The 2018 Rupture and the Tomos

This file sets out the documents. What the 1686 synodal letters say and how the two churches read them; what the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s synod decided on 11 October 2018; what the Tomos of 5–6 January 2019 actually provides; when and how communion was broken; and where ROCOR stood. It then does what the discipline of this collection requires: it states the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s case at its strongest, from the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own documents, before the following file argues against it.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / ROCOR

1686 and the Two Readings

The Metropolitanate of Kyiv had been part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate from the baptism of Rus’. In 1686, in the context of Russo-Polish diplomacy conducted through the Ottoman Porte, Ecumenical Patriarch Dionysius IV issued synodal letters concerning the ordination of the Metropolitan of Kyiv and his relation to Moscow. Everything in the modern dispute turns on what those letters did.

The Moscow reading. The act was a full and permanent transfer of the Kyiv metropolitanate to the Patriarchate of Moscow. On the strength of it Moscow governed the Church in Ukraine for over three centuries, with the acquiescence of every Orthodox church including Constantinople, which for that entire period neither ordained a Metropolitan of Kyiv, nor sent exarchs, nor treated Ukraine as its own territory in any act.

The Constantinople reading. The letters granted Moscow only the right, kat’ oikonomian and for the circumstances of the time, to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv, who was to be elected by his own clergy-laity assembly and was to commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch as his First Hierarch — thereby proclaiming and affirming his continuing canonical dependence on the Mother Church of Constantinople. On this reading nothing was ceded; a function was delegated on conditions.

Both readings are reported in the repository’s Pan-Orthodox narrative with sourcing from both sides (Ukrainian Autocephaly and the 2018 Schism), and both are summarized in the canon-law hub (Autocephaly and Territory).

Two further facts belong to the record and are relied on by Constantinople. In 1687 a council at Constantinople condemned and deposed Dionysius IV, and the transaction that produced the 1686 letters involved diplomatic pressure and gifts. And in the Tomos of autocephaly granted to the Church of Poland in 1924, the Ecumenical Patriarchate stated that the separation of the Kyiv metropolitanate from Constantinople had not been effected in accordance with the canonical regulations — which establishes that Constantinople’s 2018 position was not invented in 2018.

11 October 2018

The Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, meeting under Patriarch Bartholomew, announced a set of decisions which together constitute the canonical act at issue. As published in its communiqué of that date, the synod:

Resolved to proceed with the granting of autocephaly to the Church in Ukraine.
Restored the Stavropegion of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Kyiv.
Accepted and reviewed the petitions of appeal of Filaret Denysenko and Makariy Maletych, restoring them canonically to their hierarchical or priestly rank and their faithful to communion with the Church.
Revoked the legal force of the Synodal Letter of 1686, describing it as having been issued for the circumstances of that time and as having granted the right, through oikonomia, to the Patriarch of Moscow to ordain the Metropolitan of Kyiv elected by his own clergy-laity assembly, who would commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch as First Hierarch, proclaiming and affirming his canonical dependence on the Mother Church of Constantinople.
Appealed to all sides to avoid the appropriation of churches and monasteries and acts of violence.

The appointment of two exarchs to Kyiv had preceded this, on 7 September 2018, “within the framework of the preparations for the granting of autocephaly.”

The Rupture

The Russian Orthodox Church’s response came in two stages. On 14 September 2018 its Holy Synod suspended the commemoration of Patriarch Bartholomew in the diptychs, suspended concelebration with Constantinople’s hierarchs, and withdrew from bodies chaired by Constantinople’s representatives. On 15 October 2018, meeting in Minsk, it fully severed eucharistic communion with the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

The ROCOR Synod of Bishops declared its complete support for that decision on 18 October 2018.

Subsequent recognitions of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine produced corresponding breaks: the Church of Greece (the Hierarchy recognized Constantinople’s right to grant autocephaly in October 2019; Archbishop Ieronymos II sent a peace letter to Metropolitan Epiphanius on 21 October 2019; Patriarch Kirill first omitted his commemoration on 3 November 2019); the Patriarchate of Alexandria (Patriarch Theodore II commemorated Epiphanius in November 2019; Moscow announced the break on 26 December 2019); and the Church of Cyprus (Archbishop Chrysostomos II commemorated Epiphanius on 24 October 2020; Moscow’s Holy Synod resolved on 20 November 2020 that Patriarch Kirill could no longer commemorate him).

In December 2021 the Russian Holy Synod received African clergy who had petitioned to leave the Patriarchate of Alexandria and established a Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa, which Alexandria and Constantinople condemned as an uncanonical incursion into Alexandria’s ancient territory. That act is part of the record and is dealt with as a concession in the following file.

The Unification Council and the Tomos

A council convened at St Sophia, Kyiv, on 15 December 2018, drawing together the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, and two bishops from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, and voted to unite as the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, electing Metropolitan Epiphanius (Dumenko) as primate.

Patriarch Bartholomew signed the Patriarchal and Synodal Tomos on 5 January 2019 and handed it to Metropolitan Epiphanius on 6 January after a joint Liturgy at the Patriarchal Church of St George in the Phanar.

