The United Methodist Church voted Thursday to allow conferences in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to leave.

They are part of the United Methodist Eurasia Episcopal Area, based in Moscow, which also includes United Methodist churches in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.

Bishop Eduard Khegay, head of the Eurasia Episcopal Area, spoke to the United Methodist Church General Conference and thanked them for allowing the four conferences in the Eurasian region to become autonomous.

The nation of Ukraine is included, with Moldova, in the Ukraine-Moldova Provisional Annual Conference of The United Methodist Church, part of the Eurasia Episcopal Area led by Khegay.

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Khegay thanked United Methodists for supporting the Moscow Seminary, which trains pastors for the entire region, and thanked them for their influence on his education. He earned a master’s degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.

He said this would be his last United Methodist General Conference, but that autonomy for the Eurasia Episcopal Area would become official with the Eurasian Conference’s final vote scheduled for 2025.

Khegay did not address reasons for the Eurasian Episcopal Area seeking independence from the United Methodist Church, but the Eurasian churches have generally been more conservative theologically than the U.S. United Methodist Church.

The conferences approved to leave, under paragraph 572 of the United Methodist Book of Discipline, are: the Central Russia Annual Conference, Eastern Russia and Central Asia Provisional Annual Conference, Northwest Russia Provisional Annual Conference and the Southern Russia Provisional Annual Conference.

Following that vote, the United Methodist General Conference, which meets through May 3 in Charlotte, took up debate over a plan for regionalization, which would allow regional bodies to govern themselves, and prevent churches around the world from helping set U.S. church policy on issues such as same-sex marriage and ordination of practicing homosexuals. A petition to amend the constitution to allow regionalization got the necessary two-thirds majority on Thursday, with 586 yes votes and 164 no, but still requires further two-thirds approval by all conferences.

Methodism in Eurasia began with a missionary pastor from Sweden, Carl Lindborg, in 1882. He founded the first Russian Methodist congregation in St. Petersburg in 1889. A few congregations were planted in Ukraine prior to the first World War, notably near Uzhgorod and Ternopil. Uzhgorod was shuttered during the Soviet era.

Current churches in Ukraine began after the end of the Soviet Union, which brought an influx of United Methodist missionaries from the United States, Germany, and Liberia into many of the newly independent nations in the 1990s.