On a Saturday night in New York City in December 2021, months before Vladimir Putin sent tanks and missiles and thousands of soldiers to try to cut the heart out of Ukraine, a boxing instructor named Liubomyr saw something that made him worry for his home country.
The 30-year-old, Brooklyn-based Ukrainian expat was seated in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, alongside scores of like-minded spectators, to witness the latest performance from one of the most compelling fighters in professional boxing: lightweight Vasiliy Lomachenko, a sporting icon in Ukraine.
Whenever Lomachenko headlined a card in New York, Liubomyr, who emigrated from Ukraine to the United States in his early 20s, made sure to show up. A member of the national amateur boxing squad of Ukraine for several years, Liubomyr cribbed many of the moves in the ring—the shrewd feints and dervish-like pivots—his countryman was celebrated for, and attempted to teach them to some of his more capable clients.
“In Ukraine, many fighters copy his skills,” Liubomyr said. “We learned from him many, many things. He was an example for us.” Liubomyr, who first crossed paths with Lomachenko on the amateur circuit in 2007, saw his support for his compatriot as something beyond fandom; it was his civic duty.
Lomachenko, after all, is one of the greatest fighters boxing-rich Ukraine has ever produced, compared to Muhammad Ali by none other than Ali’s former (and Lomachenko’s current) promoter, Bob Arum, and to Willie Pep by the late doyen of boxing Harold Lederman.
As an amateur, Lomachenko reportedly racked up 396 wins against one loss (which he eventually avenged), winning two Olympic gold medals in the process (in 2008 and 2012). As a professional, he became a world champion in his third bout, a feat achieved by only one other boxer in history, and he has gone on to amass titles across three different weight divisions.
All the while, Lomachenko, 36, has mounted a reputation as one of the most entertaining attractions in boxing, in spite of his relatively diminutive stature—he is listed as 5-foot-7—and somewhat pedestrian punching power. As a savvy yet frenetic southpaw pressure fighter who combines dexterity and gusto with aplomb, Lomachenko is a stylistic anomaly, and his various monikers speak to his unusual craft: the Matrix, Hi-Tech, and the malapropistic No-Mas-Chenko, a reference to his habit of making opponents fold on their own accord, as Roberto Duran once did by mumbling “no mas” against Sugar Ray Leonard in the most infamous instance of abdication in sport.
On that December night at the Garden, Lomachenko was in prime form, flashing pinpoint combinations and balletic footwork en route to a dominant 12-round decision over rugged Ghanaian contender Richard Commey. But Liubomyr was taken aback by what happened next.
As the announcer recited the judges’ largely academic score totals, a cornerman walked over to Lomachenko and draped a banner over his shoulders. It was not the Ukrainian flag, as the occasion called for. Instead, those horizontal bands of blue and yellow, signifying the sky over fields of wheat, were superseded by three clusters of grapes set against bands of yellow and red. It was the official flag of his hometown, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi, a port city in the Odesa province of eastern Ukraine noted for its winemaking heritage.
For non-Ukrainian viewers, the moment would not have made much of an impression. But for Liubomyr, it was a troubling revelation.
Moscow’s brutal, 2022 invasion was still several months away, but since the 2014 Maidan “Revolution of Dignity”—the deadly uprisings that ousted president Viktor Yanukovych in a bid to root out Russian influence and assert a muscular Ukrainian nationalism—and Russia’s subsequent invasion of Crimea, the two countries were locked in a bitter territorial and ideological conflict that had already led to the death of approximately 14,000 people. And here was an opportunity for Lomachenko, a sporting kingpin, to assert the cause of his people at a time when the country was in dire need of such expressions of unity.
The decision, then, to publicize a municipal flag, instead of the national one, was largely seen as a slap in the face and met with widespread condemnation within Ukrainian-speaking circles. The gesture was, at best, off-putting, and at worst, disloyal. Considering there were strong indications at the time that Russia was going to ramp up its incursion, the act went beyond mere optics.
Various Ukrainian and Russian news outlets and blogs at the time picked up on the controversy. It even caught the attention of Wladimir Klitschko, the former long-reigning heavyweight champion, who, along with his brother Vitaliy, now the mayor of Kyiv, dominated the heavyweight scene throughout the 2000s. Klitschko, perhaps the most recognizable Ukrainian athlete today, publicly wagged his finger at Lomachenko in a tweet, questioning the lightweight’s patriotism. Such feelings of bewilderment toward Lomachenko would only escalate in the months to come.
“Many people don’t understand why he showed his own city’s flag,” says Liubomyr, who asked that only his first name be used, citing the tight-knit nature of Ukrainian boxing. “You represent Ukraine. Show everybody the Ukrainian flag, not your hometown flag. That’s when people started to hate him.”
Lomachenko’s Instagram account, which has more than two million followers, has been a destination for that hate to coagulate:
“Change your passport already, don’t torture yourself.”
“How about a petition to strip this asshole of citizenship to begin with?”
“Will you get to the Russian ‘brothers’ yourself or can you wait for their rocket to come to you?”
The conflicted status of Lomachenko—his trajectory from the pride of Ukraine to part pariah—has seldom been mentioned in English-language media. In the Western world, Lomachenko is still considered something of a war hero, stemming from his decision, in the early days of the invasion, to put his career on hold and join a local reserve battalion in his hometown—a move that launched a predictable deluge of generous stories extolling his sacrifice and erroneously implying that he would be engaged on the frontlines. (Lomachenko himself acknowledged in an interview that his role was confined to patrolling his neighborhood.)
