PBS News Weekend

A fight over territory between Russia and Ukraine has extended to the church. With an estimated 200 million followers, the Eastern Orthodox Church is one of the world's three main Christian branches that include Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. But Eastern Orthodoxy is less centralized than the Catholic Church, with no single ruler like the pope and a reliance on patriarchs to head national churches. Under this system, the Ukrainian Church has been operating for hundreds of years through the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church, a scenario that seemed to work until five years ago, when Russia and Ukraine began a brutal war over territory. Now, many in Ukraine see the church's links to Moscow as a battle for the soul of the country. NewsHour Weekend Special Correspondent Simon Ostrovsky has the story with support from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.