Metropolitan of Kyiv is an episcopal title that has been created with varying suffixes at multiple times in different Christian churches, though always maintaining the name of the metropolitan city — Kiev (Kyiv) — which today is located in the modern state of Ukraine.

The church was canonically established and governed by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in Kievan Rus'.

Following the signing of the Council of Florence, Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev returned to Moscow in 1441 as a Ruthenian cardinal.

The Grand Duke deposed Isidore and in 1448 installed own candidate as Metropolitan of Kyiv — Jonah.

Gregory's canonical territory was the western part of the traditional Kievan Rus' lands — the states of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland.

The Great Prince of Moscow voided the union in his lands and imprisoned Isidore for some time.

Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) sent him as legate to Constantinople to arrange the reunion there in 1452, and gave him two hundred soldiers to help the defence of the city.

His tenure was challenged by the anti-Eastern Orthodox sentiments of the King of Poland Casimir IV Jagiellon and the 1482 plundering of Kiev by the Crimean Khan Mengli Giray,[25] an ally of the Grand Prince Ivan III of Moscow.

In 1595, most Eastern Orthodox leaders in the Metropolis of Kiev and all Rus' signed the Union of Brest with the Holy See, thereby establishing the Ruthenian Uniate Church.

This is a list of Metropolitans of Kiev, Galicia and all Ruthenia in the Ruthenian Uniate Church before the partitions of Poland:[30] Some clergy in the Commonwealth refused to subscribe to the Union of Brest and continued with the old rites and their allegiance to the Ecumenical Patriarch.

In 1620, the patriarch of Jerusalem — Theophanes III — entrenched the schism by establishing an "Exarchate of Ukraine" for those dissenting clergy and laity who refused to conform to the union.

In that year, the Metropolis was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Moscow, which then assumed the right to consecrate the Kievan metropolitans.

The title became an honorific with no practical sense of governing an ecclesiastical territory beyond its own geographic remit.

A majority (initially) of bishops associated themselves with a wing of the Church that was supported by the OGPU (the Soviet secret police).

This relative freedom lasted till the return of the Red Army in 1944, after that the UAOC was again liquidated and remained structured only in the diaspora.

It had four metropolitans during that time: On 15 December 2018, the UAOC along with the UOC–KP merged into the unified Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The council voted to unite the existing Ukrainian Orthodox churches (UOC-KP, UAOC and parts of the UOC-MP) through their representatives, on the basis of complete canonical independence.