Perhaps more than any other sport, boxing often finds itself prisoner to the siren call of metaphor. When Lomachenko took on young contender Jamaine Ortiz in October 2022 after finishing up his military service, his return to the ring was pitched at viewers, per the work of his powerful promoter Top Rank and broadcaster ESPN, as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance. Seductive if predictable parallels were made between his fight inside the ropes and the larger one on the frontlines. In a promo video, ESPN journalist and anchor Jeremy Schaap confidently predicted the legacy awaiting Lomachenko. “When people think back to Vasiliy Lomachenko,” Schaap said, “I think probably the first thing they’re going to think about, in addition to his being a champion, is the way that he came to the defense of his country.”
And that viewpoint may very well be true for some people—Americans, for example. But it is not a narrative that many Ukrainians seem willing to buy today. A number of Ukrainian boxers interviewed for this story downplayed Lomachenko’s brief stint in the armed forces, likening it to a PR stunt. (Through a spokesperson for Top Rank, Lomachenko declined to make himself available for comment, citing a general refusal to answer any questions regarding the ongoing conflict.)
Interestingly, the war was not featured as a talking point in the promo exercises in the lead-up to Lomachenko’s last fight, against rising American star Devin Haney in July. Moreover, it has been entirely absent in the promotion thus far for his upcoming title fight on May 12, against George Kambosos Jr. in Perth, Australia, where the focus instead has been on Lomachenko attempting to become a lightweight champion for a second time.
Whatever goodwill Lomachenko may have generated by donning fatigues has seemingly been depleted.
“If somebody tries to make him out to be a Ukrainian hero, [tell them to] go talk to Ukrainian trainers, fighters and they’ll give you a completely opposite opinion,” says Oleksandr Gvozdyk, a former light heavyweight champion who was on the same 2012 Ukraine Olympic boxing team as Lomachenko, in addition to being his Top Rank and training camp stablemate for many years. “This is probably what Top Rank tries [to do] … to make it look like he supports [his country].”
For many Ukrainians, as it was for Liubomyr, the flag controversy was just the beginning of what would become a rapid, wholesale erosion of support for Lomachenko, a pattern that would only accelerate when Russia embarked on its march of carnage in February 2022. More than two years later, with much battleground progress—for either side—grinding to a halt, with tens of thousands of Ukrainians dead, hundreds of thousands wounded, millions displaced, and dozens of cities razed by saturation bombing, the idea of a Ukrainian sporting hero demonstrably spurning a national shibboleth can be a difficult one to stomach.
“I was his fan,” Liubomyr says. “I respect him as a boxer, but I don’t respect him as a person.”
Why Lomachenko repeatedly chooses to confound his compatriots and put himself on the periphery of social norms, at a severe reputational cost, is a question only he can fully answer. But serious attempts to understand Lomachenko’s rationale will require going beyond boxing and entering the realm of his country’s turbulent internal politics, elements of which complicate and perhaps undercut the received portrait of Ukraine as a unified monolith in the face of enemy onslaught.
It would be one thing if the flag gesture were an isolated event. For critics of Lomachenko, it is another entry in a catalog of indiscretions allegedly evincing pro-Russian sympathy.
Lomachenko, to be sure, has never said anything explicitly in support of Russia or its president. But he has also repeatedly fallen short of meeting the bare threshold of social acceptability, most notably his failure to characterize the war as one caused explicitly by Russian aggression. (For Putin and the Kremlin, the war is not a war but a “special military operation.”) His tendency to offer muddled answers when asked about the conflict stretches the credulity of his compatriots who expect a far more firm and patriotic attitude from a public figure of his stature. And on the occasions when Lomachenko has made tacit reference to the war, backlash is swift and unequivocal.
In an Instagram post published on the very day of the invasion—Feb. 24, 2022—Lomachenko produced an illustration of a pair of hands, opened up, thumbs intertwined, mirroring, above it, a silhouetted shape of a dove, the universal symbol of peace and in the Christian tradition associated with the Holy Spirit. The left hand is depicted with the colors of the Ukrainian flag, while the right bears the red, white, and blue of the Russian flag. Lomachenko, a devout Orthodox Christian, included a lengthy prayer as a caption. It begins, “Pray for the peace of the whole world and the enlightenment of the peoples of the earth. Lord, give Your peace to Your people. Lord, grant Your servants Your Holy Spirit, so that He can warm their hearts with Your love and guide them to all truth and goodness.” Suffice to say, a message of peace and unity, the latter of which skirts uncomfortably close to Putin’s claim that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” was not something that shell-shocked Ukrainians were keen on hearing.
“It’s so bad,” recalls Oleh Dovhun, a highly ranked 122-pound professional boxer from Ukraine who has been living in Pittsburgh for the past several years. “We (Ukrainians and Russians) were always OK with each other. Yes, we had trouble for the past 14 years. But still it was mostly OK. But then they just invaded Ukraine. Then he posted that we should all be friends? But we were already friends! They invaded us! What are you saying? I don’t understand why he posted that. It’s not common sense.”
