The Ukraine: more state meddling in the church?
Like Eritrea today, Peter the Great’s Russia or Henrician England... obviously Mr Yushchenko, who belongs to the country’s biggest nationalist schism from the Russian Orthodox, wants his side to be the national church with the bigger Russian Orthodox province of the Ukraine/metropolia of Kiev absorbed into it and cut loose from Moscow; something I’ve heard the US may favour as it meddles in the area trying to keep Russian power in check. (What if Mr Putin did that sort of thing in Canada?)

Here is the Russian Orthodox response. Most Ukrainians are secular; most of the churchgoing minority are Russian Orthodox. Galicians in former Polish territory in the south-west are Ukrainian Catholic; I don’t know how many of them practise.