Western Orthodox?

[MarkA]

Exactly. IIRC Russia/Muscovy and England didn't even have relations (although remarkably good) until a few decades later, under Ivan IV and Elizabeth I.

So the Russian option would require an early ascendance of Muscovy, as well as an earlier, successful Livonian War that gives it access to the Baltic, at least.



Didn't they get trashed by the HRE? Same as the Poles.

Kievan Rus did have reasonably close ties with Anglo Saxon England with intermarriage among the royal and noble houses.

 

[Abhakhazia]

Kievan Rus did have reasonably close ties with Anglo Saxon England with intermarriage among the royal and noble houses.

The thing is, however, that Anglo-Saxon England was on the very fringes of the Frankish Empire, which was and whose successors would be for centuries the biggest proponent of the Roman Church politically. The only way to really make it so that the northern Germanic nations- Saxons, Angles, Danes and Norsemen- would end up more Greek style than Roman would be a huge political fracturing of the Frankish Empire early on. This in itself could led to there not being serious differences between Eastern and Western Christianity.