With the war posing a fraught reality for many Ukrainians, such equivocation, perhaps tolerable in the past, is now regarded as entirely unacceptable (and for some, it has been entirely unacceptable since at least 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea). That celebrated athletes like the Klitschko brothers, former soccer star Andriy Shevchenko, tennis player Sergiy Stakhovsky, and current unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk have all chipped in to help and publicize the Ukrainian plight, makes Lomachenko stick out.
“It’s a real outlying position these days,” says Catherine Wanner, professor of History, Anthropology and Religious Studies at Penn State University, who has spent over three decades involved in ethnographic research in Ukraine. “A great deal of athletes have made a lot of statements, refusing to shake hands with Russian athletes, even if it means they won’t collect the prize they’ve earned, even if they can’t compete, even if they pay a high personal price. And that’s because in this war you really have something of a total civilian mobilization. Everyone is doing what they can to win this war and end it.”
The contrast with Usyk is particularly instructive. Lomachenko and Usyk are considered to be best friends (for a time they were nigh inseparable), stretching back to their days in the amateurs, but their public attitude toward the war is night and day. Where Lomachenko is largely tight-lipped, Usyk has been unapologetically outspoken, regularly leveraging his position to speak out against the invasion. (Usyk, as it happens, had been heavily criticized in the past for failing to condemn the Russian annexation of Crimea, where he is from, in clear terms.) Usyk has held fundraisers to support the war effort and has even met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. His last fight in Wroclaw, Poland, a city with a large Ukrainian population, was effectively a morale-boosting event. More than 40,000 strong showed up in the rain on a night that also featured a personal video message from Zelenskyy, who remarked, “The strength of our people is mighty as Oleksandr Usyk.”
“I don’t know why, but [Lomachenko] never says anything about Russia coming and killing Ukrainians,” says Dovhun. “Basically he doesn’t say anything or do anything. But when you don’t say anything that’s bad. Look at Klitschko, Usyk. They try to give Ukraine exposure. And he doesn’t say anything. Ukrainian people are very disappointed in him.”
As for Usyk, Dovhun calls him “my hero.”
“Look at Usyk,” he says. “He used to speak all the time in Russian. And now Usyk only speaks in Ukrainian. It’s a big deal.”
Many of Lomachenko’s peers remain similarly confused and disenchanted by his opaque stance, including pro boxer Taras Shelestyuk, who was amateur stablemates with Lomachenko for four years; they both medalled at the 2012 London Olympics, where Lomachenko won gold and Shelestyuk bronze.
“I do what I can with much less influence than Lomachenko has,” says Shelestyuk. “Loma, I don’t know why he doesn’t want to [be more supportive]. …It’s hard to understand him.”
Gvozdyk, the light heavyweight, sees the argument of Lomachenko’s critics as a simple one.
“Today we have this motherfucker (Putin) who is killing and trying to destroy my country,” says Gvozdyk, who trains and lives with his family in southern California. “There’s been more severe bombing since this war happened. People under debris. People with blood, detached limbs. I don’t support that. Because of that a lot of people don’t love him anymore.”
If there are any clues to Lomachenko’s behavior, his religious convictions, namely his Orthodox Christian heritage and the controversial denomination to which he belongs, are seemingly at the heart of it all.
In his close decision loss to Haney, Lomachenko drew the ire of his critics once more when he was asked in a post-fight interview what he planned to do next.
“Right now I want to go back home to support my country,” he began, adding, “and support my Ukrainian Orthodox Church.”
In a rare interview with the Union of Orthodox Journalists last fall, Lomachenko offered what are likely the most substantive comments he has made regarding his religious beliefs. He credits his father, who is also his lifelong trainer, with raising him in the Orthodox tradition. But it was only when he was 33 years old that he truly began to embrace his faith. Lomachenko said he had an epiphany after suffering a defeat to Teofimo Lopez in their lightweight title unification bout in October 2020. “That was the moment that changed my attitude towards life and my attitude towards faith,” he said. “I could see what I was doing wrong.”
There’s empirical evidence for this supposed sea change. Before the 2022 Russian invasion, Lomachenko’s Instagram page–hardly a perfect representation of a celebrity athlete’s life, but surely the most accessible and ubiquitous, especially for fans–followed a fairly predictable, carefree vibe: product endorsements, selfies, videos and photos of him training, fishing, playing ice hockey. Since the Lopez loss, his page has taken an austere turn, dominated by ecclesiastical subject matter: Byzantine icon paintings, homilies by priests, passages from Scripture. Boxing-related posts are few and far between and the ones that appear are restricted mainly to fight announcements, as if out of obligation. Religion, one gleans from these choices, is not a marginal concern for Lomachenko but a defining feature.
A Ukrainian boxer publicizing his faith would not ordinarily be a controversial matter. After all, Ukraine is a predominantly Orthodox Christian nation. A recent Pew Research Center survey concluded that nearly 80% of Ukrainians (8-in-10 adults) identified as Orthodox Christian, up from roughly 40% in 1991, the year the Berlin Wall fell, and Ukraine became an independent nation. (Unlike Roman Catholicism, the Eastern Orthodox Church is decentralized; it does not view the pope as the top authority and instead, it functions around the basis of autocephalous, or “self-headed,” churches.)
But Lomachenko belongs to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which, despite its name, has historically had connections to and taken its cues from the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Understandably, the very existence of this institution in Ukrainian society has become a flashpoint in the debate over national security, patriotism, and religious freedom, amid intensifying efforts from the government to rein in and at times stamp out elements perceived as pro-Russian.
