Will the Orthodox Church split over Ukraine - Russia conflict and alienation?

as reported in National Catholic Reporter / NATIONAL RELIGION NEWS SERVICE analysis - coverage (March 27, 2014): "[F]or the churches in Ukraine, the protests that toppled President Viktor Yanukovych were also a galvanizing religious awakening and may lead to a seismic shift in church-state relations. Dramatic images of clergy with crosses standing between protesters and government forces went viral as the standoff escalated in January and February. "The majority of the Ukrainian churches followed a paradigm common to Eastern Christianity; they aligned with the state," said the Rev. Cyril Hovorun, a former chair of the Ukrainian Orthodox church's Department of External Church Relations who has also worked at the headquarters of the Moscow patriarchate and is now studying church-state relations at Yale Divinity School. "The churches in their majority on different levels supported the justifiable demands of the Maidan," he said referring to the square in Kiev where the protests took place. Greek Catholics, or Eastern rite Catholics who are loyal to Rome, were the earliest and most active supporters of the demonstrations, he said. Many of them come from Western Ukraine, on the Polish border, where the state and communist policy of persecution of religion under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was accompanied by forced conversion from Eastern rite Catholicism to Orthodoxy. Atheism never took hold. Yet during the protests, all of the churches "with a different pace realigned with the new agenda," Hovorun said, and prayer became an integral part of the protests, which also became, in effect, ecumenical meeting grounds. "Maidan, apart from being an important civil event, appeared to be an important religious event," he said. "There were prayers said every day in the morning and at night. It was a religious phenomenon apart from being a political and social phenomenon, and it was also an ecumenical phenomenon because Maidan actually facilitated many churches, many church leaders who had never really conversed publicly with each other." http://ncronline.org/news/global/ukrainian-crisis-may-split-russian-orthodox-church