How the Russian administration restricts religious freedom and reshapes the religious landscape in the occupied territories of Ukraine
By A. Philalethes
Two new reports published in September 2026 shed light on an aspect of the Russian occupation that is often lost amid military news coverage: the systematic restructuring of the religious sphere. The Council of Europe records serious restrictions on communities not affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, while the research group TOT Insights seeks to map the mechanism behind these pressures — from the security services and compulsory re-registration to the courts and ecclesiastical absorption.
When cross-checked against the findings of the United Nations and USCIRF, the picture that emerges is broader than a series of isolated persecutions: Russia’s legislative and administrative architecture for religion is being transferred to the occupied territories and used as an instrument for controlling identity, institutions and public space.
1. Two reports, one common conclusion
On 2 September 2026, the Secretary General of the Council of Europe released his new annual document on the human rights situation in the Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation. The report covers the period from April 2025 to March 2026 and, although it examines a much broader range of rights, devotes a separate section to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. Its institutional conclusion is clear: severe restrictions on religious communities not affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church have substantially undermined religious freedom and eroded the religious diversity of these areas.
The Council of Europe is not speaking merely of administrative difficulties. It records bans, seizures of religious property, searches of places of worship and homes, criminal prosecutions under Russian “extremism” legislation, as well as the use of rules on “missionary activity” as a means of controlling unregistered communities.
During the same period, TOT Insights published the briefing “Religious Persecution, Cultural Destruction and Ukrainian Identity in Wartime”. It is neither an international organisation nor a judicial body; it is a research platform that seeks to map the institutional architecture of the occupation. The value of this particular study lies precisely there: it does not stop at establishing that violations occur, but tries to explain which bodies do what, which legal instrument is used against each religious community, and what institutional outcome is produced.
2. The mechanism: from “security” to religious administration
TOT Insights proposes a model of five institutional layers. At the first level it places security and coercive mechanisms: the FSB, Centre E and Rosgvardia. One institutional clarification is necessary here in relation to the wording of the briefing: Centre E (Centre for Combating Extremism) is not an FSB service, but a structure of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).
In the analytical model of TOT Insights, the FSB and Centre E are associated with identifying and investigating targets, while Rosgvardia is associated with enforcement operations such as searches and seizures. Occupation administrative structures issue decisions on re-registration, prohibition, or the designation of activities as “extremist”, while prosecutors and courts turn cases into fines or custodial sentences. Finally, the briefing argues that the Russian Orthodox Church is the principal institutional beneficiary where parishes, dioceses or properties are transferred into a new ecclesiastical regime.
The last formulation is an analytical conclusion of TOT Insights, not a verbatim finding of the Council of Europe or the United Nations. Nevertheless, a significant part of the underlying pattern is independently corroborated. The Council of Europe report states that restrictions particularly affect communities not affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, while an earlier institutional report by the same organisation had recorded that re-registration had profoundly altered the religious landscape and that the great majority of registered religious entities in the occupied territories now belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church.
3. Not everyone is persecuted in the same way
The most interesting feature of the new research is that it does not describe a single method of repression. On the contrary, it argues that different religious communities are dealt with through different legal instruments, depending on their institutional and political profile. This differentiation matters because it shows that the occupation’s religious policy does not operate only through prohibition. It also operates through restructuring.
The Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU)
In the case of the OCU, the Council of Europe records that the Diocese of Crimea was formally dissolved in 2025, after a long process of being pushed out of the peninsula. Churches had already been lost in previous years and its institutional presence had been almost eliminated. TOT Insights interprets this trajectory as a combination of administrative attrition, dispossession of property and ecclesiastical absorption — a process different from the outright banning of a religion.
The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
For the Greek Catholics, the model is different. The new Council of Europe report notes that, while some Catholic parishes continue to exist in Crimea, the Greek Catholic Church has been banned in the occupied parts of the Zaporizhzhia region. TOT Insights links this ban to the transfer or redistribution of church property by the occupation authorities. Here there is no possibility of canonical “absorption” by Moscow; the method is the administrative elimination of an organised presence.
