Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, Archbishop Major of Kyiv-Halyc, with the consent of the Synod of the Greek-Catholic Ukrainian Church and after having informed the Apostolic See, transferred Bishop Ihor Vozniak, C.SS.R., from Auxiliary Bishop of the Archeparchy of Lviv of the Ukrainians to residential Archbishop of the same see.
Rocco here discusses the ins and outs of what this little snippet may mean.
My thoughts
I am not qualified to disagree with Rocco's reading the fine print of the above excerpt, so I will take his word for it.
As far as the distancing, while it will give the Vatican 'technical', canonical cover, I doubt the Orthodox are really going to buy that. The Russian Patriarch will fume and rage and complain and all that. But since there is pretty much nothing he can do about it except spurn further attempts by the Holy See at reconciliation, the Catholic Church will just have to live with an extension of the status quo.
If Husar plays his cards right and acts in the new role with some humility and discretion, I wouldn't be surprised if some of those Orthodox factions started paying some attention to his calls for a single Ukrainian patriarchate.
In a larger sense, Benedict XVI has a possible strategy here to lure the Orthodox back from schism by pointing at the Ukrainian Greeks and saying, 'They operate with pretty much total autonomy'.
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