I can’t quite believe this is still necessary, but that’s the nature of things i guess. But I’ve recently read a couple of pieces which purport to bring historical and even theological perspectives to the war in Ukraine, claiming to rebalance the narrative because it is distorted by a MSM (mainstream media) that is hostile to traditional Christianity. It really requires rebuttal because it really is the most absurd distortion of the reality.
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Patriarch Kirill’s Christian Framing
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The Ironies of Ukraine’s History
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Nabokov’s Prophetic Insight
1. President Putin’s Christian Framing
When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 (in fury at the Ukrainian people-power rejection of his puppet President Yanukovich in the Euro-Maidan protests), he deliberately makes grand historical justifications. Despite decrying Ukraine as an artificial country He cites NATO expansion as a provocation (but then one just as to ask why other countries would want to join) and the need to denazify Ukraine (and yes, there is a far right elements in parts of the Ukraine military—as there is more or less everywhere, including Russia). How ironic then that Ukraine is led by a Russian-speaking Jewish president from Ukraine’s east, one who lost many family members in the Holocaust? But more than that…
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Putin explicitly invokes the Kyivan Rus leader Vladimir the Great, said to have been baptized on the peninsula in the 10th century and converted the medieval Slavic state to Orthodox Christianity—at which point, Moscow did not even exist. It is, of course, ‘obvious’ that Kyiv must return to Russia (despite the fact that the opposite conclusion could early be drawn). But for those who know and love Russian history, this move apparently makes complete sense.
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Incidentally, according to the article just linked, a poll in Russia conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, found that just 25 percent of Russians surveyed were able to recall that the conversion of Kievan Rus to Christianity took place under Vladimir the Great. So he’s clearly really important to people.
The invasion began in Feb 2022. There are many points before and since at which Putin outlined his casus belli. But two are significant here. Later that year, in September, Putin gave a speech to herald the signing of the Donetsk and Lugansk accession treaties into Russia.
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These regions have joined Russia on the basis of citizens’ right to choose who governs them (and, of course, they’re desperate to secede from Ukraine ). But what about the rest of Ukraine. He’s discussed the historical grounds for this on many occasions: it’s definitely worth listening to the Rest is History episodes on the Vikings in the East (to learn both why he claims this and why it really doesn’t hold up). But that’s not the only justification.
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In this speech, he gets all theological. The invasion is necessary because
Ukraine is being lured away from the Russian sphere (Russkiy Mir) by the conspiring western countries. Representative of this evil influence is the pervasive confusion about sexuality, gender, parenthood. So he declares that this influence must be resisted:
Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.
He cites the presence across Europe and N. America of like-minded people who are equally concerned about these seismic cultural shifts (he’s not wrong about this, of course). His point, though, is that the only hope for the world is push back, territory by territory, and that means preventing Ukraine becoming even more westernised. Which is why invasion is the ONLY course, completing what he began in 2014 in Crimea. How grimly ironic to draw on the Sermon on the Mount at this point, do you not think?
But Putin’s rhetoric doesn’t even come close to what his pet Patriarch, Kirill, has said.
2. Patriarch Kirill’s Christian Framing
6 March 2022: Just days after the invasion began, on Forgiveness Sunday (of all days), Patriarch Kirill preached in Moscow’s Cathedral of the Holy Saviour (in translation here).
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As far as he is concerned, the invasion just days before is quite explicitly linked to, and partly justified by, Gay Pride.
For eight years there have been attempts to destroy what exists in the Donbass. And in the Donbass there is rejection, a fundamental rejection of the so-called values that are offered today by those who claim world power. Today there is a test for the loyalty to this new world order, a kind of pass to that “happy” world, the world of excess consumption, the world of false “freedom.” Do you know what this test is? The test is very simple and at the same time terrible—it is the Gay Pride parade. The demands on many to hold a gay parade are a test of their loyalty to the new world order; and we know that if people or countries reject these demands, then they do not enter into that world order, they become strangers to it.
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Now, there are many things one might say quite legitimately about such events; for example, the domineering cultures of the likes of Stonewall UK have been exposed and resisted recently (for example, at the BBC itself). But at the very least, in a democracy, one can disagree with what a pride march represents or promotes at the same time as accepting its right to take place.
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To suggest that this is why Donbas’ Russian speakers would secede is bizarre. But apparently, they have suffered for eight years because of this desire and thus Putin’s ‘special military operation’ was designed to rescue them. Even though it is now well known that the Donbas resistance was a classic false flag operation with the notorious ‘little green men’.
But a full-blown theologising comes 2 years later (at a point that we now realise was not even half-way through the war). In a decree from the World Russian People’s Council (chaired by Kirill) on 27 March 2024 (entitled The Present and Future of the Russian World), it is stated that:
special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people are defending the single spiritual space of Holy Russia, [against] the West, which has fallen into Satanism.
In previous statements, Kirill declared that death on the battlefield in Ukraine washes away all sins and that Russia opposes the Antichrist and global evil. Naturally others in the ROC (Russian Orthodox Church) echo such views. And when the invasion commenced, the patriarch ordered that the Prayer for Holy Rus for victory in the war should be mandatory in all church services. In this prayer the war is presented as a fight for the survival of the so-called All-Russian nation. In his mind, as this article says, he sees this as a zero-sum game.
The WCC (World Council of Churches) was, in its rather feeble way, quite unimpressed. Which is something, I suppose. But neither this, nor countless other protests, have made the slightest difference. According to catholic scholar George Weigel, the patriarch has doubled down on his heretical position in a recent book in which he claims this ‘war as a salvific action: a duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world’ ($).
