After Ukraine’s Boats, Is a Church the Next Battleground for Russia?

Kiev considers martial law following a naval clash with Russia. Meanwhile, a potential religious conflict is brewing between the two countries.

Russia fired upon and seized three Ukrainian ships over the weekend for allegedly violating its territorial waters while crossing the Kerch Strait, which Russia has effectively controlled since it seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. The worrying escalation saw the two militaries come into open conflict, and Kiev is now mulling martial law in response. Inland, meanwhile, religious tension is bubbling ...

Taras Palianytsia isn’t religious, but the Holy Dormition Pochayiv Lavra monastery has been on his mind a lot lately. Built on a hill in the 16th century, the monastery towers over the small western Ukraine city of Pochayiv that Palianytsia calls home. The shrine is Ukraine’s second biggest monastery and one of its most sacred Orthodox sites. But right now, Palianytsia, a deputy in the local city council and member of the nationalist “Svoboda” (Freedom) party, says the monastery is “a problem.”

A country of 42 million people in which two-thirds of the population is Orthodox, Ukraine is in the midst of a tussle over its religious identity. In early October, the Istanbul-based Constantinople Patriarch, considered “first among equals” in the Orthodox world, announced its intention to grant Ukrainian clerics independence from the Russian Orthodox Church, which controls the Pochayiv monastery and has, until now, dominated religious life in Ukraine. The previously unrecognized Church of the Kiev Patriarchate will take a leading role in the new church.

Denver’s Nikola Jokic has graduated from immature enigma to one of the game’s most riveting talents.

Doubters be damned, Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic wasted no time setting the tone for his breakout NBA season.

After three years largely spent finding his footing in the league, Jokic, 23, was expected to elevate his game this season. The versatile big man’s skill set — one reliant on creativity, court vision and shooting touch — is rare in a league full of more explosive, bruising centers. But since Jokic was drafted in 2014, NBA scouts and Denver fans have touted him as a “center of the future,” awaiting the day when the evolving NBA properly valued its improving big man’s unique gifts. That day has come.

Suave, disciplined and ruthless — highwaymen don’t come more effective than Feringeea.

The Thugs made several efforts not to kill the young, beautiful Muslim woman who they assumed was not carrying enough money to warrant the effort. But the woman’s “growing affection” for Feringeea — the gang’s handsome, high-caste Hindi leader — sealed her fate, says Mike Dash, author of Thug: The True Story of India’s Murderous Cult. “He had no interest in strangling her,” says Dash, but Feringeea could not allow their friendship to go any further. That night, deep in the jungle of southern Rajputana, the signal was given and the woman and her servants were murdered.

This young woman was only one of the hundreds of victims strangled by Feringeea and his gang of Thugs along the highways of central India in the first decades of the 19th century. Widen the net to include other Thug gangs and earlier eras, and the death toll could easily be between 50,000 and 100,000, estimates Dash.