by concelebrating the liturgy with Epiphanius while considering Epiphanius as primate of the OCU. The Ecumenical Patriarchate declared on 8 January 2018 that the tomos was "approved and valid" and that the signing by the whole synod was a "purely technical step". It added that Ukraine had asked for the tomos to be brought to Ukraine for Christmas instead of leaving it in Istanbul for a few days until the whole synod signed it. Main religious groups The main religious groups are presented below: Eastern Orthodox Orthodox Church of Ukraine Abbreviated as the OCU, the church was established by a unification council on 15 December 2018, and received its tomos of autocephaly (decree of ecclesial independence) by Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople on 5 January 2019. The council voted to unite the existing Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdictions: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP), the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church (UAOC) and two bishops of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP). The primate of the church is the Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Ukraine. The unification council elected Epiphanius Dumenko as its primate, previously the Metropolitan of Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi and Bila Tserkva (UOC-KP) in 2018. Orthodox Ukrainians of the diaspora are subject to the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Ukrainian Orthodox Church The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, sometimes abbreviated as UOC-MP, operates as an autonomous church under the Moscow Patriarchate. The head of the church is Metropolitan Onufriy who was enthroned in August 2014 as the "Metropolitan of Kyiv and all Ukraine". The UOC-MP claims to be the largest religious body in Ukraine with the greatest number of parish churches and communities counting up to half of the total in Ukraine and totaling over 10 thousand. As of 2007, the UOC also claimed to have up to 75% of the Ukrainian population. Independent survey results, however, show significant variance, as many Orthodox Ukrainians do not clearly self-identify with a particular jurisdiction and, sometimes, are even unaware of the affiliation of the church they attend or the existence of the controversy itself. This makes it difficult to use survey numbers as an indicator of the relative strength of any given Church. Also, the geographical factor plays a major role in the number of adherents, as the Ukrainian population tends to be more churchgoing in the western part of the country rather than in the UOC(MP)'s heartland in southern and eastern