Neither Moscow’s Chapel nor Brussels’ Ledger

There are disputes in which the wrong question does most of the damage. 

The recent quarrel over the European Union’s twenty-first sanctions package is one of them. Bulgaria has threatened to block the package if Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and Lukoil remain inside it.  Brussels sees obstruction. Moscow sees opportunity. Sofia sees national interest, or at least says it  does. 

The question is not whether Bulgaria should defend Kirill. It should not. The question is whether Bulgaria still knows the difference between defending Orthodoxy, shielding Moscow, and negotiating seriously over its own energy security. 

That distinction is Bulgaria’s national interest. 

Kirill is not the Church 

Kirill is not a martyr. The Patriarch of Moscow has not been singled out for prayer, doctrine, or liturgy. He has been proposed for individual restrictive measures because of his public support for Russia’s war. The measure concerns the man, not the Church. A personal asset freeze and travel ban is not a ban on worship, not the closure of churches, and not a sentence passed upon Orthodoxy. 

That must be said first, because Moscow’s entire strategy depends on blurring it. Kirill blessed an invasion and allowed the language of holy war to be attached to Russia’s violence in Ukraine. That phrase alone should trouble any Christian conscience. The Orthodox East has no crusading doctrine to hide behind. The Fathers did not teach that war becomes holy when the state requires it. Saint Basil’s thirteenth canon did not call killing in battle innocent. It treated bloodshed as spiritually grave enough to require abstention from Communion. That is not pacifism. It is judgment. 

The tradition Kirill invokes condemns what he consecrated. 

Nor is this Justinian’s symphonia. In Novella 6, Justinian described the priesthood and the imperial office as the two greatest gifts of God, whose harmony sustains the Christian order. But harmony presupposes distinction. The emperor does not become a bishop. The bishop does not become a minister of war. Symphonia is not the state swallowing the altar and teaching it to bless artillery. 

The Russian model has long moved in the other direction. The patriarchate of Moscow was established in 1589 and placed fifth in the Orthodox order, after Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Moscow’s own ecclesiastical memory records that order. Fifth, not first. 

Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate in 1721 and replaced it with the Holy Synod, effectively governing the Church as a department of state. Restored in 1917 amid revolution, the patriarchate was then brought into Soviet wartime use under Stalin in 1943, when the regime discovered that a Church it had persecuted could still mobilise a nation. However one judges the pastoral compromises of that terrible century, the institutional result is clear: the Russian Church was trained by empire, then by Soviet power, to survive by proximity to the state. 

That is not apostolic freedom. It is an ecclesial institution habituated to state command. 

The Bulgarian memory Moscow cannot own 

Bulgaria should understand this better than most. Its own Church is no appendage of Moscow’s. Constantinople recognised the Bulgarian patriarchate in 927, making it the first recognised Slavic patriarchate. Moscow’s patriarchal dignity came roughly six centuries later. Bulgarian autocephaly was later interrupted, contested, suppressed, restored, fractured, and reconciled through conquest, Ottoman rule, the Exarchate, schism, and twentieth-century recognition. But the essential point survives every rupture: Bulgarian ecclesial memory does not derive from Moscow. 

The Bulgarian Exarchate of 1870 matters here. It was not a bureaucratic episode. It was one of the central institutions of the Bulgarian national revival, carrying language, memory, and ecclesial identity into the political rebirth of the nation. Its establishment was canonically contested; Constantinople declared the schism in 1872 and lifted it only in 1945. That history should make Bulgarians cautious in every direction. It should make them wary of Brussels’ administrative instincts. It should also make them immune to Moscow’s spiritual patronage.

Russia’s armies helped end Ottoman rule in 1878. The debt is real. Serious nations do not falsify debts. But the Russian Church of that hour had no patriarch. It had been absorbed into the imperial synodal system. The Bulgarian nation did not survive five Ottoman centuries because Moscow remembered it. It survived because Bulgarian ecclesial memory did not die. 

That is why Kirill’s 2018 visit to Bulgaria still matters. He rebuked Bulgarian leaders for acknowledging other nations alongside Russia in the war of liberation. The scene was humiliating because it exposed the old reflex: gratitude demanded as submission. A sovereign Bulgaria may remember Russia’s role in 1878 without accepting spiritual tutelage from Moscow in 2026. 

Sofia’s double game 

The present Bulgarian dispute is therefore not only about Brussels. It is also about Sofia’s own confusion. 

Lukoil is a national-interest file. The Burgas refinery is not a symbol. It is infrastructure. A Bulgarian government that negotiates over energy continuity is doing what governments exist to do. The United States and the United Kingdom have both had to manage waivers and licences around sanctioned Russian energy assets. Frontline states live with refineries, ports, prices, and voters, not only with communiqués. 

Kirill is not Lukoil. To place a patriarch and a refinery under the same veto threat is to disorder the argument before it begins. One concerns energy security. The other concerns the conduct of a religious office holder who became an arm of a war narrative. 

Prime Minister Rumen Radev has invoked religious freedom and the language of crusade while also raising the economic exposure around Lukoil. That combination may work for domestic audiences. It does not answer the deeper question. What is the Bulgarian national interest? Not theatrical defiance in Brussels while quietly accepting the rest of the sanctions architecture. Not performing Orthodoxy as cover for an oil negotiation. Not allowing Moscow to present a sanction on one bishop as persecution of the Church. 

The Bulgarian Patriarchate’s recent posture makes the distinction still more important. Patriarch Daniil has allowed his position to be read as sympathy for Radev’s objection to sanctions on Kirill. Yet the Holy Synod’s official statement of 26 June was more restrained: the Synod declared that the matter was not within its competence. That formal restraint is wiser than the political theatre surrounding it.

The Church should not become the government’s alibi. Bulgaria’s patriarchal dignity is older than Moscow’s. Its role is not to shield the fifth see from consequences. Its role is to preserve the distinction Moscow has violated and Brussels risks misunderstanding: the Church is not the state, and the faith is not the man who exploits it. 

This is where Brussels must also be precise. A conduct-based listing of Kirill can be defended. He is not beyond legal scrutiny because he wears a mitre. But the Union must say exactly what it is doing: targeting an individual for public support of aggression. It must not speak, act, or brief as though ecclesiastical office itself were the target. If measures ever touched worship, parishes, sacraments, or the faithful, the legal terrain would change. Member states enforcing EU measures remain bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, including freedom of religion. That is not this case. But the line matters because civilisations survive by keeping lines before power erases them. 

The Kremlin wants the line erased. It wants Brussels to appear as Rome marching eastward again. It wants Kirill to be mistaken for Orthodoxy, and sanctions to be mistaken for persecution. The answer is not to spare Kirill. The answer is to refuse the lie. 

What Bulgaria’s national interest requires 

A sovereign Bulgarian position would be simple and difficult. Negotiate Lukoil as energy security. Treat Kirill as a man answerable for his conduct. Defend Orthodoxy by refusing both Moscow’s captivity of the altar and Brussels’ temptation to administer the sacred. Remember that Bulgaria’s Church is older than Moscow’s patriarchal claim. Remember that the Exarchate, not the Russian Church, carried the nation’s name through the darkness. Remember that gratitude is not vassalage. 

That is the national interest: neither Moscow’s chapel nor Brussels’ ledger. 

A serious civilisation places even war beneath law, and law beneath judgment. Bulgaria’s task is not to choose between Russia’s sacralised empire and Europe’s administrative impatience. It is to remember what it is: Orthodox before Moscow claimed primacy, European before Brussels claimed ownership, sovereign before either discovered its usefulness.