For nearly three centuries, this Moscow-aligned church was the main Orthodox denomination in Ukraine. The extent of its relationship today with the ROC, one of the most powerful and well-heeled churches in Eastern Orthodoxy, is the topic of fierce contention. Supporters of the church have long insisted that the connection with the ROC is merely filial and symbolic, while critics maintain that it is a Trojan horse for pro-Russian narratives bent on undermining Ukrainian statehood.
The church became at the very least nominally independent of the ROC in 1990, with the breakdown of the Soviet Union. An agreement was reached whereby the church would have self-governing status while still operating under the jurisdiction of Moscow. For at least two decades, this arrangement was accepted by most of Ukrainian society, if at times somewhat uncomfortably. But the Maidan Revolution of 2014, a revolt against the decision of then-president Yanukovych to steer Ukraine into an alliance with Russia instead of with the European Union, dramatically altered the status quo. An ecclesiastical concern became enmeshed in a geopolitical crisis.
Orthodox denominations and their abbreviations
Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Vasiliy Lomachenko’s church): UOC-MP
Russian Orthodox Church: ROC
Orthodox Church of Ukraine: OCU
The notion that the largest Orthodox denomination in Ukraine—the UOC-MP has over 12,000 religious organizations, including parishes and monasteries—possibly has ties with an entity that is not only based inside enemy lines but that has an active and symbiotic relationship with its own warmongering government is a deeply disturbing thought for many Ukrainians.
The head of the ROC, Patriarch Kirill, has long maintained close ties with Putin and has been a prominent and earnest supporter of the invasion. In the early months of the war, amid protests in response to the Kremlin’s partial call-up of military reservists, Kirill told his followers that “carrying out your military duty washes away all sins.” Priests within the ROC are forced to recite a prayer that Kirill composed himself advocating for “the victory of Holy Rus”—or risk getting defrocked. At least one Russian priest was stripped of his rank for substituting the word “victory” with “peace” several times during a public prayer.
Pope Francis once felt compelled to warn Kirill about becoming “Putin’s altar boy.”
Indeed, Kirill and Putin are both promulgators of the ideological concept of the “Russian world” (russkiy mir). For Kirill, this notion postulates a unifying, spiritual Arcadia for Orthodox Christians in the East Slavic nations, namely Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, in which Russian language and culture are the predominant pillars. In a 2009 speech directed at the Russian diaspora, Kirill described parishes in foreign countries as “little islands of the historical Russia abroad.”
In years past, Kirill has been careful to respect sovereign boundaries, especially Ukraine. But that nuance has been lost after Putin, an outwardly religious man himself, co-opted the term, using it as a pretext for his actions against Ukraine (and the Western world writ large), giving his imperial ambitions a theological shape. Kirill, in turn, finds an enforcer for his views. Putin’s claim that the West (NATO, the EU, the US, etc.) is responsible for destroying “traditional values,” dovetails neatly with Kirill’s view that a “metaphysical” struggle is taking place in Ukraine, where the liberal West is sowing moral disorder by holding gay pride parades. Ukraine, in this view, is less a country with its own agency but a bulwark against the social, religious, and geopolitical forces that threaten the Russian order.
With such stark rhetoric coming from the mother church of the UOC-MP, it is then little wonder that many Ukrainians are deeply resentful of the organization and harbor suspicions that there may be fifth columnists within their ranks actively undermining the sovereignty of their country.
Stakhovsky, the retired tennis player, has insisted that, at a bare minimum, Lomachenko should be stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship (while hinting that he might inflict violence on Lomachenko if he ever uttered something about the Orthodox Church to his face). Former boxer Serhiy Dzinziruk, once a champion in the 154-pound division, was similarly dismissive of Lomachenko, saying “He is persona non grata for me.”
A milieu like this might begin to explain why the reaction against Lomachenko has been so furious. The calls for peace and unity between Ukrainians and Russians that describe many of his Instagram posts are regarded not as innocent or naïve appeals but as unadulterated Kremlin agitprop.
“If Ukrainians and Russians are one people,” Viktor Yushchenko, former president of Ukraine, once said, “it means that the Ukrainian people do not exist.”
The frustrations of the Ukrainian public with Lomachenko predate the 2022 Russian invasion.
Back in 2020, Lomachenko landed in hot water when he appeared in a 40-minute documentary produced by a Russian Orthodox monastery, Korsun Hermitage, located in southwest Russia, in which he offers a viewpoint highly reminiscent of the “Russian world.”
“Basically we are one people,” Lomachenko said. “From my childhood, when I was growing up, I had no idea of Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, that these are different people, that these are different borders. I always thought that we are one people, that we are all Orthodox Christians. We all live on the same land.”
In another post, from December 2022, Lomachenko excerpted a clip of Metropolitan Longin, one of the most well-known and admired hierarchs of the UOC-MP, giving a sermon about how the Ukrainian state had waged war against the church. Lomachenko accompanied it with an appeal to his fellow adherents. “We have the opportunity to show how faithful we are to our Heavenly Father and the Mother of our Church … a true Orthodox will show himself precisely at the most difficult moment for our church,” Lomachenko wrote. “Today we have been given a wonderful opportunity to prove whether we are worthy of eternal life in the Kingdom of God!” (Ukrainian media have reported that Lomachenko’s Instagram account has been blocked from viewing in Ukraine.)
