The Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate once presented itself as the moral backbone of the nation. Today it stands as one of the Kremlin’s most reliable political instruments, its hierarchy more interested in blessing tanks than tending souls.
Since Moscow first set its sights on Ukraine’s sovereignty in 2014, the Church has steadily abandoned any pretence of spiritual independence, embracing instead the role of a sanctifier of imperial ambition. The 2022 full-scale invasion merely stripped away what remained of the mask.
Patriarch Kirill, the Church’s powerful leader, no longer even bothers with subtlety. When Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilisation” in the autumn of 2022, Kirill declared that Russian soldiers who fell in battle would receive forgiveness for all their sins. It was a medieval indulgence wrapped in modern propaganda: the promise of automatic salvation, provided one died in the service of Moscow’s bloody expansionism. That statement alone should have provoked outrage from any institution claiming Christian heritage. Instead, it was met with choruses of approval from the Church’s upper clergy—men who seem to have confused martyrdom with state-sanctioned murder.
This is not the first time Kirill and his synod have woven theology around Kremlin policy. Since the annexation of Crimea, they have framed Russia’s aggression as a sacred duty, a defence of a mythical “Holy Rus” threatened by Western decadence.
The Kremlin has eagerly amplified this mythology, finding it a useful veneer to disguise what is in reality a straightforward war of conquest. While Russian artillery pounds Ukrainian towns, Church television channels broadcast sermons warning of the “spiritual rot” of Europe and celebrating Russia as the last bastion of Christian civilisation. Such rhetoric might play well to those steeped in nationalist fervour, but it rings hollow against the backdrop of mass graves and scorched apartment blocks.
The Church’s enthusiastic embrace of the “Holy War” narrative has not merely blessed Moscow’s military adventure; it has also tightened the Kremlin’s grip over Russian society. Parishes and monasteries have become recruiting grounds, their clergy encouraging young men to take up arms. Religious processions now march alongside military parades, icons carried before missile launchers as if Christ himself were an artillery officer. This is not faith. It is theatre—an elaborate pageant designed to sacralise the state and erase the boundary between altar and armour.
The damage runs deeper than propaganda. By presenting the war as divinely sanctioned, the Patriarchate has corroded the very concept of moral responsibility. If killing becomes a path to salvation, then cruelty is no longer a sin but a service. Soldiers can burn villages and still imagine themselves righteous. Parents can send their sons to die for a dictator’s vanity and console themselves that heaven awaits them. This is the perversion of Christianity into a cult of death. It mocks the Sermon on the Mount and profanes the Cross, transforming a message of peace into an excuse for slaughter.
The Kremlin could not have asked for a more useful partner. The Church’s blessing offers a spiritual legitimacy that no political decree could manufacture. In return, the state has showered it with privileges—tax breaks, property, and a near-monopoly over religious life in Russia.
Dissenting clergy who oppose the war are silenced or driven into exile. Even laypeople who criticise the Church’s militarism risk arrest under Russia’s draconian “discrediting the army” laws. The result is an ecclesiastical echo chamber, where only the voices of loyalists are heard, each outdoing the other in fervour as they praise the President and curse his enemies.
It is tempting, from the comfort of Western Europe, to dismiss all this as a peculiarly Russian affair. That would be a grave mistake. The Moscow Patriarchate operates far beyond Russia’s borders, running parishes across the continent and wielding influence within international Orthodox bodies. Its clergy lobby against European sanctions, spread Kremlin talking points, and attempt to discredit Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church. The same hierarchy that anoints missiles in Donbas holds services in Paris and Berlin. To treat it as merely a religious organisation is to ignore its role as a foreign policy instrument.
Some argue that Kirill and his bishops are hostages to circumstance, that they cannot defy the Kremlin without risking persecution. This is an excuse, not an explanation. Moral courage is measured precisely by the willingness to speak truth when it is dangerous. Other Russian religious figures have done so—and paid the price with exile or imprisonment. The Patriarchate has chosen the opposite path: not silence, but loud complicity. It has not been coerced into servitude; it has embraced it.
The long-term consequences will be grim. When the war ends—and it will end—the Russian Orthodox Church will find its moral authority in ruins. Generations may pass before Russians can again view it as anything more than a propaganda bureau draped in vestments. Yet the world should not wait for that reckoning. Europe must recognise the Patriarchate for what it has become: a willing accomplice in aggression, not a neutral spiritual body. Diplomatic niceties should no longer shield it from scrutiny or sanction.
Faith is meant to comfort the afflicted and restrain the powerful. Under Kirill, it has been inverted to comfort the powerful and afflict the weak. The Church of Moscow does not offer salvation; it offers absolution for conquest. That is not Christianity. It is the liturgy of empire.
Main Image: Kremlin.ru
