Dmytro Horyevoy, a well-known religious scholar, analyzed the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church from the geopolitics perspective.
In the article on LB, the expert explained the geopolitical model of Orthodoxy.
"It is clear that, in addition to pastoral care, Patriarch Bartholomew had a number of other reasons to untie the Gordian knot of Ukrainian Orthodoxy. It is obvious that after autocephaly, Kyiv will be a natural ally of Constantinople in the inter-Orthodox arena. Just like the UOC-MP will play in the Moscow national team. The question lies in the very foundations of these blocs and coalitions.
Bartholomew's program is about the openness and development of Orthodoxy. Development, not conservation at the level of an ethnographic museum. It is ready for revision and reform, a cautious but urgent reform. And this is not about some ultra-liberal things that propagandists intimidate with. Bartholomew himself is quite conservative, but there are Church problems that do not fit into the framework of the "liberalism/conservatism" dichotomy. These are questions of fasting and calendar, liturgical innovations and the role of believers in society. There are so many relics of previous eras in the church that the issue of LGBT people, for example, is simply not visible on the horizon, because it is lost in the queue of pressing problems. Bartholomew wants to solve these problems.
But the Russian Orthodox Church does not want to change anything, because, first of all, it is afraid of its own flock, which they themselves incited, that everything should be unshakable. Secondly, the more changes there are, the more questions and rights ordinary believers have, which is something the Moscow Patriarchate doesn't need. It is much more interesting to build historiographic concepts of "Holy Russia", to impose political influence on neighbors through the Church, language and history.
In fact, the Phanar is building a kind of British Commonwealth in an ecclesiastical way. Where there is a formal role of the head, but everyone has real independence. That is, there are autocephalous churches and the first Mother Church in honor, which gave birth to them, gave independence, and now is only spiritual authority. And there is the Russian Orthodox Church, which is building the second Warsaw bloc, where everyone is formally independent, but all decisions are made in Moscow," Dmitry Gorevoy summed up.