GOPers Back Pro-Putin Churches in Ukraine
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Unnamed U.S. Republicans reportedly are working behind the scenes to preserve Russia’s ability to operate in Ukraine through religious organizations based there.
Pending Ukrainian legislation would let officials investigate churches allegedly assisting Russia’s two-year-old invasion of Ukraine and take them to court. Critics of the bill, including some U.S. Republicans, publicly call it a ban on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) and an infringement on religious freedom.
The battle over the legislation, known as Bill 8371, pits right-wing American Christians who redefined religious freedom here — justifying exemptions from U.S. anti-discrimination laws — against a weaponized version of their own creation: a religious-freedom shield for pro-Russian operatives in Ukraine, backed by other right-wing American Christians.
And this wouldn’t be the first time right-wing U.S. Christians helped cloak Russian machinations in religiosity. After the FBI exposed two Russian operatives for using the National Prayer Breakfast to build right-wing back channels, a former CIA official told me that Russia purposefully exploits America’s reluctance to scrutinize religious activity.
Most Ukrainians, polls show, think Russia’s doing just that right now. And the ties between Russian and Ukrainian orthodoxy are deep and historic. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) only finalized its split from the Russian church, a staunch supporter of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin and the war, in 2022.
The UOC condemned the invasion, but many congregants have left. Even if the institutional split is genuine, individual congregations may still harbor Russian sympathies. Ukrainian officials have arrested dozens of church officials on charges ranging from treason to child pornography.
In April, Ukraine accused a high-ranking UOC cleric of giving Russian forces information about Ukrainian military checkpoints.
Both the government and, polls say, most Ukrainians, support legislation to expand government powers to investigate churches suspected of helping the invasion.
But Bill 8371 has been stalled for months — in large part, reportedly, due to unspecified Republican pressure from the U.S.
A handful of Republicans — notably Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — have been vocal about the bill publicly. As has commentator Tucker Carlson, who was largely deferential to Putin during a lengthy interview earlier this year. (Carlson, however, has also spotlighted a UOC lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, who is openly critical of Russia.)
But behind the scenes, unnamed Republicans are also directly pressuring Ukrainian government officials against the bill, according to Ukrainian media.
Parliamentary work on the bill reportedly has been delayed until Ukraine’s annual National Prayer Breakfast later this month, with a high-ranking — but not yet publicly named — Republican from the U.S. expected to attend.
Reports out of Ukraine say that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party delayed the bill to avoid angering Republicans whose votes Ukraine needed to win $61 billion in funding from Congress.
According to The New Voice of Ukraine, citing an unnamed Servant of the People insider, Ukraine’s prayer breakfast will be held at the end of this month with what the outlet described as a “guest appearance by a high-ranking official of the U.S. Republican Party.”
The Ukrainian party insider told New Voice that unnamed conservative Republicans see Bill 8371 as religious oppression and an encroachment on religious freedom.
Those Republicans “have repeatedly reached out to [Ukrainian] lawmakers and the President's Office,” the source told New Voice. “Proceeding [with Bill 8371] may jeopardize their support.”
The source called Bill 8371 “a trigger point” for these Republicans.
Debate on Bill 8371 has been delayed for multiple reasons, the source told New Voice. One was to avoid making it an issue at this coming weekend’s international Ukrainian peace summit in Switzerland.
Another reason for the delay: “[T]o avoid harming the president [Zelenskyy] and current international policy objectives,” the source told New Voice. For that reason, New Voice reported, the parliament will hold off on debate until after the American visit to the prayer breakfast at June’s end.
Another outlet, Voice of America, says that the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has also waded into the fight. (USCIRF did not respond to my request for comment.)
Last year, when Bill 8371 hit Ukraine’s parliament, USCIRF told Voice of America that the commission asked Ukraine’s top U.N. diplomat to ensure that the legislation wouldn’t violate religious freedoms.
USCIRF Chair Rabbi Abraham Cooper acknowledged at the time “some of the worst religious freedom violations” by Russians. But he also said, “However, we reiterate our concerns about the possible impacts of law No. 8371."
U.S. efforts to protect religious freedoms abroad have historically included extensive involvement of right-wing Christian leaders and organizations, including the Fellowship Foundation. Also known as The Family, the secretive group is the driving force behind the right-wing prayer breakfast movement that helped spawn Ukraine’s annual event, as well as Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ+ death penalty and the destruction of a U.N. task force targeting an evangelical Guatemalan president suspected of corruption.
Many right-wing Christian leaders define religious freedom not just in its original sense, as freedom from discriminatory laws, but as freedom to discriminate based on religion. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, for instance, is a former USCIRF chair with ties to The Family and a staunch supporter of legalizing anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination on religious grounds.
One longtime insider of The Family, former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), was serving as a USCIRF commissioner, appointed by then-Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), when USCIRF first pushed back last year on Ukraine’s Bill 8371.
