When Vladimir Putin presented Donald Trump with the conditions for peace in Ukraine, he did not merely demand the cession of the Donbas. Two clauses revealed the Kremlin’s true obsession: the recognition of the Russian language as official in Ukraine and the guarantee of protection for the Russian Orthodox Church. Two demands that do not speak of geopolitics, but of identity, culture and religion: the real battlegrounds that Moscow can no longer control. It is the same nostalgia that re-emerges in the symbols: from the military parades recalling the great patriotic war to the monuments to Stalin inaugurated in Moscow, up to the highly symbolic gesture of Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who showed up in Anchorage wearing a sweatshirt with the CCCP inscription, as if to evoke a past that no longer exists.

The rift within Orthodoxy

Already in 2019, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople had granted the tomos of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, effectively sanctioning its separation from Moscow. It was both a theological and political split: Kyiv claimed spiritual independence as part of its national emancipation.

From a canonical point of view, this choice has had enormous consequences. It means that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine is no longer ‘under the jurisdiction’ of the Moscow Patriarchate, but is fully independent in governing itself: electing its own bishops, organising its ecclesial life and preserving its liturgical tradition. At the same time, the act of autocephaly reaffirms the role of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople as primus inter pares in the Orthodox world, i.e. as the universally recognised authority to settle questions of unity and canonical legitimacy. In simple terms,the Ukrainian Church took the power to define its identity away from Moscow and returned it to Constantinople, the original centre of Orthodoxy.

The invasion of 2022 made this fault permanent. In 2024, a law gave the government the power to ban religious organisations linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, while symbolic sites such as the Kyiv Cave Lavra came under the control of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Putin continues to demand ‘guarantees’ for his Church, but the reality is that Ukraine has already realigned itself elsewhere.

The language that changes with war

The language battle also recounts an irreversible process. The 2019 law had already enshrined Ukrainian as the sole state language, but it was the war that made it a mark of identity. According to data from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) and surveys reported by The Insider in 2025, 63% of Ukrainians speak Ukrainian at home, 13% Russian and 19% both languages equally. This is a significant increase from even 2020 alone, when Ukrainian was used in the household by only 52% and Russian by 25%.

In addition to this internal transformation, there are other significant elements. On a digital level, academic research shows that the use of Russian on social media was already declining before 2022, but with the invasion it fell rapidly: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have become laboratories for the ‘Ukrainianisation’ of communication.

The change is also marked on a political and social level: in December 2022, 80% of Ukrainians stated that Ukrainian should prevail “in all public spheres”, while only 15% supported the idea of a bilingual country – a drastic reduction from 33% five years earlier. The idea of an officially bilingual Ukraine has almost dissolved.

It should be noted, however, that territorial and age differences remain: in the eastern and southern regions and among the older generations, the use of Russian is even more frequent, while among the young and in the west of the country, Ukrainian clearly prevails.

Finally, the education system has become a decisive instrument for consolidating the process. In 2023, 98.4 per cent of secondary schools taught exclusively in Ukrainian and 99.1 per cent of students received instruction in this language. The Russian language, now marginal, was studied as a subject by just 768 students, compared to 454,800 in 2021: a collapse that photographs the acceleration of change.

To demand a return to official bilingualism today is not realpolitik, but imperial nostalgia. Language, like faith, marks the now unbridgeable distance between Kyiv and Moscow.

Cracks beyond Ukraine

Away from the front, the Russian cultural and religious sphere is crumbling elsewhere. Latvia has broken ties with Moscow, declaring its own independent Orthodox Church. In Lithuania, pressure is growing for the same step, whilein Moldova, dozens of parishes have already chosen to join the Bessarabian Metropolia, linked to Bucharest. It is a movement that silently spreads and reminds us how, over the centuries, the strength of the Russian Empire was not only military, but made of rites, alphabets and symbols. Even in Central Asia , the switch to the Latin alphabet in Kazakhstan has a clear political meaning: to distance itself from the Russian matrix.

The Betrayal of Armenia

The Caucasus is perhaps the most dramatic example of this loss of trust. In 2023, during the Azeri offensive that emptied Nagorno-Karabakh, Russian troops did not lift a finger. In Yerevan, there was open talk of betrayal: the historical protector had left Armenia at the mercy of Baku. In 2025, the Armenian government even signed a peace agreement under a Western umbrella, mediated by the United States. For Moscow, which had always presented itself as the guarantor of the Caucasus, this was a huge blow.

Possible contagion

The war in Ukraine has not only redrawn borders, it has accelerated identity fractures. Putin’s every demand on language and church is proof that the Kremlin knows: its empire is crumbling in souls before it does on maps. If Ukraine does not turn back, the risk is that other peoples – from the Baltic Churches to the Moldavian communities, to Armenia and beyond – will decide to follow the same path. It is a process that the violence of 2022 has made irreversible.

Trump may host Putin and imagine a ‘grand bargain’, but the truth is that those conditions are already out of time. No decree will bring Ukrainians back to praying with Moscow or writing in Russian. The war has exploded rifts that were silent, and now they are widening like concentric circles.