Vladimir Putin’s saint, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, promoted Ukraine’s ‘abdication’

Beneath the golden onion domes of Danilov Monastery, a few miles south of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin’s chief shaman explains why Russia wants to destroy Ukraine.

“If we see [Ukraine] As a threat, we reserve the right to use force to ensure that the threat is destroyed,” Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill recently preached to the 90 million faithful followers of his church. “We were engaged in a conflict that had not only physical but also metaphysical implications. We are talking about the salvation of man, something much more important than politics”.

The wartime alliance between Putin and his patriarch is called Symphony, a close alliance between church and state that ensured reciprocal reverence, with no institution supposed to dominate the other. Theologians have spent centuries arguing over the good points, which have now left 44 million Ukrainians the victims of a bloodthirsty land grab that Putin and the Patriarch launched as a holy campaign to soul cleansing.

“A new world order is born before our eyes,” was how Putin described the relationship in a statement published at the start of the war, later warning those who disagreed with him. “let’s do maximum damage to people.” “The Russian people will be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and spit them out like a mosquito that accidentally flies into their mouths,” he said.

To be sure, the only lingering question is how far Putin and his patriarch can go before the means no longer justify the end.

Byzantine and Orthodox church historian Henry Hopwood-Philipps thinks that NATO and all those who oppose Putin’s crypto theocracy have a long wait. “The information war, the military war against Putin seems to be working,” Hopwood-Philipps said. “But for all of the West’s digital gunpowder, we’re up against nearly 700 years of a deeply entrenched otherworldly belief system.”

As the cardinal sees it, Ukrainians are sinners. “Many people who are weak, stupid, ignorant, and often willing to justify their sins are condemned by the Bible as a test of our ability to profess faith in our Savior,” said Kirill. with his flock.

In Western capitals, Hopwood-Philipps says, the importance of Kirill’s muscles has been overlooked or lost in translation. “Putin will execute any Russian layman who disagrees with Kirill,” he said. “Putin and Kirill are bound together, and they have shaped religion to provide the Russian people with spiritual nourishment instead of material nourishment.”

Putin’s revival plan Symphony and using it to gain influence beyond Russia’s borders culminated at a ceremony in Moscow in 2007, when Putin presided over the signing of the Act of Communion with the Russian Orthodox Church in the country. outside. Kirill was appointed Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’ in 2009, heading a global congregation of more than 140 million people.

Since then, about 100 of the 340 clerics who manage the church community abroad have changed their robes to join Orthodox churches that are not affiliated with Putin, according to Dr. Stratos Safioleas, spokesman for the General Greek Orthodox diocese in New York. To date, an additional 145 Church of America parishes abroad have followed suit.

A Russian Orthodox Church in Amsterdam has also left the parish because of threats it received for condemning Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. “It is no longer possible [us] to operate within the Moscow Patriarchate and provide a spiritually safe environment for our faithful,” the parish council of Saint Nicholas of Myra said in a statement.

For the rebel priests left behind in Russia, history can offer a lesson in what comes next from the Kremlin.

According to the diary of Johann Korb, Austria’s secretary before the Court of Peter the Great, Ukraine-born Exarch Stefan Yavorsky begged the tsar to stop torturing those who disagreed with him. “What’s your business here,” shouted the tsar Romanov. “The duty that I owe to God is to save my people from harm and to prosecute crimes of public vengeance that lead to general ruin.”

So, what will it take to protect Putin and the patriarch from further ravaging Russia and destroying Ukraine?

“We need Frodo,” sighed Sergey Buntman, the now muffled Echo Moscow Radio program director, as he watched the Hobbits overthrew Mordor in Lord of the Rings as the only liberator with the mystical wall to save both nations.

And Buntman was not lenient.