During his tenure, which ended only last month, Wolf also faulted Russia for “religious freedom violations.” He has a widely respected record on issues of religious freedom, but he has also cited it as grounds for legal exemptions from anti-discrimination laws.
An opponent of reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, Wolf signed onto a legal brief arguing that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993 allowed companies to deny some health-care coverage if it offended the religious sensibility of company owners.
That case ultimately yielded the Hobby Lobby ruling, embracing Wolf’s position and denying workers the right to contraceptive care coverage. (Hobby Lobby is owned by the Green family, which has its own ties to The Family.)
Wolf’s USCIRF bio boasted that he wrote the 1993 RFRA law, which “infused religious freedom into U.S. foreign policy.”
He also served on the advisory board of In Defense of Christians (IDC), which has multiple ties to The Family. (The IDC was recently tied to illegal fundraising for former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE), also a Family insider.)
Another Family insider involved in the Ukraine debate allegedly claimed that U.S. policy was to destroy the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Amsterdam, the UOC lawyer, told Carlson in April that “some of this targeting of the church came from Washington, that it was partially planned because Washington saw our church, which had a spiritual connection to Russia, as somehow being a threat.”
Amsterdam reportedly used much starker language in a Ukrainian-language interview in February. “[I]t was U.S. policy to destroy the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Eastern Orthodox,” Amsterdam reportedly claimed.
In both interviews, Amsterdam named Bob Destro, former undersecretary for human rights in the Trump State Department, as the source of this claim. (Destro was also listed as recently as last year as an IDC emeritus board member; an internal Family document I obtained names Destro as a Gulf States point person for the 2016 National Prayer Breakfast, working under former Gov. David Beasley (R-SC).)
Amsterdam said that Destro made his incendiary claim about U.S. policy in February, the same week as the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast and affiliated religious freedom events in Washington. Destro was a panelist at that week’s International Religious Freedom Summit.
But conservative Christians aren’t of one mind on Bill 8371 — even those who share a right-wing view of religious freedom.
Former Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) was Trump’s ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom and co-chaired the 2024 IRF Summit. (Amsterdam asked Brownback to bar a Ukrainian official who supports Bill 8371 from participating in the February IRF Summit.)
But Brownback — who once lived at The Family’s C Street residence — is a defender of Bill 8371. He wrote this April that “There is no religious freedom protection for aiding an invading army in their conquest of another country,” but didn’t explain why not.
Brownback is not new to Ukrainian terrain. He reportedly was a key figure in U.S. support for creating a new autocephalous, or independent-headed, orthodox church in Ukraine. Russia’s top orthodox cleric, Patriarch Kirill, accused the U.S. of seeking to divide Russians from Ukrainians, who made up 40% of the Russian-led denomination before the split.
Today, Brownback sees the schism between Russian and Ukrainian orthodoxy, which began before the invasion, as having stoked Putin’s fears of losing influence over Ukraine and its majority-orthodox Christian people.
And yet another Family insider has been the face of evangelical Ukrainian opposition to Russia.
In a previous life, Pavlo Unguryan led a Ukrainian political movement combating LGBTQ+ and reproductive rights — or supporting life and the traditional family, as he would put it. Unguryan was also The Family’s point man in Ukraine, organizing the prayer breakfast there and picking guests to attend the prestigious original in Washington.
As I first reported in April, Unguryan used religious freedom as part of his shadow diplomacy — meeting with Zelenskyy and, separately, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) — to convince Christian conservatives that this was a holy war, with religious freedom its cause, as Russia persecuted evangelical Protestants.
Unguryan appears still to be running the Ukrainian prayer breakfast set for late this month. In previous years, he ran it as a right-wing rally and networking event.
(At the 2019 Ukrainian breakfast, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) credited the events for helping influence then-Pres. Donald Trump to back right-wing Christian causes. Last year, The Family flew Walberg to Uganda’s prayer breakfast to steel Ugandan resolve against international opposition to its LGBTQ+ death penalty.)
In April of this year, Unguryan was part of a religious-themed meeting with Zelenskyy at which the main ask of Ukraine’s wartime president was that he resume the nation’s prayer breakfasts. It’s not clear that the breakfasts ever really went away, but we’ll likely find out later this month whether the request was really just for Zelenskyy to start giving the event his official government imprimatur, an important and powerful tool that The Family seeks for many of its religious activities.
We may also get some idea of whether Unguryan and The Family will resume using the prayer breakfast for right-wing ends. (Unguryan appeared on Perkins’s show pitching Ukraine as a bulwark against European liberalism and says he is backed by several right-wing evangelical organizations.)
Either way, once the June prayer breakfast tables have been cleared, we may soon learn Bill 8371’s fate. And whether those unnamed U.S. Republicans successfully defended their vision of religious freedom at the possible expense of Ukraine’s war effort.
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Holy schisms.
Christofascits gonna Christofascit.