Church

CRITICAL: церква is the only viable term but is an acutely live, politically contested word in contemporary Ukraine, not merely a default-institutional-reading risk as in more religiously homogeneous contexts. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, the historically Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) has faced intense public distrust and legal scrutiny, while the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU, granted its tomos in 2019) and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) are widely seen as aligned with Ukrainian national identity. Romans’ sense of church as the universal people of God, not any one institution or jurisdiction, must be framed with particular care; громада (local assembly/community) is a useful clarifying synonym that sidesteps jurisdictional questions entirely.