REPORT: One Year Past the August 18 Ultimatum, Ukraine's Moscow-Linked Church Is Still Waiting for a Verdict

One year ago today, the clock ran out.

At midnight on August 18, 2025, the deadline expired that the Ukrainian state had set for the country's largest religious structure to prove, documents in hand, that it no longer answered to Moscow.

The deadline passed. The Church is still standing.

Not dissolved, not cleared. Suspended.

Twelve months on, no dissolution ruling has been made public, the case sits with the administrative courts, and the state keeps widening its examinations to other structures of the same Church — a Kyiv monastery declared Moscow-affiliated four days ago, a Zaporizhzhia eparchy placed under study eight days ago.

This report tells the story of that year. Not to rule in the court's place. To understand why nothing has been ruled at all.

And everything starts with a number.

Four signs out of seven.

Twenty days in August 2024

Understanding that number means going back two summers.

On August 20, 2024, the Rada passed law 3894-IX — its official title speaks of "protecting the constitutional order in the sphere of the activity of religious organizations." The world's press compressed it into three words: banning the Russian church.

The shorthand is wrong, and this case would not exist if it were right.

The law does not ban a faith. It bans the activity, inside Ukraine, of religious organizations whose decision-making center sits in the aggressor state — the Russian Orthodox Church first among them — and it gives the Ukrainian structures tied to that center a nine-month window to break away.

Nine months to divorce Moscow.

On paper, the machinery is almost clerical. A state agency — DESS, the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience — conducts a study. If it finds signs of affiliation, it issues a directive. If the directive is not carried out, it goes to court. And only a court, at the end of that chain, can end the legal existence of a religious organization.

The agency itself put it in writing the day the law was adopted: the court, and only the court, will decide.

The state denied itself the brutal gesture. It chose the slowness of files.

That slowness is what we are measuring today.

Four signs out of seven

Then, on May 20, 2025, the study began. Its object: the Kyiv Metropolis of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church — the legal entity registered under code 21510633, the administrative head of what everyone still calls the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate.

Seven weeks later, on July 8, 2025, the experts delivered their finding.

Four signs out of seven.

Of the seven affiliation criteria the regulations define, the study confirmed four. Not impressions. Documents.

First comes the gramota of 1990 — the charter granted by Moscow Patriarch Alexy II, which founds the Ukrainian Church's status and binds it canonically to the Moscow throne. Thirty-five years later, that text has never been renounced. The study found it still producing effects: statutes validated in Moscow, mandatory commemoration of the Moscow patriarch in the liturgy, Ukrainian bishops sitting in the governing bodies of the Russian church, holy chrism received from Russia.

Since 2022, the Kyiv church has answered that it proclaimed its independence, in full council, in the first months of the invasion.

The study answers proclamations with registries.

And the registries say something else. Since 2022, the Russian church has taken direct control of three dioceses carved out of Ukrainian territory — Crimea, Rovenky, Berdiansk. A church genuinely separated from Moscow would have protested this canonical carve-up of its own dioceses.

Kyiv heard no such protest.

Four signs out of seven. The number is not an opinion. It is the conclusion of an expert study the law requires to be entrusted to specialists independent of the state — and it is precisely this number the Church is now contesting before the judges.

In this file, a charter signed in Moscow in 1990 weighs more than thirty-five years of sermons.

What the state actually demanded

On July 17, 2025, DESS issued its directive. The document set a date: August 18, 2025.

By then, the Kyiv Metropolis had to do four things.

One: publicly renounce, in black and white, any subordination to the structures of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Two: recall its clergy from the governing bodies of the Russian church.

Three: sever the canonical ties, starting with that 1990 gramota which no one, in thirty-five years, has ever denounced.

Four: prove it, in a report filed with the state.

The head of the agency, Viktor Yelensky, sent the directive out with a sentence that traveled the whole country and sums up the state's position: this is not a religious organization, it is a branch of the aggressor state.

A hard sentence. It is exactly what the court will have to confirm or strike down.

Then a calendar detail that says much about the real texture of this affair: the directive, sent by mail, only reached the Metropolis on July 24. Yelensky therefore admitted publicly that the effective deadline ran to August 24. Even historic ultimatums depend on postal delays.

You picture an arm-wrestling match. It is an exchange of registered letters.

And that may be the strangest thing about this case: the confrontation between a state at war and a thousand-year-old church runs on delivery receipts.

The letter that says no

The answer arrived before the deadline.

Not a compliance report. A letter of refusal.

