Tug of war over Russian Orthodox churches in France: Moscow reclaims cultural sites

About 20 years ago, the Russian state began a large-scale operation to take control of Orthodox parishes all over Europe. Some of these had, over time, broken ties with the Moscow patriarchate. They’re now the object of legal cases pitting the Russian Federation against local associations created to run these expatriate churches during the Soviet era. In April, a court in the French city of Nice ruled that a church and historic cemetery there rightfully belonged to Russia, rather than to the local cultural association. For some of its parishioners, seeing the French justice system side with the country waging war against Ukraine has been hard to accept. Descendants of the Russian tsars, on the other hand, welcome this decision. FRANCE 24’s Elena Volochine reports.