Putin’s Holy War
Robert C. Blitt November/December 2025As the war against Ukraine grinds into its fourth year, a widely acknowledged reality is that the Russian Orthodox Church—Moscow Patriarchate (ROC)—has operated as a steadfast champion of the Kremlin’s aggression. Less well-recognized, however, is the fact that this controversial church role—ideological underwriter and chief cheerleader for Russia’s foreign policy—long predates Russia’s outright invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and transcends the geographic boundaries of the current military conflict. In practice, the global spaces where the ROC works in lockstep with the Kremlin to advance Russia’s interests are considerable and varied.
The modern origins for the contemporary church-state partnership in Russia have percolated for decades. As a departure point, one might point to the late 1990s and the fateful decision to award Russian Orthodoxy preeminent status as one of four “traditional” religions within the Russian Federation’s newly minted secular constitutional order. But the onset of the current rapprochement—where “canonical” Orthodoxy and traditional values serve as the mortar for the Kremlin’s new Russian nationalism while temporal Russian foreign policy preoccupies the ROC hierarchy—arrived shortly thereafter. More accurately, it can be attributed to the alliance forged between Russia’s head of state, President Vladimir Putin, and the leader of the ROC, Patriarch Kirill. Both individuals share a common desire to see Russia’s civilizational identity restored to pride of place in the global order as a counterweight to perceived Western dominance. To situate the ROC and Russian Orthodoxy as a linchpin for Russia’s civilizational identity and foreign policy, President Putin and others regularly commend the church’s “huge, colossal contribution” in undergirding the state’s moral and patriotic foundation and furnishing “spiritual support to our military personnel.”1 In tandem, Patriarch Kirill regularly reveres Putin: “God put [Putin] in power so that [he] could perform a service of special importance and of great responsibility for the fate of the country.”2 This special service, according to Kirill, entails Putin’s recognition of the importance of Orthodoxy in the “strengthening of the true sovereignty of Russia, the spiritual, moral, and patriotic education of contemporaries [and] the protection of traditional family values.”3
Viewed through this contextual lens, the war waged against Ukraine is not merely about Ukraine. Russia’s myriad and shifting justifications for invasion—fighting Nazis, saving Russian compatriots, countering NATO, rejecting color revolutions, protecting religion—make this fact plain. Rather, the invasion is inexorably driven by Putin’s larger mission to restore Russia’s imperial status and power while tearing down any semblance of a global order led by the West. This objective is hardwired in Russia’s 2020 constitutional amendments and its revised 2023 Foreign Policy Concept (FPC). Tellingly, this latter document frames Russia as the successor to the USSR, a state entitled to a particular “place in the world” and “performing a historically unique mission aimed at . . . building a multipolar international system.” As a product of this imagined great power role, even as the FPC demands “eliminating the vestiges of domination by the U.S. [and creating] conditions to enable any state to renounce neo-colonial or hegemonic ambitions,” it celebrates Russia’s own reasserted imperial dominion as nothing more than “the natural course of history.”
Defending “Spiritual Unity”
Beyond invoking Soviet and imperial grandeur, Putin’s effort to reboot a new Russian civilizational identity leans heavily on “traditional values” associated with Russian Orthodoxy. This cornerstone of the country’s newly amended constitutional order is held out as fundamental to national identity and security; it also underwrites Russia’s new imperialist mission: confronting and taming the intolerable threat of barbarism at Russia’s gates, embodied by an untethered and all-corrupting Western liberalism. This national mission pits Russia against a Western foe depicted as nothing less than subhuman. In Putin’s words the West is “denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan. . . . This opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism. . . . Without the values embedded in Christianity” “people will inevitably lose their human dignity. We consider it natural and right to defend these values.”4
Given the intensity associated with the perceived threat to traditional values posed by the West, the Kremlin frames the issue as jeopardizing Russia’s sovereignty and national security. More tellingly, it is also construed as endangering Russia’s waning regional influence and its compatriot communities abroad. Accordingly, the narrative of defending Russia’s “spiritual unity” and Orthodoxy’s “common spiritual space” against the onslaught of Western moral bankruptcy engages an extraterritorial imperative that demands Russian interference in the domestic affairs of other sovereign states. Armed with the pretext of preserving spiritual unity, the Kremlin routinely meddles in Ukraine, Georgia, and elsewhere in the “near abroad” for the purpose of ensuring that the ROC has unfettered space to continue disseminating and normalizing Russia’s Manichean worldview.5