“If you take a look at his Instagram, out of his last nine posts, eight are about Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” said Alex Krassyuk, Usyk’s promoter and longtime acquaintance of Lomachenko, in an interview last year. “It’s not about boxing. It’s not about the war in Ukraine. He’s not supporting the war. He’s supporting the unity of the people, between Russians and Ukrainians under that of the Moscow Patriarchate. That’s why he lost so many followers in Ukraine, because this idea is unacceptable.”
“I view him as a victim,” Krassyuk continued. “He inherited his religion. He stands his ground because he is stubborn, he has the heart of a fighter, the mentality of a fighter so once he puts a stake into a position he doesn’t move.
But even for those Ukrainians who are religious themselves, if only in a token sense, the case of Lomachenko beggars belief.
“I think he is brainwashed,” says Shelestyuk, who is also an Orthodox Christian. “Loma needs to study Ukrainian history. I think because he boxed from a young age, he didn’t study. The people who don’t have knowledge of history, it’s easy to manipulate them, like what this Russian church is doing to him. I think he needs to learn Ukrainian history and he will understand what is going on and why Ukraine is an independent country and is separate from Russia.”
Serhiy Prytula, a popular Ukrainian comedian-turned-politician (like Zelenskky himself) who is famous these days for leading one of the largest crowdfunding foundations to provide the Ukrainian military with everything from drones to energy drinks, perhaps best summed up the country’s attitude toward its Russophile population.
“I’d like to address those people who live in Ukraine, but are supporters of the Russian World and are waiting for it to rule in our country,” Prytula said in a video uploaded on his YouTube page in 2022 shortly after the Russian invasion. “Thank God there are not many of you, even though there are some. I have a simple message for you: You also have to help the Ukrainian army, which protects us, and it protects you too. Why? Because when a projectile flies in the direction of your house, it doesn’t have time to conduct an interview or opinion poll to find out if you are a Russian or a Ukrainian patriot. This projectile simply destroys your house and kills everyone there.”
To say that the UOC-MP is embattled today would be an understatement. Caught in the crossfire of domestic unrest and assault from an enemy state (Russian missiles, ironically, have been responsible for destroying many religious buildings that belong to the UOC-MP), the church has been at pains to insist that its connection to the Moscow Patriarchate is strictly historic. Three months after the invasion, the UOC-MP declared full independence from Moscow, although the decision has not actually been ratified. Many of its priests immediately stopped evoking Kirill during their sermons and prayers. Last year, Metropolitan Onufriy, the charismatic head of the UOC-MP and a recurring figure on Lomachenko’s Instagram account, referred to the cause of the war as “Russian aggression” for the first time.
Despite these moves, the Ukrainian government clearly believes the church is a threat to state security, even if it knows that there are plenty of patriotic Ukrainian citizens within its abbeys. In the wake of the invasion, it launched a raft of criminal charges against several top clergy and priests. At one point more than 60 priests were under investigation for collaboration, and at least 20 church leaders have had their Ukrainian citizenship stripped. Public anger erupted last year after the SBU, the intelligence and security arm of the Ukrainian government, released a wire-tap phone recording of one of the leaders of the UOC-MP, Metropolitan Pavel, appearing to endorse the invasion. Pavel was placed under house arrest.
Perhaps the most drastic step to curtail the UOC-MP is a bill currently awaiting ratification in the Ukrainian parliament that some say would essentially ban the church from operating within Ukraine. Last October, the parliament voted overwhelmingly by a tally of 267 in favor, 15 opposed, and 2 abstaining, for a draft law that would give the government power to outlaw any religious organization that has ties to a larger religious body of an enemy state. The bill appears to mainly target the UOC-MP, without explicitly mentioning it.
The proposed legislation has sparked concerns that it violates religious freedom rights. Last year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights issued multiple reports expressing concern about the rule of law and religious liberty in the government’s conduct against the UOC-MP. Although the issue remains under the radar for many in the West, it has attracted the scrutiny of some unlikely figures from the right flank of the US political establishment, most notably conservative commentator Tucker Carlson and Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy, both of whom have also opposed sending further US financial aid to Ukraine. It has also led the church to hire outside counsel in Canadian attorney Robert Amsterdam, who claims that UOC-MP priests have been apprehended on trumped-up charges and are the victims of evidence planting.
“What the Ukrainian government has done to this church is absolutely shameful,” says Amsterdam, whose appointment to defend the UOC-MP was announced shortly after the tally of Draft Law 8371. “This church has been at the forefront of protecting Ukraine. It’s the church that has looked after refugees. It’s the church that first condemned the invasion. It’s the church that ensured that it was completely separate from Moscow, first in 1990, then in 2022 after the full-scale invasion. Frankly, what the government has done in terms of defaming them is just shameful.”
But members of Ukraine’s political establishment maintain that the UOC-MP continues to be in subordination to Moscow.
“This church was created by Russia,” lawmaker Mykola Kniazhytskyi, one of the chief authors of the draft bill, told Politico. “Some of the priests are just spies in cassocks and people just don’t want to tolerate it anymore. The church is teeming with priests who are pro-Russian and while not all of them are agents, they’re ready to assist and to perform some tasks for Russia.”
