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You’ve heard plenty about Russia’s territorial expansion. But the Russians aren’t stopping there. In Africa, the Russian Orthodox Church is pioneering ecclesiastical expansionism. By offering gifts—not theological persuasion—it’s winning over priests and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which covers all of Africa. The Moscow Patriarchate poaching African Orthodox Christians from its very own brethren is less odd than it might seem, because it’s a geopolitical move—and part of an ongoing battle within the Orthodox Church over Ukraine.

You’ve heard plenty about Russia’s territorial expansion. But the Russians aren’t stopping there. In Africa, the Russian Orthodox Church is pioneering ecclesiastical expansionism. By offering gifts—not theological persuasion—it’s winning over priests and parishes from the Patriarchate of Alexandria, which covers all of Africa. The Moscow Patriarchate poaching African Orthodox Christians from its very own brethren is less odd than it might seem, because it’s a geopolitical move—and part of an ongoing battle within the Orthodox Church over Ukraine.

J. Peter Pham is one America’s most experienced Africa hands—and an ordained Episcopal priest with a doctorate in theology and a postgraduate degree in canon (church) law, along with more worldly credentials in economics, political science, and international law. When Pham travels to Africa, where he served as the U.S. special envoy for the Great Lakes Region as well as the first-ever Sahel envoy in the Trump administration, he visits churches and speaks with fellow clergy from all kinds of denominations.

In recent months, Pham has been witnessing an extraordinary development. “I’d heard about the Moscow Patriarchate wooing priests away from the Patriarchate of Alexandria,” he told me. “Whenever I traveled in these areas where I’d heard it was happening, I started looking into it. And it turns out it wasn’t just one or two isolated cases. It was a large number of African Orthodox clergy who had been part of the Patriarchate in Alexandria and had been recruited by the Moscow Patriarchate. It was very systematic.”

As their names suggest, the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the Patriarchate of Moscow are related. The Patriarchate of Alexandra, which is based in the famed Egyptian port city, looks after the African continent’s Eastern Orthodox Christians, outside of traditionally Orthodox Ethiopia, who are thought to number around 1 million.

It’s a storied Patriarchate that........

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