The Church, led by Metropolitan Onufriy, replied in writing that the directive amounted to interference in the internal life of the Church and could not be carried out.

Weigh what that sentence means inside its own system. For the UOC hierarchy, canonical ties are not a contract an administration can order terminated; they are spiritual realities, and a state demanding their rupture has left its lane. For the state, those same ties are documented legal facts binding a Ukrainian structure to the religious center of a country that bombs Ukraine every night.

Two logics. No common ground.

For a year now, those two logics have faced each other without touching.

On August 27, 2025, the mechanical consequence landed: DESS officially recognized the Kyiv Metropolis as affiliated with a foreign religious organization banned in Ukraine. In early September, the agency filed suit in administrative court to terminate the entity's activity — with its assets, religious objects excepted, passing to the state.

Yelensky had announced it word for word ten days earlier: recognition first, lawsuit second. "These are the steps the law dictates to us."

So the law dictated. The court, ever since, disposes.

A year without a judgment

And here is where the file turns uncomfortable for everyone.

A year since the suit was filed.

A year in which Ukraine's largest religious structure has lived under the threat of a dissolution no one has pronounced.

A year of the state repeating that the process is running its course, and of the course leading to nothing public.

Let us be precise about what is known and what is not. We know the proceedings are open. That no dissolution ruling has been made public to date. That the legal entity still exists, that the parishes hold services, that the monasteries function. The rest — the detail of the hearings, the procedural skirmishes, the contested expert reports — belongs to a fragmentary judicial chronicle that no source allows anyone to reconstruct cleanly from end to end.

What this judgment-less year does prove, however, is already considerable.

It proves that law 3894-IX was not the guillotine Moscow described. Russian propaganda promised churches shuttered by force, believers driven from the crypts. Twelve months past the deadline, the instrument Ukraine chose remains the slowest and most contestable one there is: a trial.

It also states the price of that choice. Because while the court does not rule, each side fills the vacuum. The state multiplies its affiliation studies. The Church multiplies its appeals. And the country keeps counting its dead under the strikes of an aggressor the Moscow Patriarchate publicly blesses.

The faithful, meanwhile, have spent twelve months in that in-between.

Priests hold services without knowing whether their structure will still exist next winter.

And Moscow works every postponed hearing into a cry of persecution, while Kyiv works every agency communiqué into proof of its patience.

Slow justice is the pride of democracies. It is also their bill.

While the court waits

Because the state, for its part, is not waiting.

As early as July 28, 2025, one of the agency's research teams was examining the Korets women's monastery, attached directly to the Moscow Patriarchate.

On August 10, 2026 — eight days ago — the agency announced a study of the administration of the same Church's Zaporizhzhia eparchy, a few dozen kilometers from the front.

On August 14, 2026 — four days ago — DESS recognized the Holy Intercession monastery of Holosiiv, the Holosiivska Pustyn on Kyiv's doorstep, as affiliated with a banned religious organization.

A study opened. An affiliation confirmed. The same machinery, directive after directive.

The strategy reads easily enough: never hang the whole file on the fate of a single trial. While the Metropolis case bogs down, the state documents — entity by entity, monastery by monastery, eparchy by eparchy — and every new finding of affiliation shrinks the space in which the Church can plead that it has nothing left to do with Moscow.

Four out of seven, again. And again.

The list grows in silence, through administrative communiqués almost nobody reads.

Nothing in this accumulation prejudges the coming ruling on the Metropolis itself. But everything in it prepares the ground: each file closed with a finding of affiliation becomes one more exhibit filed toward the main trial, one more brick in the wall of evidence the state has been raising for two years around a Church that swears it no longer has a master.

This is a war of clerks. Less photogenic than a war of domes and censers — and probably more decisive.

Eight thousand parishes

What remains is scale, because scale is the real subject.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate is roughly eight thousand parishes. Nearly a quarter of all the parishes the Russian church counts worldwide. The Moscow Patriarchate without Ukraine is no longer quite the Moscow Patriarchate — which is why the Kremlin watches this trial so closely, and why every communiqué from the agency triggers a Moscow salvo about "religious persecution."

But eight thousand parishes are not eight thousand offices.

Inside them: priests, some of whom have buried Ukrainian soldiers fallen at the front, and others of whom have been convicted of informing for the enemy. Believers who pray in Ukrainian inside a structure whose founding charter sleeps in Moscow. An old woman lighting a candle in the church where she was baptized, who asked geopolitics for absolutely nothing.

The tearing is there, and neither camp gets to reduce it away.

