Aggressors may deliberately destroy, substitute, or integrate the spiritual institutions and beliefs of an indigenous people into their own dominant religious system. Using religion as an instrument of unification allows the colonizer to establish a rigid ideological dictate, destroy the independent spiritual authorities of the local population, and impose submission upon it through the sacralization of the aggressor's power.
Immediately after the subordination began the imposition of Muscovite church standards and rites, marginalizing the local tradition. The Ecumenical Patriarchate recorded the canonical illegality of the act itself directly: "the alienation from our Throne of the Metropolitanate of Kyiv and of the Orthodox Churches of Lithuania and Poland dependent on it, as well as their attachment to the Holy Church of Moscow, were from the very beginning carried out entirely out of accord with the lawful canonical prescriptions"[1].