The Catholic Difference: Russia’s sacrilegious war on Ukraine

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 Jan. 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 Mr. Tucker Carlson. 

Reversing history’s verdict in the Cold War was also a motivator for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: a brutal act of aggression originally buttressed by Putin’s lies that Ukraine was not a distinct nation; that the post-Cold War Ukrainian state was run by Nazis; and that a Ukraine allied with the West was a mortal threat to Russia. However, as Ukraine mounted and sustained a fierce resistance that denied Russia the quick victory Putin anticipated in February 2022, Russian justifications for the war began to take on a new coloration: the war was now a crusade in defense of Christian civilization. The barbarism this grotesque distortion of Christian truth underwrites was illustrated in a January Wall Steet Journal article, in which a Ukrainian prisoner of war described being questioned “with a torture method known as ‘a call to Putin,’” in which the wires from a field telephone were “attached … to his feet, hands, and genitals and delivered electric shocks by turning the phone’s dials.”

And there is worse, as described in a recent statement by the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk:

“We were appalled … by the [video] footage of the brutal execution of six of our prisoners of war and the fact that the Russian who executed them wore a badge with an icon of Christ on his uniform. It [was] a truly ghastly scene … Defenseless victims must not be slaughtered in the name of God” in “a sacrilegious war [that] cannot be justified.”

To repeat: U.S. foreign policy cannot correct the heresies underwriting the transformation of Russia’s war on Ukraine into a crusade in which savagery redolent of Genghis Khan has been given a thin veneer of pseudo-religious sanction by Russian Orthodox leaders acting as Kremlin vassals. But American policy-makers should take this pathology into account when pondering whatever negotiations, or other Western actions, might bring the war in Ukraine to a just conclusion: a conclusion that does not reward the aggressor (which would further Putin’s grand strategy and valorize Patriarch Kirill’s justification Patriarch Kirill for it); a conclusion that provides for reconstruction of the Ukrainian civilian and economic infrastructure wantonly destroyed by Russia; a conclusion that safeguards Ukraine against future Russian invasion; a conclusion that does not tempt Putin to further aggressions in the Baltic states and Poland.

Just before Inauguration Day, I was interviewed by the German Catholic newspaper Die Tagespost. One question involved Ukraine: Could America’s new president “reach a solution without giving way to the aggressor Putin?” To which I replied, “There is no happy or just solution to Putin’s aggression that does not end with Putin losing. How that happens is subject to debate. But Putin must lose, both for Ukraine’s sake and for Russia’s.”

To which I would now add “… for America’s sake, and for the world’s.”

‘The Catholic Difference’ is syndicated by the Denver Catholic, the official publication of the Archdiocese of Denver.