The Ukrainian government contends that followers of the UOC-MP have a clear and legitimate alternative: the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). The OCU is not only fully independent of Russia but it is also unabashedly partisan; its leader, Metropolitan Epiphanius, offers galvanizing messages to its laity to support the troops and regularly stresses the importance of Ukrainian statehood. Furthermore, the OCU conducts their liturgies and services in Ukrainian. By contrast, the majority of parishes under the UOC-MP deliver their sermons in Russian and services in Old Church Slavonic.
No doubt, the Ukrainian government has a vested interest in seeing the OCU thrive at the expense of the UOC-MP. This dynamic was on full display in 2019 when the government approved an edict forcing the UOC-MP, which was formally registered as the “Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” to rename itself as the “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine” so that its affiliation with the Moscow Patriarchate was transparent. (In the past, many Orthodox churchgoers were not necessarily aware of or focused on the denomination of their parish). But if mass defections were the aim of that bill, it seemed to have largely failed.
Indeed, while attendance in the UOC-MP has drastically plummeted, it has not led to a corresponding boost in the membership of its national rival, which suggests that there is the possibility that there could be millions of devout believers who have “gone underground.” Since the invasion, it has been reported that about 1,500 out of 12,000 parishes in the UOC-MP have switched their allegiance to the OCU—though there appears to be no major doctrinal differences between the denominations, the UOC-MP and the OCU are not as interchangeable as the government has suggested.
For those like Lomachenko who remain committed to the UOC-MP, then, “switching” to the government-aligned church is simply a nonstarter, as it would mean joining an entity that they regard as non-canonical and a puppet of the state. It would mean adopting liturgical practices that diverge from the ones that have been handed down to them over a millennium, from the saints being celebrated to the calendar being observed. It would mean committing a kind of soft apostasy.
Lomachenko has made it apparent through his social media posts that he does not view the OCU as an acceptable home for his spiritual needs. What’s more, he has made it clear that, within a climate that demands that he choose between faith and patriotism, he will prioritize the former.
“If someone mistreats or humiliates your parents, a normal reaction for anyone is to defend them,” Lomachenko said in the Union of Orthodox Journalists interview. “You will stand up for your parents, risking your life if needed. The same works with the Church, the temple, and the Orthodox faith. This is our mother, without whom we would perish. The reaction of any Orthodox person is to stand up in defense.”
Nowhere is Lomachenko’s defense of his church more pronounced than in the Ukrainian government’s actions against its priests and their estates. The SBU, the state security agency, has carried out raids on more than 350 church buildings aligned with the UOC-MP since the invasion, seizing assets and property. The outfit claims to have found in several establishments Russian passports and pro-Russian literature, including propaganda for the “Russian world.”
The most publicized of these raids was on the Lavra, the iconic 11th-century monastic complex in Kyiv and one of the most beloved seats of power in Eastern Orthodoxy. In the fall of 2022, more than a hundred priests and monks aligned with the UOC-MP were ordered to vacate the monastery, prompting protests from churchgoers. Last spring, the Ukrainian government terminated the UOC-MP’s lease on the monastery and transferred those rights to the OCU. (In Ukraine, most of the land is owned by the state, a vestige of its socialist past). The UOC-MP monks who live on the premises of Lavra have repeatedly refused to leave, sparking standoffs with authorities and demonstrators.
Lomachenko has devoted several posts on Instagram to videos, produced by others, that are highly critical of the Lavra blitz. “It’s painful to watch, very painful,” Lomachenko told the Union of Orthodox Journalists when asked for his thoughts on this matter. “No matter from what perspective we look at it, it definitely should not happen.”
“Some people say that banning a religious denomination is a form of persecution,” counters Wanner, the Penn State professor. “That’s true. Those who would argue against that position would say, within the context of war, and when you have sympathizers with an enemy state that is actively not just even bombing and destroying and killing people, but even denies the right of a separate people, that they even exist, and as a result they have no right to state independence—for some people that kind of stark, what they call existential, threat is also a kind of formidable persecution.”
But the perception that the only Ukrainians who support the crackdown of the UOC-MP are ultra nationalists is belied by both anecdotal accounts and statistics. The floated legislation to stifle the UOC-MP does not appear to be especially controversial within Ukraine. According to a poll last year by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 85% of the respondents believe that the government must actively intervene in the affairs of the UOC-MP. And 66% of respondents believe the UOC-MP should be outright banned.
Is it a crime to hold an unpopular viewpoint? The hellfire and rubble of war complicate that calculus, blurring the line between what is considered collaboration and what is simply a minority opinion. And when does patriotism become something like jingoism? When does adherence to one’s faith become a form of treason? Some observers argue that what is happening with the UOC-MP is a symptom of a larger ongoing story about an increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic climate in Ukraine, egregious even for wartime conditions. The fear is that some of the draconian measures greenlit by the Ukrainian government may wind up inflicting irreparable harm on civil liberties in the country, beyond the duration of the conflict. For others, a unified front is all that counts. Andriy Biletsky, a far-right politician and first commander of the Azov Brigade, a controversial militia known to attract extremists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis to its ranks, put it this way: “Today, Ukrainians have only one option of political orientation: for or against Ukraine.”
