Ukraine’s ban targeting Russian-linked faith groups raises religious freedom concerns

Ordinarily, I would be fully in favor of religious freedom for even the Russian Orthodox Church, but the ugly reality is that apart from some evangelical (and cult) groups, most churches in Russia are compromised by the FSB (the new KGB), as well as their international branches. So to allow them to go on unmonitored is more or less to set up a spy center in a huge portion of Ukrainian towns.

More or less, the independence that former Soviet and Warsaw Pact republics seem to show, as well as their level of corruption, is a strong function of their physical and linguistic distance from Moscow. The same goes for the churches of the former Warsaw Pact. Like it or not, the USSR did not totally die; it rebranded.