Is Ukraine Putin’s Holy War?

I went to Moscow in 1991 to talk to Gorbachev’s religious advisers and to visit a little Catholic church and its community in the shadow of the Lubyanka. Two surveillance cameras were

trained on the door. The parish priest was a resilient Ukrainian who had spent many years in prison. Catholicism is not Russia’s favourite brand of Christianity.

Gorbachev’s religious advisers wanted to talk about life after communism. They were worried about what would fill the vacuum and hold society together. “Now our communist ethics [sic] have

gone what is going to replace it?” Enter Christianity, which provided the glue for society and which was seen by them as the only available solution. I told them things weren’t quite that

simple and that they would need to accommodate different varieties of Christianity. I wondered privately about the future role of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Thirty years on and Russia is 70% Orthodox with quite a high level of observance. Pentecostals and Plymouth Brethren are given a very hard time and there is little love wasted on the

Catholics. Orthodoxy in Russia has largely become a politicised religion.

The Russian Orthodox Church is undoubtedly important to Putin. His mother may or may not have been a closet Orthodox Christian who had her son secretly baptised. Metropolitan (head of a

major diocese) Tikhon, first trained as a screenwriter and friend of Putin, is known for his ultraconservative nationalist theology, his opposition to democracy and support for censorship as

well as his promotion of Orthodoxy as the antidote to “Western decadence”.

The friendship between Putin and Tikhon dates from the late 1990s and developed into a close relationship as their careers blossomed. Tikhon reached the status of Archimandrite (Grand Abbot)

in 1998 and became Rector of the restored Stretensky Seminary in Moscow in 1999. Putin became President of the Russian Federation in 2000 in time to oversee the rebuilding of Moscow’s

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

It is difficult to assess what the Russian Orthodox Church means for Putin’s life, thinking, imperial ambitions and legitimacy. Until Archbishop Rowan Williams’ recent denunciation of the

Moscow Patriarch Kirill’s collusion with the war in Ukraine, Putin’s thinking about religion hardly featured in UK media analysis of his motivations. The question of  whether Putin is simply

using religion as a political tool, seeing war as “a mere continuation of policy by other means”, remains unanswered.

There is nothing exceptional in a head of state attending a thanksgiving service after their inauguration. In Putin’s case, having won the presidency in 2000, he went straight to prayers in

the Orthodox Cathedral of the Annunciation in the Kremlin. We do know that Putin makes diplomatic use of his relationship with Orthodoxy. During a visit to George W. Bush in June 2001 Putin

drew attention to the baptismal cross his mother allegedly gave him. “This was a very good meeting”, Bush enthused. “And I look forward to my next meeting with President Putin in July. I

very much enjoyed our time together. He’s an honest, straightforward man who loves his country. He loves his family. We share a lot of values. I view him as a remarkable leader”. Trump was

not the only President to be enamoured. Putin knew which buttons to press.

Archimandrite Tikhon has on several occasions accompanied Putin on foreign visits and Putin has visited the impressive Russian Orthodox monastery of St. Panteleimon on the Greek peninsula of

Athos at least twice. The first time was in 2005 and the last in 2016 when, with Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, he joined celebrations of the thousandth anniversary of Orthodox monks

establishing themselves on Athos. Recently a friend of mine on pilgrimage to Mount Athos saw about thirty men, in a small taverna in the ferry port of Ouranoupolis all in their late 20s with

shaved heads, eating supper in silence. Next day he watched them disembark in orderly fashion at the first Russian monastery on the peninsula. His immediate thought was that they were

Russian soldiers from a military academy.

There is other evidence of militarisation of religion. In June 2020 Sergei Soigu, the Russian Defence Minister, opened the main church of the Russian Armed Forces on the outskirts of Moscow.

The khaki-coloured Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ was dedicated for the 75th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War. Its metal floor is made from melted down Nazi

ordinance and armour. It has icons of martyrs who fought for Russia, most strikingly that of Fyodor Ushakov, “righteous commander of the Black Sea Fleet”.

The Ukrainian capital has religious significance for Russians. In 988 Prince Vladimir was baptised in the Crimea. The conversion of the Rus people began when he returned to Kyiv. An equally

significant date for Putin is 1686 when the Orthodox Church in Ukraine was brought under the Moscow Patriarchate, only to split away in 2019 — supported by the then Ukrainian President Petro

Porochenko — when the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul granted it “autocephaly”. Patriach Kirill’s view of Kyiv as the Jerusalem of Russian Orthodoxy might explain why central

Kyiv has not been shelled.

According to the Christian think tank, Theos, Putin does believe Grand Prince Vladimir’s “spiritual feat of adopting Orthodoxy” “predetermined the overall basis of the culture, civilisation

and human values that unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus”. And Patriarch Kirill sees his role as being “concerned with the maintaining and strengthening of spiritual ties

between people living in these countries for the sake of preserving the system of values which the one Orthodox civilization of Holy Russia reveals to the world.”

In short, for Putin, the old canonical boundaries of the Russian Orthodox Church provide the template of Russia’s rightful political boundaries, and after the catastrophe of the Soviet

Union’s disintegration, justification for the resurrection of “the Russian World” (Russki Mir) to challenge and defeat the secular political project of Ukrainian politicians who are backed

by a degenerate Western world.

Does Putin really believe his barbarism in Ukraine is a Holy War promoting a glorious expansive, ethnic vision of Holy Mother Russia? Or is he simply instrumentalising religion? Whatever his

motivation, there are signs it is backfiring. On 13 March 2022, distinguished members of the Russian Orthodox Church signed and circulated A Declaration, which condemned Russki Mir as a

heresy. It has 1,280 signatories including theologians and others from different Christian traditions around the world. Some have compared it to the Declaration of Barmen which described the

Nazi “Christian Movement” as a heresy.

Perhaps the secular West should consider that some atavistic part of Putin really does believe in this perverse religious vision. The militarisation of Russian Orthodoxy is obvious and

worrying. It has policy implications for the West, Ukraine — and the world.

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