To say those eight thousand parishes are eight thousand Kremlin antennas is false, and the Ukrainian state itself does not say it — its case targets the governing entity, not the faithful, and the law explicitly spares the objects of worship.

To claim the affiliation is a Kyiv invention is just as false — four criteria confirmed out of seven, a gramota intact, dioceses annexed without protest.

Between those two convenient lies stands a country trying to do something no democracy has had to do at this scale: legally separate millions of believers from the religious center of a state that is killing them.

The canonical paper sleeps in Moscow. The prayers rise in Ukrainian.

That split is what the old woman with the candle carries without knowing it. And the proceedings target the split — not her.

What Moscow made of this Church

A word, here, about the elephant in the nave.

This trial would not exist without what the Moscow Patriarchate has become. An institution whose head blesses the invasion, calls it a holy war, and drapes in prayer the units that razed Mariupol and strike Kherson.

That is the context the word "affiliation" carries, and no administrative euphemism erases it.

When the administration writes that an organization is tied to a foreign religious structure "whose activity is banned in Ukraine," the cold formula points at this burning reality: the canonical center in question is not neutral in this war. It is one of its loudspeakers.

For a year, the Kyiv church has been answering for that tie. Not for its faith. For that tie.

And its refusal to carry out the directive, whatever its theological sincerity, has a political consequence it cannot ignore: every month the 1990 gramota stays in force is a month Moscow can still say Kyiv belongs to it.

You can pray against a war inside a structure that belongs, on paper, to the man waging it. That is exactly the paradox the court has to untangle.

The ridge line

There remains the question Ukraine's friends have no right to dodge: is this procedure compatible with the freedom of conscience a democracy must defend, war included?

An honest answer holds in three observations.

First observation: Ukraine chose the most constraining path for itself. Study, directive, deadline, appeal, court. Every step can be attacked, and the Church attacks it. The opposite of an ukase.

Second observation: the test applied is not belief but institutional subordination to a center located in the aggressor state. The nuance sounds byzantine. It is in fact the entire difference between a national-security law and a persecution.

Third observation: the very slowness this report documents — a year without a judgment, hearings that resolve nothing, an entity still standing — is the best answer to the slogans about a "ban on Orthodoxy." You do not ban a church through a year of adversarial procedure. You put it face to face with its own documents.

The ridge line is narrow. On one side, the precipice of impotence: a state letting a structure run from the invading country prosper in the middle of a war. On the other, the precipice of the arbitrary: a state dissolving a community of believers to make an example.

This August 18, 2026, Ukraine is still walking that ridge. It has fallen off neither side.

Less spectacular than a verdict. Perhaps more important, in the end.

That date of August 18, 2025 was meant to be a cutoff. It has become an anniversary — of a country that preferred slow law to the quick gesture, facing a Church that preferred refusal to divorce.

The judges will rule eventually. Someday.

Until then, the question stays open, and it concerns all of us who watch from afar: if your country were bombed every night, how many years of due process would you grant an institution that refuses to say, documents in hand, whom it answers to?

Sources :

Sources Primaires :

Verkhovna Rada — Law 3894-IX on protecting the constitutional order in the sphere of the activity of religious organizations (official text)

DESS — Signs of affiliation of the UOC Kyiv Metropolis with the Russian Orthodox Church identified (July 8, 2025)

DESS — Directive ordering the elimination of violations issued to the UOC Kyiv Metropolis (July 17, 2025)

DESS — "This is not a religious organization but a branch of the aggressor state": content of the directive and the August 18, 2025 deadline

DESS — Adoption of the law on Ukraine's spiritual independence: the study, directive and court-decision mechanism (August 20, 2024)

DESS — DESS recognizes the UOC's Holosiivska Pustyn monastery as affiliated with a banned religious organization (August 14, 2026)

Sources Secondaires :

Interfax-Ukraine — DESS recognizes Kyiv Metropolis of UOC as affiliated with banned Russian Orthodox Church (August 27, 2025)

Interfax-Ukraine — Court proceedings opened on claim to terminate activity of Kyiv Metropolis of UOC

Ukrinform — Lawsuit filed to liquidate Kyiv Metropolis of UOC-MP

Euromaidan Press — Ukraine gives Moscow-aligned church ultimatum to cut Russian ties (the 1990 gramota, eight thousand parishes, transferred dioceses)

Ukrainska Pravda — Viktor Yelensky's statements: effective August 24 deadline, recognition of affiliation and lawsuit as steps dictated by the law