Abstract
<jats:p>According to the general consensus of domestic and foreign scholars, during the 20th and 21st centuries three attempts were made in Ukraine to obtain autocephalous status for the Orthodox Churches operating on Ukrainian lands: in the 1920s–1930s, during the period of the Second World War, and from the late 1980s of the 20th century until 15 December 2018, when the Unification Council of Orthodox Ukrainians took place. This council laid the foundation for the granting of the Tomos on autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). However, these events did not mark the completion of the unification of all Orthodox Ukrainians into a single autocephalous Church. Moreover, the granting of the Tomos of autocephaly to the OCU symbolized an intensification of inter-Orthodox contradictions not only in Ukraine but throughout the entire Orthodox world. This is evidenced, in particular, by the non-recognition of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine by ten Orthodox Churches, while to date, seven years after the proclamation of its autocephaly, it has been recognized by only four Churches. The reason for this state of affairs was the obvious lack of adequate preparation on the part of both the Church and the Ukrainian state in the process leading up to the Unification Council of 2018. In practice, only the structures of the former Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP) and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) were united at the council. From the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that remained in communion with the Moscow Patriarchate, only two bishops out of more than one hundred hierarchs belonging to that Church took part in the work of the council. What, then, caused this situation? First and foremost, the extraordinary resistance from the Russian Orthodox Church and its satellites. However, an important shortcoming in the process of establishing autocephaly for Orthodoxy in Ukraine must also be acknowledged in the mistakes made by the leaders of the Orthodox Ukrainians themselves, as well as by the political forces that supported them within the country and by their sympathizers abroad. An analysis of these mistakes constitutes the subject of this article. Its aim is to resolve contemporary contradictions within Ukraine’s Orthodox environment and to build in our country a single Orthodox Church of Ukraine that would unite at least the largest church structures operating here—the OCU, the UOC, the UOC-KP, and others.</jats:p>