The Russian Orthodox Church declares ‘holy war’ on Ukraine

Like Putin’s Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church and its leader, Patriarch Kirill, have completely lost their spiritual bearings and rejected everything that Christianity claims to represent, above all, the belief that one should love one’s neighbor as oneself.

On March 27, just a few days before most Christians celebrate what Saint Paul considered to be the central element of the Christian faith — Christ’s resurrection from the dead — Kirill’s church adopted a programmatic document that indirectly though unmistakably endorses killing, death and genocide. It’s called the “Order of the 25th World Russian People’s Council, ‘The Present and Future of the Russian World’” — and it makes for terrifying reading.

Part One is dedicated to the “Special Military Operation,” Putin’s euphemism for his invasion of and war against Ukraine. Kirill, clearly, rejects Jesus’ advice that the things that belong to Caesar should be given to Caesar. And why not? Russian Orthodoxy has become a central component of the Kremlin’s propaganda.

“The special military operation [SMO] is a new stage in the national liberation struggle of the Russian people against the criminal Kyiv regime and the collective West behind it, waged … since 2014,” says Part One. “During the SMO, the Russian people, with arms in hand, defend their lives, freedom, statehood, civilizational, religious, national and cultural identity, as well as the right to live on their own land within the borders of a single Russian state.”

Readers may wonder just how a poorly armed small state such as Ukraine could possibly threaten a well-armed giant state such as Russia and force it to defend itself “with arms in hand” by launching a limited invasion in 2014 and a full-scale invasion in 2022. Not even foreign policy “realists” like the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer would make such a preposterous claim.

Readers may also wonder how church leaders could have reached the following astounding conclusion: “From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people … fulfill the mission of ‘Restrainer,’ protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism.”

Even Putin hasn’t called his special military operation a holy war, though Kirill’s terminological innovation, which brings to mind the Crusades and Islamic Jihad, is perfectly compatible with Putin’s language.

Then Kirill shows his true face: “After the completion of the SMO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine should enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence in this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.”

The last two words are key. Complete exclusion is possible only if all Ukrainians are either killed or deported — that is, if Russia completes the genocide it’s already committing. Putin couldn’t have put the case for mass murder and war any better.

But Kirill and his pals don’t stop with holy war and restraining Satan. They have bigger plans, as noted in Part Three:

“The reunification of the Russian people should become one of the priorities of Russian foreign policy. Russia should return to the doctrine of the trinity of the Russian people, which has existed for more than three centuries, according to which the Russian people consist of Great Russians, Little Russians [Ukrainians] and Belarusians, who are branches (sub-ethnicities) of one people, and the concept ‘Russian’ covers all the Eastern Slavs. … In addition to recognition and development in domestic science, the doctrine of the trinity should receive legislative codification, becoming an integral part of the Russian legal system. The Trinity should be included in the normative list of Russian spiritual and moral values and receive appropriate legal protection.”

Reunification is code for exterminating and/or assimilating Ukrainians and Belarusians. Their names will survive, but their languages, cultures, identities and histories will not, having been swallowed up by the “Great Russians.” Destroying the “soul” of a nation in this way is just what Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish scholar who coined the word genocide, meant by the term.

So, there you have it. Kirill has transformed the Russian Orthodox Church into an anti-Christian handmaiden of Putin’s fascist state. Instead of separation of church and state, Kirill has opted for subordination of church to state.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”