On Jan. 5, some 150,000 people lined up in front of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. They came to see a single document called a tomos, issued a few days before by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. There, on a piece of parchment, written in ornate Greek, English and Ukrainian, were words that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had dreamed about for centuries: The document made the Ukrainian Church autocephalous, meaning it is now fully independent from Moscow.

This declaration of independence came about despite months of behind-the-scenes attempts by the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church officials to dissuade Patriarch Bartholomew from issuing a tomos. When cajoling did not work, Kremlin-connected hackers (who were recently indicted in the United States) stole thousands of email messages from Patriarch Bartholomew’s aides. When blackmailing failed also, Moscow resorted to traditional bullying — issuing unspecified threats and denouncing the patriarch as an agent of the United States and the Vatican.

Still he did not waver, and the split was accomplished.

It is a serious blow, on several levels, to the ambitions of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, as well as the Russian Church. The Ukrainian Orthodox population accounts for about 30 percent of all Orthodox Christian believers under Moscow’s patriarchate. Dozens of parishes have already switched to the Ukrainian Church and hundreds more are likely to follow. Moscow stands to lose millions of the faithful and untold millions of dollars in church property.

But those are not the most important losses. With autocephaly, a large portion of the Ukrainian population will now be under the influence not of Moscow on church matters but of an independent church in Kiev. In other words, Russia may have annexed Crimea, but it has lost Ukraine.