Protestants and Evangelical communities
Protestants and Evangelicals are affected primarily through Russian legislation on “missionary activity”, registration and, in some cases, accusations of foreign influence or espionage. The Council of Europe records that between July and December 2025 at least eight raids were carried out on places of worship in the occupied parts of Donetsk and Luhansk — six against Baptist communities and two against Muslim and Pentecostal communities. Administrative cases and fines for “missionary activity” followed. In March 2026, according to the same report, a Baptist pastor lost his residence permit and was ordered to leave the occupied territories.
Jehovah’s Witnesses
In the occupied territories, Jehovah’s Witnesses are essentially subjected to the same regime that applies in Russia. The organisation has been designated “extremist” under the Russian legal order, and this Russian legal framework is extended to Crimea and the other occupied territories. The Council of Europe reports new convictions and states that, at the time of its delegation’s visit, 33 members of the community remained in detention. The United Nations, in the Secretary-General’s report published in June 2026, documented new prosecutions in Crimea and recalled that the European Court of Human Rights has found the criminalisation of peaceful religious activity by Jehovah’s Witnesses under “extremism” provisions to be unlawful.
Muslims of Crimea and Crimean Tatars
For Crimean Tatars and other Muslims, the main legal route is different and often harsher: counter-terrorism and anti-extremism provisions, particularly in cases of alleged links to Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Russia but not under the Ukrainian legal order. The Council of Europe report states that, according to Ukrainian data, 104 Muslim Crimean Tatars were in detention mainly on such charges. In January 2026, the occupation authorities also seized the historic Khan-Jami mosque in Yevpatoria, depriving the local community of the possibility of Friday prayers.
4. The Russian Orthodox Church and the reshaping of canonical geography
The religious dimension of the occupation becomes even more complex in the Orthodox case. The change does not concern only the OCU. An earlier Council of Europe report recorded that dioceses of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) under Metropolitan Onufriy in the occupied territories were unilaterally incorporated into the Russian Orthodox Church, and that UOC clergy who opposed incorporation or criticised the war were replaced, arbitrarily detained or convicted. This is a crucial point: it shows that what is at stake is not a simple confrontation of “Russia versus a hostile Church”. Even ecclesiastical bodies historically belonging to Moscow’s sphere can come under pressure when they refuse the canonical reordering that follows military occupation.
TOT Insights goes one step further and describes this development as “ecclesiastical jurisdiction following military control”. The wording is analytical, but it describes a real problem: when the military seizure of an area is followed by the reorganisation of dioceses and parishes under Moscow, canonical geography ceases to be merely an internal ecclesiastical matter and acquires a clear geopolitical function.
5. The same legal architecture already exists inside Russia
The significance of the occupied territories cannot be understood in isolation from the religious policy of the Russian Federation itself. In its 2026 Annual Report, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) assessed that in 2025 Russia continued severe violations of religious freedom, using designations such as “extremist”, “undesirable” or “terrorist” organisation against peaceful religious groups. The Commission estimated that approximately 190 Jehovah’s Witnesses were in pretrial detention, imprisonment, house arrest or forced labour for religious activity.
This picture is not based only on policy reports. On 16 October 2025, the European Court of Human Rights, in Markin and Others v. Russia, held that the criminal prosecution of believers for continuing peaceful worship activities as Jehovah’s Witnesses violated Article 9 of the European Convention. In other words, the legal instrument being applied in the occupied Ukrainian territories is not a special invention of the occupation. It is the export of an already existing Russian model for restricting religious activity.
6. From religious freedom to the politics of identity
This is also where the most substantial contribution of the two new reports lies. Religious repression is not presented as an isolated phenomenon. The Council of Europe places it within a broader strategy which, according to its report, seeks not only to control territory but also to assert dominance over the population through structural violence, erosion of Ukrainian national identity and serious violations of fundamental rights.
The United Nations points in the same direction. The Secretary-General’s report records pressure to acquire Russian citizenship, the imposition of the Russian curriculum, restrictions on the Ukrainian language, the criminalisation of pro-Ukrainian symbols and views, monitoring of private communications, and restrictions on religious practice. The same state structures, therefore, do not regulate only where and how a person may pray. They regulate language, education, memory, political expression and civic identity.