Its provisions, as published, include:

The church is named the “Most Holy Church of Ukraine,” its primate styled “His Beatitude the Metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine,” taking his place in the diptychs after the primate of the Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia.
A territorial limitation: the OCU may not establish bishops or extraterritorial altars beyond the borders of Ukraine, and its diaspora parishes are to come under the Ecumenical Throne.
The OCU must receive the Holy Myron from the Great Church of Christ, that is, from Constantinople.
The right of hierarchs and clergy to appeal to the Ecumenical Patriarch is reserved, and Constantinople is named the mother church.

Moscow and others read these clauses as making the autocephaly qualified — more dependent on Constantinople than the older autocephalies. The Ecumenical Patriarchate presents them as the normal marks of a daughter church’s relation to its mother see.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s Case, at Its Strongest

What follows is the case for the acts of 2018–19, stated as its proponents state it and from their own documents. It is set out here because a judgment rendered against an unstated case is worth nothing, and because the discipline this collection applies to Severus of Antioch and to the First Vatican Council applies equally to a sister Orthodox Church.

1. 1686 was a delegation, not a cession, and the documents say so. Constantinople’s central historical claim is that the surviving letters do not transfer the metropolitanate; they authorize the Patriarch of Moscow to perform the ordination of a metropolitan elected locally, and they require that metropolitan to commemorate the Ecumenical Patriarch — a requirement intelligible only if canonical dependence on Constantinople continued. The Patriarchate published the underlying material as The Ecumenical Throne and the Church of Ukraine: The Documents (Istanbul, 2018), and the canonical analysis most often relied on is Konstantinos Vetochnikov’s paper to the 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies at Belgrade in 2016, “La ‘concession’ de la métropole de Kiev au patriarche de Moscou en 1686: analyse canonique,” which argues that the act was not a cession of territory. Constantinople adds that the commemoration condition was in fact abandoned, so that the very terms on which the delegation was granted were not kept.

2. Constantinople’s position is not new. The 1924 Polish tomos, quoted above, records the same judgment about 1686 nearly a century before the present dispute, at a moment when Constantinople had no interest in Ukraine to advance.

3. The prerogative to grant autocephaly. Constantinople holds that the Ecumenical Throne alone is competent to grant autocephaly, or at least is the indispensable arbiter without whose tomos no autocephaly is canonically complete, and it points to the practical record: Serbia (1879), Romania (1885), Poland (1924), Albania (1937), the Bulgarian schism lifted (1945) and the patriarchate recognized (1961), Georgia (1990), the Czech Lands and Slovakia (1998) — every one of these received a tomos from Constantinople, and the one modern autocephaly granted without one, the Orthodox Church in America in 1970, remains unrecognized by most of the Orthodox world. The canonical ground offered is Constantinople’s conciliar privileges, above all Chalcedon, Canon 28 (Primacy and Synodality; and the proof-text disputes in Autocephaly and Territory).

4. The right to receive appeals. Constantinople claims a universal appellate competence — the ekklēton — on the basis of Chalcedon, Canons 9 and 17, and of Byzantine practice, and has published its position under the title “The Ecumenical Throne’s Exclusive Prerogative Regarding Litigious Disputes.” On this reading the acceptance of the petitions of Filaret and Makariy was not an intrusion into another church’s discipline but the exercise of a competence the canons assign to the Ecumenical Throne, and one that has been exercised historically.

5. The restoration was of persons, not an invention of orders. Constantinople did not re-ordain. Filaret (Denysenko) was consecrated a bishop in the Russian Orthodox Church in 1962, and his episcopal orders as such were never in question; his deposition in 1992 and anathema in 1997 were imposed on non-doctrinal grounds — schism and oath-breaking, not heresy. Constantinople’s act was therefore, on its own account, the lifting of a canonical penalty by the competent appellate authority, restoring men whose orders were not at issue.

6. Its own account of primacy. The Patriarchate’s theological case is that primacy is constitutive of the Church’s order at every level, including the universal, and that it is necessarily borne by a person — the position argued in Metropolitan Elpidophoros (Lambriniadis)’s “First Without Equals” of January 2014, written in direct reply to Moscow’s 2013 document. On that account the acts of 2018 are not an innovation but the exercise of a prerogative that exists whether or not it is used.

7. The pastoral argument, which is the strongest of all. Millions of Ukrainian Orthodox were in bodies outside communion with the whole Orthodox world, some of them for a generation. No local authority could heal the situation: Moscow would not recognize the schismatic bodies, and the schismatic bodies would not return to Moscow. Cyril Hovorun, a Ukrainian theologian of the Constantinople jurisdiction who defends the grant, candidly notes that the Ecumenical Patriarchate “had to take over” the unification process because the two unrecognized groups could not cooperate with each other, and that the tomos’s terms could be revisited if the OCU revised its statutes (Hovorun, The Cause of Ukrainian Autocephaly, Routledge, 2020). Nicholas Denysenko reads the autocephaly as the fulfilment of a century-old Ukrainian movement for a church subordinate to no one but God (The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation, 2018). Whatever one concludes canonically, the pastoral problem was real, it was unresolved, and no other party proposed a solution.

