The role of the Orthodox Church in advancing Putin’s war messaging

In its first resolution, the Council called for attention to be paid to the risks of Russia “losing strategic positions” in the world and to the desire of other countries “to replace the results of World War II with the results of the Cold War”.7 Two significant extracts from that statement: “The apparent and short-sighted desire of certain forces in the world to prevent Russia’s resurgence as a g. [...] Both Putin and Kirill dreamed about restoring the greatness of the country – Putin calls the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, while the Russian Patriarch considers the catastrophe to have started from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.9 In the 1990s, as a high-ranking clergyman, Kirill was an active participant and initiator of discussions about Russ. [...] At the first meeting of the World Russian People’s Council, he said that “Russian ecumene” (read: “Russian land”) was undermined because of “weakening of ideas of Orthodoxy and monarchism” in the 20th century and declared that the “only force that is able to fertilise and realise the Russian national idea, without destroying the universal mission of our people, is the Orthodox Church”.10 8 The Rus. [...] Photo: Vlad Dokshin/Novaya Gazeta During a sermon at The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (where the diameter of the main dome is 19.45m in reference to the end of WWII, Nazi tanks were melted to make the floor, and mosaics commemorate the country’s role in Syria’s civil war, the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea in 2014), Kirill urged the Armed Forces to “recognis. [...] The president, the army, the state security agencies, the government and the church enjoy the greatest trust today,” according to the conclusion of the Levada Center survey.88 It would appear that the same political factors impact the results of polls about Russian state institutions and the Orthodox Church.