Today’s Russian Orthodox leadership is a theological, moral, and pastoral train wreck. U.S. foreign policy can’t fix that. Nonetheless, those responsible for devising U.S. foreign policy should recognize how that train wreck helps define Russia’s ongoing assault on Ukraine, even as it conditions any resolution of the war worthy of the name “peace.”
This past January 7, the traditional Russian Orthodox Christmas, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’ declared that Russia is fighting a “biblical battle” in Ukraine against the “decadent West.” This blasphemy has infected Russia far beyond its metropolitan centers; thus, a new booklet published by the Russian Orthodox Raifa Bogoroditsky Monastery in far-off Tatarstan declared the Russian war on Ukraine a “manifestation of active love” while denouncing those who dared oppose Vladimir Putin’s “special operation” (which has cost Russia some 700,000 casualties) as “cowards” and “traitors.”
Long before Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 and then invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the imperialistic dimension of Putin’s war on Ukraine was obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. Putin, the ex-KGB man, believes that the Cold War’s resolution in favor of the West was a “genuine tragedy” and “geopolitical catastrophe” that unjustly stripped Russia of its great power status. Reversing that alleged tragedy has been Putin’s grand strategy since he assumed virtually autocratic power in Russia in 2000. To that end, Russia has been conducting a new form of hybrid war against the West, involving, as longtime foreign correspondent Edward Lucas put it recently, “propaganda, bribery, physical intimidation, subversion, sabotage and psychological warfare”—to which might be added assassinating Putin’s enemies living in or visiting the West, severing crucial fiber-optic cables beneath the Baltic, fouling the Western information space through troll farms, and seducing “influencers” like Tucker Carlson.
Read it all in First Things