This makes religion part of a broader policy of coercive incorporation. When a community must acquire Russian legal status in order to retain its property, when public missionary activity can be punished, when religious groups are prosecuted as “extremist”, and when education and public memory are simultaneously redefined, the result is not merely a restriction on worship. It is a redesign of the social space within which religious identity can exist.
7. What we know — and what we should not overstate
The evidence also requires an important caveat. Neither the Council of Europe nor the United Nations has unhindered physical access to the occupied territories. The Council of Europe explicitly states that it relies on visits to Kyiv and Warsaw, discussions with Ukrainian authorities, international organisations, human rights defenders and public sources. The United Nations reports that the Russian Federation did not respond to the request for access, but its findings are based on direct interviews with victims and survivors and are included when the standard of “reasonable grounds to believe” that the event occurred is met.
TOT Insights, for its part, is a research source rather than an intergovernmental or judicial one. Its classifications — especially the claim that the Russian Orthodox Church is the “sole institutional beneficiary” of the process — should be treated as an interpretive model and checked against primary sources. That is precisely why it matters that many of the individual facts it uses — the dissolution of the OCU in Crimea, the banning of Greek Catholics in Zaporizhzhia, prosecutions of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and repression of Muslim and Protestant communities — are independently corroborated by the Council of Europe and the United Nations.
8. The real geopolitical stake
The discussion of religious freedom in the occupied territories is not only about protecting individual believers or communities — important as that is. It concerns the question of whether military occupation can be converted into a permanent change in cultural, ecclesiastical and national identity. In the Ukrainian case, the new reports show that religious policy operates in parallel with the imposition of Russian citizenship, the Russification of education, control of information and the reordering of cultural memory.
This is the point at which the “geopolitics of religion” ceases to be a theoretical term. The Church, legislation, security services, courts and administrative mechanisms converge in the same field. And the result, according to the institutional reports, is a religious environment that is progressively less pluralistic and increasingly dependent on the political and legal structures of the occupying power.
The most critical observation is not that “Russia persecutes religion” in general. The reality is more specific and, for that reason, more troubling: religious activity that fits within the permitted Russian institutional framework may continue to exist, while communities, clergy and believers that do not fit within that framework face an escalating range of pressures — from re-registration and fines to seizure, prohibition, expulsion and imprisonment.
Religious freedom is not abolished by a single act. It is restricted through a system that determines which forms of faith are institutionally tolerated and which are turned into a matter of “security”.
Primary and institutional sources
- Council of Europe — Human rights situation in the territories of Ukraine temporarily occupied by the Russian Federation (SG/Inf(2026)23) — 2 September 2026. The principal new institutional report; covers April 2025–March 2026.
- Council of Europe — Continued deterioration of human rights in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine — 9 September 2026. Official presentation of Secretary General Alain Berset’s report.
- United Nations / OHCHR — Situation of human rights in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, including Crimea and Sevastopol (A/HRC/62/59) — 13 May 2026 / published 26 June 2026. Report of the UN Secretary-General with a dedicated section on freedom of religion.
- Council of Europe — Human rights situation in the territories of Ukraine temporarily controlled or occupied by the Russian Federation (SG/Inf(2025)24) — 30 June 2025. Used for the background on re-registration and the incorporation of Orthodox dioceses in the occupied territories.
- European Court of Human Rights — Markin and Others v. Russia — 16 October 2025. Judgment concerning criminal prosecutions of Jehovah’s Witnesses under Russian extremism legislation.
Research and supplementary documentation
- TOT Insights — Religious Persecution, Cultural Destruction and Ukrainian Identity in Wartime: An Institutional Attribution Briefing — September 2026. Research mapping of institutions, legal instruments and differing patterns of pressure by religious community.
- S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) — 2026 Annual Report, Russia chapter — March 2026. Supplementary documentation on Russia’s domestic religious-freedom regime and its application in the occupied territories.
- USCIRF — Russia’s Religious Freedom Violations in Ukraine — Issue Update — July 2023. Background on the export of the Russian legal framework to Crimea and the other occupied territories.