Critics, including Amsterdam, the UOC-MP attorney, point to the repression of antiwar activists, (mostly left-wing) political dissidents, journalists, and the consolidation of the media under Zelenskyy—nearly all television channels in Ukraine have been subsumed under a single government-managed platform—as signs that Ukraine is descending into an illiberal monoculture, the very form of governing that may describe its current assailant.
For some, the Russian invasion obscures an equally pressing internal issue, and that is the question of Ukrainian identity and how much of it should be pinned on an explicit opposition to anything related to Russia. In 2019, the government enacted a language law that imposed fines on the use of the Russian language in certain public and private contexts. But the fact is that Ukraine has a sizeable Russophile population, who, according to Nicolai Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island and longtime expert on Ukraine and Russia, “refuse to categorize themselves as a minority. They see themselves as Ukrainian citizens.”
“This is a conflict between Russia and the West. It is also a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and it is also a conflict within Ukraine,” Petro said. “Unless you have an awareness of all three, you can’t understand what’s happening.”
“The western part of Ukraine is often seen as part of Europe,” Petro explained. “Then we have the region in the east, which is largely Russian speaking and always has been. What to do about them when you fine the public use of the Russian language? It’s the native tongue. How’s that going to work exactly?”
“I have a lot of friends in Russia,” Lomachenko said in the Korsun monastery documentary. “I have relatives in Russia. I have rivals from Russia. I communicate with everyone, make friends and maintain relationships. I can’t just stop talking to them because they told me that this is a country that is at war with my country. It doesn’t fit in my head.”
This is a conflict between Russia and the West. It is also a conflict between Ukraine and Russia, and it is also a conflict within Ukraine.
Nicolai Petro, professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island
A few weeks after the invasion, the Ukrainian parliament added new laws to their criminal code that widened the scope of prosecution for collaborators of an aggressor state. More than 7,000 collaboration cases are thought to be currently open; by contrast, there were 663 criminal cases in the period between 2014 and 2021. Eight forms of wartime collaboration were delineated in the measure, including public denial of foreign aggression, which, depending on one’s interpretation, could incriminate Lomachenko via his social media accounts.
In some ways, Lomachenko has attracted more than the usual social opprobrium. His various public comments and social media posts have landed him on at least two privately-owned “traitor blacklists,” Myrotvorets and Chesno, both of which are known to be consulted by the SBU. Indeed, after Lomachenko posted about one of his favorite priests, a high-ranking member of the Azov regiment responded by suggesting swapping Lomachenko for Ukrainians held in Russian captivity: “If he is taken for high treason, many Ukrainian patriots who are in captivity can be exchanged for him.”
Myrotvorets, or “Peacemaker,” is particularly notorious for several scandals stemming from its practice of doxing alleged traitors. Founded by a former member of the Ukrainian parliament, the website features more than 1,300 names, from noted pro-Russian politicians to journalists who covered the conflict in the occupied territories. (Some have referred to Myrotvorets as a “hit list” because of a string of mysterious assassinations of pro-Russian Ukrainians who were on the database.) On Lomachenko’s Myrotvorets page, there is a pointed appeal to law enforcement to consider his various faux pas as “deliberate acts against the national security of Ukraine.”
Chesno, or “Honestly,” a liberal NGO in part backed by US government-funded groups, began its own digital dragnet shortly after the Russian invasion.
“Anyone who dare challenges Ukraine’s nationalistic agenda could find themselves on these websites that make public personal data of oppositionists, including their addresses,” says Olga Baysha, a former journalist in Ukraine and associate professor of media and communications at HSE University in Moscow. “This is illegitimate—the Ukrainian Constitution states that ‘the human being, his or her life and health, honor and dignity, inviolability and security are recognized in Ukraine as the highest social value’—and this is dangerous.… I doubt that regular Ukrainian citizens pay attention to these ‘patriotic’ sites, but radicals definitely check on them.” (Chesno declined an interview for this story.)
If there is an air of criminality that accompanies Lomachenko’s profile on Chesno, it appears to be by design. On it, Lomachenko is charged with “the spread of pro-Russian propaganda and the denial of Russian aggression.” A photograph of his face is illustrated with blood dripping underneath the frame. Below is a chronology of his supposed misdeeds. At the top of the screen, there is a suggestion: “You can report a traitor to info@chesno.org.”
That Lomachenko should have few outspoken supporters these days is hardly surprising. Even among his closest peers there is a palpable chill. Usyk, who has emerged in the past couple of years as an avatar of the Ukrainian cause, has been particularly careful to distance himself from his best friend, at least in the public eye. (One has to go back to before the 2022 invasion for the last time Usyk posted a selfie with Lomachenko on his Instagram.)
Of all the Ukrainian fighters who might be sympathetic to Lomachenko, none may be more forthright than welterweight Ivan Redkach, his teammate on that 2012 Olympic team that also featured Usyk, Shelestyuk, and Gvozdyk. Redkach is an unlikely ally because of the reputed bad blood he shares with Lomachenko. Back in 2020, shortly before Lomachenko’s showdown with Teofimo Lopez, Redkach caused a stir by publicly crowing about a large wager he placed on Lopez to win.
Lomachenko apparently did not appreciate that gesture, going so far as to confront Redkach at an Orthodox parish one Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles, where Redkach lives. Boxers are known to be irritable creatures in the days leading up to a fight, in part from all the weight cutting, and Lomachenko, all spleen and no cheer, was no exception. Cooler heads prevailed that day, but in the fight that sparked the spat, Lomachenko would wind up losing to Lopez, and Redkach, as a result, would pocket (so he claimed) $200,000, which he would flaunt in a chintzy video of himself stacking racks behind a pair of shades.
