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The paper aims to demonstrate characteristics of interaction between governmental efforts to maintain national security and the situation with freedom of religion in Ukraine. To answer the questions of how political decisions have influenced the religious sphere in Ukraine over the past five years including wartime and whether there is a balance between national interests and freedom of religion we apply event impact assessment comparing trends of transitions of parishes and people attitudes towards different Orthodox churches before and after political actions and governmental decisions during 2018–2023. The paper confirms that although religion was repeatedly brought into the political sphere religious pluralism persists in Ukraine on the territories that are under government control. We demonstrate that establishing the Orthodox church that was independent of Russia bolstered freedom of religion and full-scale Russia invasion caused a steep increase in many religious transfers from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UPC MP) to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Despite an increased role of the state and issues of national security due to Russian aggression, the religious sphere was quite autonomous.
Salnikova et al. (Wed,) studied this question.