Petr Dudnik, the Good News Church pastor, said he did not know who exactly was behind the takeover but said it fit into a long campaign by the Russian Orthodox Church to portray competing denominations, particularly evangelicals, as a heretical fifth column inspired and financed by the United States.

The Orthodox Church, like the Roman Catholic Church, traces its origins to the earliest Christian church established by the Apostles and, shaped by the different histories and cultures of its main strongholds in the eastern Mediterranean and Slavic lands, comprises a wide range of divergent views and political attachments. But unlike the Rome-based Catholic Church, from which it split in the schism of 1054, the Orthodox Church is divided into autonomous branches, with the Moscow patriarchate a particularly conservative and, in territory it judges bound to Russia by history, language and faith, assertive force.

“We cannot ignore the fact that the conflict in the Ukraine has unambiguous religious overtones” Patriarch Kirill I, the Moscow-based head of the Russian church and its Ukrainian affiliate, wrote in a recent appeal to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I in Istanbul, the Orthodox faith’s most senior cleric. Accusing rival churches, including a breakaway Ukrainian Orthodox church, of persecuting believers who obey the Moscow patriarchate, he cast efforts by the Ukrainian military to confront Russian-backed rebels as a religious war intended to “overpower the canonical Orthodox Church.”

Rival church leaders say there is indeed a religious struggle underway but insist its root cause is political and what they see as the Moscow patriarchate’s role as an instrument of Kremlin policy. “Patriarch Kirill has become part of the Russian government, and it is in this light that his words and actions should be perceived,” said Patriarch Filaret, the head of an Orthodox hierarchy based in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.

The Moscow church has avoided giving explicit support for separatist gunmen but made no effort to rein in pro-Russian fighters who, claiming to serve the Russian Orthodox Church, imposed a reign of terror on Slovyansk marked by murders, kidnappings and general thuggery.