Where ROCOR Stands

Stated exactly, and consistent with the account in Ukraine and the Russian Church.

The ROCOR Synod of Bishops declared its complete support for the Moscow Patriarchate’s severance of communion with Constantinople on 18 October 2018.
ROCOR has not broken with the Moscow Patriarchate. It remains a self-governing part of the Russian Church under the Act of Canonical Communion of 17 May 2007, and commemoration of Patriarch Kirill has continued under that Act. On 24 March 2022 the ROCOR Synod chancery rebutted rumours to the contrary, stating that the Synod of Bishops had not convened on the matter and had made no such decision.
On the war, ROCOR’s consistent stance from 2022 has been to mourn it, to call for peace, and to support relief for refugees. Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) issued an archpastoral epistle calling the faithful to prayer on 24 February 2022; Metropolitan Mark (Arndt) of Berlin and Germany went furthest publicly, calling the war a crime and a fratricide that must stop immediately, while his diocese organized major refugee relief.
Metropolitan Hilarion (Kapral) died on 16 May 2022; Bishop Nicholas (Olhovsky) of Manhattan was elected ROCOR’s seventh First Hierarch on 13 September 2022 and confirmed by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church the following day.

State Action, Reported and Left There

Both states have acted in ways that bear on the Church, and this collection reports the facts and takes no position on either.

On the Ukrainian side: from November 2022 the Security Service of Ukraine conducted searches at UOC monasteries and cathedrals; the UOC’s tenancy of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra was terminated in March 2023; Law No. 3894-IX, adopted on 20 August 2024 and signed on 24 August 2024, bars religious organizations whose governing centre is in the aggressor state and provides a mechanism for terminating the activity of bodies found affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church; the citizenship of Metropolitan Onufriy was revoked by presidential decree on 2 July 2025. The measures have been defended on national-security grounds and criticized on religious-freedom grounds, including by Human Rights Watch (October 2024) and by UN special-procedures mandate-holders (October 2025). The full sourcing, from more than one side, is in Ukraine and the Russian Church.

On the Russian side: the Russian state has supported the Moscow Patriarchate’s position diplomatically, and Patriarch Kirill’s public framing of the war — most prominently the sermon of 6 March 2022 — drew condemnation across the Orthodox world and is treated, with its critics, in the same file.

Neither of these paragraphs is an argument. The canonical case in the following file does not rest on the conduct of any government, and would stand or fall unchanged if both governments had done nothing.

References

Ecumenical Patriarchate. Synodal communiqué of 11 October 2018; announcement of the appointment of exarchs to Kyiv, 7 September 2018; Patriarchal and Synodal Tomos for the Bestowal of Autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine, 5–6 January 2019 (ec-patr.org).
Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Ecumenical Throne and the Church of Ukraine: The Documents. Istanbul, 2018.
Ecumenical Patriarchate. Tomos of autocephaly for the Orthodox Church of Poland, 1924.
Ecumenical Patriarchate. “The Ecumenical Throne’s Exclusive Prerogative Regarding Litigious Disputes” (ec-patr.org).
Lambriniadis, Elpidophoros (Metropolitan of Bursa). “First Without Equals: A Response to the Text on Primacy of the Moscow Patriarchate.” January 2014 (ec-patr.org).
Vetochnikov, Konstantinos. “La ‘concession’ de la métropole de Kiev au patriarche de Moscou en 1686: analyse canonique.” 23rd International Congress of Byzantine Studies, Belgrade, 2016.
Moscow Patriarchate. Holy Synod statements of 14 September 2018 and 15 October 2018; synodal acts concerning Greece (2019), Alexandria (26 December 2019), and Cyprus (20 November 2020); establishment of the Patriarchal Exarchate of Africa, 29 December 2021 (mospat.ru; exarchate-africa.ru).
Moscow Patriarchate. “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church,” 26 December 2013 (mospat.ru).
ROCOR Synod of Bishops. Statement of 18 October 2018 in support of the Moscow Patriarchate’s decision; chancery statement of 24 March 2022 on the commemoration of Patriarch Kirill (synod.com; orthodoxlife.org).
Act of Canonical Communion between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, 17 May 2007.
Hovorun, Cyril. “The Cause of Ukrainian Autocephaly.” In Orthodox Christianity and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Europe. Routledge, 2020.
Denysenko, Nicholas E. The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018.
“Kyiv Metropolia and Moscow Diplomacy: an Ottoman Viewpoint.” Scrinium 15, no. 1 (2019). Brill.
Law of Ukraine No. 3894-IX (Bill No. 8371), On the Protection of the Constitutional Order in the Sphere of Activities of Religious Organizations, adopted 20 August 2024, signed 24 August 2024; Human Rights Watch, “Ukraine: New Law Raises Religious Freedom Concerns,” 30 October 2024; UN OHCHR press release, October 2025.
Fourth Ecumenical Council (Chalcedon, 451), Canons 9, 17, 28; trans. NPNF II/14.