Journal Issue Explores Religion As A Weapon In Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill on Unity Day on Nov. 4, 2016, a patriotic day in Russia to commemorate the 1612 expelling of Polish-Lithuanian forces from Moscow. Creative Commons photo
(ANALYSIS) Russia today is a quasi-religious fascist state claiming legitimacy from the support it receives from a morally compromised Orthodox Church. That is the sense of the phrase, “clero-fascist (or clerical-fascist) state” employed by Father Leonid Kishkovsky, ecumenical officer of the Orthodox Church in America, which has operated independently from Moscow since 1917.
Father Kishkovsky used the phrase after witnessing the enthronement of Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Moscow in 2009. Paul Mojzes, founding editor of Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe, recalls Kishkovsky’s pained clero-fascist state observation in his introduction to OPREE’s newly released, themed issue on Ukraine. It is ironic that 13 years ago, a leading figure of American Orthodoxy would already have perceived the Moscow Patriarchate’s support for Putin as a prop for a fascist autocrat who today claims he must rid Ukraine of nonexistent Nazis.
In this same OPREE Ukraine-themed issue, I was given the opportunity to plumb the depths of Patriarch Kirill’s complicity in Putin’s fratricidal, Cain versus Abel war against Ukraine (“Putin’s Invasion of Ukraine; What’s Religion Got to Do with It?”). An accompanying “Chronology of Church-Related Public Protests against Russia’s War on Ukraine” will require additions almost daily because of the continuing flood of faith-motivated laments, appeals and petitions against Putin’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine. In a stranger-than-fiction state of affairs, a contract-killer kleptocrat in the Kremlin, with a power-obsessed patriarch in tow, poses as the leading protector of Christian values against a decadent, secularizing West. So to “save” Ukraine from its Western “temptation,” Russia’s military, I argue, “is about the destruction of a democratic, religiously tolerant state that is home to arguably the most robust Christian population of any country in Europe.”
Also in this Ukraine-themed issue, OPREE co-editor Beth Admiraal points out, “There are other religious dimensions to this crisis, too many to enumerate adequately in this space.” She is right, and in time each one she notes should receive its due:
“Religious groups … actively working within and outside of Ukraine to help citizens who are fleeing Ukraine.”
“Faith organizations … leading vigils for peace and raising funds to support Ukraine.”
“The Jewish faith of Volodymyr Zelensky (that) has become a part of his patriotism.”
And sadly, “some evangelical leaders in America (who) have come out in support of Putin’s invasion” (“Religion and Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” xi).
OPREE co-editor Admiraal also highlights a themed article treating a new religious movement that is frequently the target of state and societal discrimination. In this instance, Jehovah’s Witnesses are the “litmus test for religious freedom in a given state.” The conclusion of four Ukrainian scholars is that members of this much-maligned religious minority, “with few exceptions … have been largely unhindered in practicing their faith in Ukraine” (Admiraal, xi; Roman Bogachev et al., “Activities of the Jehovah’s Witnesses Organization as a ‘Litmus Test’ for Religious Freedom in Ukraine”). The authors tellingly contrast Ukrainian tolerance with the treatment of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia, where their faith has been banned since 2017 and where over 600 have been prosecuted for practicing their allegedly “extremist” faith. If anything, in the Russian puppet states of Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine their treatment — and in fact the treatment of all non-Moscow Patriarchate believers — has been even worse than in Russia proper.
Dr. Admiraal and I share the conviction that it is ominous to contemplate the level of disregard for freedom of conscience that will occur if Donbas-style persecution expands into additional territories Russia may manage to wrest from Ukraine. Russian soldiers have forcibly deported at least 60,000 civilians to Russia.
In these same Russian-controlled districts, presumably unreliable Protestants are being singled out for unwelcome attention. On March 9, Mariupol pastor Mikhail Reznikov and his brother, Andrey Fomenko, father of ten foster children, were captured as they went in search of food for the 250 bombed-out refugees sheltering in their church. Ten days later, on March 19, Ukrainian-American missionary Dmitry Bodyu, pastor of Melitopol’s Pentecostal Word of Life Church, was arrested in his home — and since released on March 28 — while his church was forbidden to conduct worship as of March 20. Then on March 21, Russian troops arrested pastor Alexander Glushko of Mariupol’s Light of the World Church and spirited him off to separatist-held territory in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.
Speaking of religion under the thumb of Kremlin control, Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, has just seen the departure of Russian occupation forces. And the whole world now stands aghast at the unspeakable scenes of death and destruction. Will we ever forget the photos of civilian men strewn across streets, dead from execution style shots to the head, some with hands tied behind their backs? Fyodor Raychynets is head of the theology department at Kyiv’s Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary and a pastor at Vifaniya (Bethany) Baptist Church in Bucha. The church is just walking distance from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of St. Andrew, where a mass grave will be the site where war crimes investigators must determine the cause of death of the many civilians half-buried there. Pastor Fyodor, recovered from COVID-19 hospitalization and still coping with the loss of his wife to COVID-19 a year ago, is now having his grief compounded by his first venture back into Bucha from Kyiv. He writes on the 41st day of the war in wrenching prose:
Yesterday we were able to go to Irpen, Buchu and Gostomel. ...
From what I saw and heard blood stuck in my veins for a while, I want to escape somewhere and just be silent or scream madly alone. ...
There's some dumb unspeakable pain stuck in my chest. ...
The scale of destruction, especially when you knew the lives of these towns before this inferno war, is just catastrophic. Photos and videos are capable of conveying what is seen, but believe me the reality itself is just depressing. ...
But especially impressed by people who move like ghosts, the expressions of their faces, the color of their skin, who approach the first meeting and want to tell a lot, tell about what they've seen, experience(d), hear(d). ...
But who is able, willing to listen to this pain not just listen but hear what knowledge and wisdom it takes to understand it and share this pain? What kind of psychology, and what theology are able to explain, understand, help?
Yesterday, for the first time in 40 days of the war, I was scared, not from the missiles flying over my head, not from the explosions of bombs somewhere nearby, but scared for what we still have to hear, learn and how to live with it.
God give us the strength to survive all this, it's (a lot) to go through and remain human...
In the Soviet era, hundreds of miles north of Moscow, a side wall of an Orthodox church was breached in order to convert a sacred space into a machine tractor station and a meat storage locker. After 1991, it took years for the church’s enterprising priest to restore this desecrated house of worship. Especially poignant to ponder for me was the symbolism of the sanctuary’s huge front metal doors, retrieved and redeemed from an abandoned missile silo. Tragically, today a weaponized Russian Orthodox Church in the soiled hands of Patriarch Kirill has no part in turning the prophet Isaiah’s swords into plowshares. Rather, Putin’s captive Orthodox patriarch aggressively defends an indefensible, fratricidal war while a handful of brave vocal opponents of the cloth interpret it to be a 21st century repetition of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel.
Mark R. Elliott, who holds a doctorate from the University of Kentucky, is a retired professor of European and Russian history and editor emeritus of the East-West Church Report.