Such are my briefest of forays gleaned from cursory Google searches. I confess to not really having the stomach for much more. But there’s no doubt that some regard this conflict as a holy war, and even crusade, that’s being waged against the Satanist West in its humanist secularism that casts of all constraints from common sense and tradition. Ukraine just happens to be the flash point. You can just feel the waves of pity emanating from the Kremlin as night after night Kyiv and other cities are bombarded.
But what really gets me is that Christians in the west who certainly have a few thoughts about culture wars and church decline are swallowing the lines from both president and patriarch whole.
The Ironies of Ukraine’s History
(i) Ukrainian persecutors?
Something that gets picked up from time to time is the subject of religious freedom in Ukraine. It’s a hot button issue for the right, and for good reason. It IS a problem all over the world, and it’s rarely the kind of thing flagged by human rights activists. Organisations like CSW and Release International do vital but often thankless work. But the case is occasionally made that President Zelenskyy is, in Tucker Carlson’s words, ‘a persecutor of Christians’ because of its suppression of the ROC within Ukraine. Far from being legitimate, it actually bears the classic propaganda hallmarks to exploit an existing grievance or concern in the west for anti-Ukrainian purposes.
At stake is the status of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP, formed around the country’s independence in early 1990s). This is inevitably complex and there is much that I don’t understand. But during wartime, all sides tend to exploit whatever means they have to gain the upper hand. As I understand it, there is little doubt that the Kremlin uses the ROC for its own ends, and because UOC-MP is affiliated to Moscow, it’s not hard to see why it has been regarded, and used, as a fifth column. This is in part what led to the historic schism when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) broke away in 2018/19. Christianity is not proscribed in Ukraine. Nor is Orthodoxy. But the UOC-MP is problematic at the very least. No wonder there have been legal consequences, as this fairly recent research paper by Mark Elliot, the eminent church historian of the region, investigates.
However, it should be clear by now that the UOC-MP is a unique case. No other religious organisation or denomination has been affected by this kind of legislation. So the suggestion that there is religious oppression in Ukraine is frankly absurd, as is the claim that there is no free speech.
For all its problems with corruption, agitation and extremists, they are nothing compared to those of Russia where even carrying blank pieces of paper in a protest can lead to imprisonment. What amazes me about corruption in Ukraine, is not that there is a lot of it (which there is) but that it is still actively and successfully hunted down, despite cases coming desperately close to the presidency. Even during wartime. Can you see that happening in Moscow? Or for that matter in Washington DC?
(ii) Ukrainian humanists?
The roots of Christianity in the Slavic world is traditionally traced to the Baptism of Rus in Kyiv in AD998, which is why Kyiv’s Pechersk-Lavra has been such an icon of Ukrainian and Slavic Christian identity. So what’s going on with Putin’s bombing of it? If this really is a holy war, it’s a very peculiar way of going about it.
Furthermore, during the USSR era, Ukraine was an outlier.
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As far as Orthodox believers were concerned, c50% of all ROC parishes across the entire Soviet Union were in Ukraine. And in fact, 25% of all USSR ROC parishes were found in just 4 Ukrainian oblasts (counties)!
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What about Protestants? Ukraine actually had a reputation for being the country’s ‘bible belt’. The USSR’s Baptist church had 1.5 million registered members; over half lived in Ukraine. That made it the largest Baptist community in Europe!
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Then there is the anomaly of the Ukraine Greek Catholic Church, found predominantly in western Ukraine around Lviv and other hubs (the reason, if you’ve ever watched major Vatican ceremonies like conclaves or papal installations, why a bunch of cardinals wear orthodox-looking kit). In the Soviet era after western Ukraine was annexed by Stalin (it had been part of Poland), the UGCC was prohibited. (You can see more about the ban at the Lviv Sobor/Synod here) Prior to that, it had 3.6 million members in nearly 2400 parishes across the region. The church then had to exist underground for the next four decades or so.
How darkly ironic then that Moscow deigns to invade, bomb, and brutalise Kyiv in the name of a holy war when Ukraine was far more ‘Christian’ than Russia (however that might be quantified)?
Nabokov’s Prophetic Insight
I’ll close with an extraordinary paragraph that I read only this afternoon. It comes from an important but chilling book by Russian investigative journalist Andrei Kolesnikov, titled The Closing of the Russian Mind.
The eclectic essence of this ideology, which has been reproduced at various stages of Russia’s historical development, was described astutely by the writer Vladimir Nabokov in the short story “Conversation Piece, 1945,” published in The New Yorker in June of that year. In it, a former White Army colonel – an immigrant living in America – says:
The great Russian people has waked up and my country is again a great country. We had three great leaders. We had Ivan, whom his enemies called Terrible, then we had Peter the Great, and now we have Joseph Stalin. I am a White Russian and have served in the Imperial Guards, but also I am a Russian patriot and a Russian Christian. Today, in every word that comes out of Russia, I feel the power, I feel the splendor of old Mother Russia. She is again a country of soldiers, religion, and true Slavs.
This was an exceptionally precise observation by Nabokov, who abhorred such an ideological combination. Soldiers, religion, and true Slavs: nothing has changed in decades. A militarized empire that considers itself sacred and sanctified by God, blinded by the most vulgar nationalism… (Closing of the Russian Mind, p67)
And still it continues. And still the missiles, drones and bombs continue to fall on a beautiful and inspiring country (destroying thousands of lives and hundreds of religious sites). Make it stop.