminds every member country that relationships built before they are needed, partners trusted to lead in their own country, and lessons shared across borders become essential when crisis arrives.