You would be hard-pressed to find two more discordant personalities. Where Lomachenko is flinty, stubborn, and prideful, Redkach is jovial and self-deprecating, a prankster by nature who has had his hair dyed in seemingly every shade on the DayGlo spectrum. Clean-cut versus punk, ego versus id. Just about the only thing they had in common was that they were Ukrainian and that they both fought in the southpaw stance.
Eventually, Lomachenko would have a response to Redkach’s slight, albeit in indirect fashion. When Gvozdyk, his longtime friend and member of his tight-knit circle, took a picture with Redkach at a boxing event in Atlanta, Lomachenko took it as a violation of omerta. Next thing Gvozdyk knew, he was booted from the team.
But whatever enmity Lomachenko may still hold against Redkach seems like juvenile concerns these days. The truth is, Redkach has a lot of sympathy for his old teammate.
“All his messages (on social media) were peaceful and nothing about hate,” Redkach says during an interview interpreted by his wife. “The situation in Ukraine is really tough. You have to spread hate. Otherwise, you will not be loved.”
Dissatisfied with the tenor within his own country lately, Redkach respects Lomachenko for maintaining an outlier position. Where others see complicity in his hesitation, Redkach sees the same stubbornness that has driven Lomachenko to become one of Ukraine’s most accomplished athletes.
“He supports the Orthodox Christians and he doesn’t change his point of view to make sure that it’s going to please somebody,” Redkach says. “At this point I respect him not being like a puppy.”
By contrast, Redkach says he has little respect for Usyk, whom he accuses of selling out to please the more jingoistically-oriented of their confreres.
“Before, Usyk was always saying that ‘no matter what, I’m going to support the Ukrainian Orthodox Church,’” Redkach says. “But once [the invasion] happened, he didn’t keep his word. Meanwhile, Lomachenko, he’s never changed his mind and is openly in support of the church.”
The last time Redkach was back home was in 2019. He is not sure when he will return. While he misses it, he yearns for the version that existed before 2014, a sentiment that may apply to more than a few Ukrainian expatriates these days. And he is aware that he would not be welcomed in his homeland because of his pacifist orientation, what he calls a refusal to “spread hate.” A recent Gallup poll indicates that a majority of Ukrainians, fatigued but unbowed, are not only committed to seeing their country win the war but regard a victory as nothing less than regaining all the territories—including Crimea—that were lost to Russia since 2014.
When Lomachenko ducks through the ropes on May 12 to take on Kambosos for the lightweight title, he will open himself up once more to the scrutiny of a war-weary people. With the invasion trundling over the two-year mark, and victory as elusive as ever, they will probe his every word and gesture for some sliver of consolation. What flag will be draped over his shoulders? Will he mention Ukraine in the post-fight interview? Or will he just say “country”? Or will he simply pay homage to his “Russian church”?
“He has never given any proper explanation of what he thinks,” Krassyuk said last year over WhatsApp. “It’s up to him. If he wants to send a message to the people, he needs to do it himself. As long as he is a famous athlete it’s a natural right. He is a man with over two million followers on Instagram. People follow him and listen to his opinions. He has to go on [social] media and explain his real attitude.”
Whatever his real attitude, the reality is that Lomachenko has chosen to approach this fight purely from a sporting perspective, shorn of symbolism and subtext. “Right now, my goal is to become a world champion again,” he said in a press release when the contest was first announced. “After that, I can start thinking about becoming undisputed [champion].”
I don’t understand why he does these things. But I’m not God.
Liubomyr, boxing instructor
Yet the fight itself is not expected to be all that competitive, with most bookmakers installing Lomachenko as the prohibitive favorite over Kambosos, whose only advantage, admittedly, is that he gets to perform on home turf. Barring a catastrophic meltdown, Lomachenko should have his hands raised. But away from the floodlights and turnbuckles, questions abound. A bloody conflict roars on, and becoming a champion again will do little to quiet the din of his skeptics, discontents, and ex-fans, some of whom will boycott his upcoming fight.
Dovhun, the boxer living in Pittsburgh, intends to watch. He may even find himself, against his better judgment, rooting for Lomachenko.
“When he fought Haney, I said, ‘Fuck it, I don’t care who wins,’” he recalls. “But when the national anthem started playing I was like, ‘I have to support him.’”
As for Liubomyr, the fitness instructor, he will not be tuning in. But he can’t help but hope Lomachenko wins him back.
“If I speak to him personally, maybe he will explain why he doesn’t support Ukraine, why he doesn’t use his social media for supporting Ukraine,” says Liubomyr. “Maybe he will explain it to me. Maybe I’ll be able to understand him. But now? I don’t understand why he does these things. But I’m not God.”
This story was made possible by the support of Sunday Long Read subscribers and publishing partner Ruth Ann Harnisch. Header photograph courtesy of Mikey Williams/Top Rank via Getty Images. Edited by Peter Bailey-Wells. Designed by Anagha Srikanth.
Sean Nam
Sean Nam (he/him) is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, Fixed Fights, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing. His work has appeared in USA Today, Boxing News, and The Baffler. He lives in New York City.
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