Perhaps most familiar in this context is Russia’s strident rejection of the Ecumenical Patriarch’s 2019 decision granting autocephaly to a newly designated Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Coming in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its ongoing support for separatist groups fighting in Ukraine’s Donbas, this decision likely was hastened by Ukraine’s urgent desire to extricate its Orthodox believers from Moscow’s grip. The ROC and its local proxy, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), did little to refute this perception. Rather, its officials continued to bolster the Kremlin’s agenda, denying the legitimacy of Ukrainian national identity, manifesting support for Donetsk and Luhansk rebels, and blessing Russia’s military personnel and armaments deployed to Crimea.6 Ultimately, the annexation of Crimea was not enough to end Russia’s interference in Ukraine’s internal affairs. According to the Kremlin, the prospect of an Orthodox “schism” constituted an unacceptable violation of Orthodox canons.7 But more practically, the split threatened to diminish the ROC’s influence in Ukraine over millions of Orthodox adherents and consequently augured a grave blow to Russia’s national interests. In fact, so dire was this injury to Russia’s extraterritorial influence that Putin convened his Security Council to forestall it. Ever faithful, the ROC echoed Kremlin talking points, accusing the U.S. of a nefarious plot to destroy Russian Orthodoxy by wresting Ukraine from the ROC’s self-defined canonical territory.
Russia’s compulsion to defend “spiritual unity” extends well beyond the “near abroad” states bordering Russia. For example, in the Balkans, the Kremlin invokes shared history and religion to cast uncertainty over regional integration into Western institutions and to present Russia as a viable and natural alternative—capable of defending shared Orthodoxy, conservative values, cultural commonalities, and even state sovereignty.8 These self-seeking interests are advanced in part by making space for agents of Russian influence, with the ROC foremost among them. In turn, ROC rhetoric across its own extensive diplomatic and religious networks mirrors and reinforces Kremlin themes, including depicting NATO as the destroyer of “Orthodox shrines” and opposing rapprochement with the EU as an anti-religious and Russophobic threat.9
A Global Project
Enticing potential allies with messaging that supports traditional values and state sovereignty while denouncing the West extends far beyond communities with obvious Orthodox adherents, to Africa, the Muslim world, and elsewhere. By deploying a modulated version of “traditional values”—portraying the West as anti-religious, “ultraliberal,” debauched, hypocritical, and corrosive of state sovereignty—the Kremlin and ROC can preserve the essence of the message while appealing to broader audiences. This more flexible formulation facilitates building out a more diverse international constituency supportive of Russia’s position as the ostensible guardian of religious conservative values, and/or state sovereignty depending on the target audience.
Looking to Africa, President Putin’s messaging invokes “solidarity with the African states in their desire for a more equitable polycentric world and elimination of . . . neo-colonial policies” and shared traditional values that operate as a common “foundation of our identity . . . existence and . . . sovereignty.”10 In parallel with this political outreach, the ROC has embarked on its own “significant and new endeavor,” namely a newly established Patriarchal Exarchate for Africa. The Exarchate is intended to expand influence opportunities for Russia and Russian Orthodoxy across the continent through its 350 parishes. Egypt’s ambassador to Russia has hailed the ROC initiative as opening “new prospects for cooperation” and developing “traditional fraternal relations” between Russia and Egypt.11 As an example of how these prospects become tangible, the East African Continental Council (EACC), a Russian NGO established to develop Russia’s religious, cultural, and business relations in Africa, facilitated an agreement between the ROC and Uganda’s longtime president, furnishing the African Exarchate with a plot of land to be used for “a religious and educational centre” that will include a church, Russian government offices, and an apartment hotel.
Turning to the Muslim world, Russia’s long cultivated alliance-building efforts are similarly platformed on a cocktail of traditional values and hostility to the West. The 2023 FPC affirms Russia will take “efforts to protect traditional spiritual and moral values, and combat Islamophobia, including via the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.” One way the Kremlin advances this cooperation is through its Russia-Islamic World Strategic Vision Group, a program that brings government leaders together with Orthodox and Muslim religious figures. At the group’s most recent summit, the Russian foreign minister reminded participants they were “united in [the] conviction that no society should tolerate the imposition of alien values from abroad, which undermine historical roots, spiritual and moral foundations.”12 At a prior meeting in 2023, Patriarch Kirill echoed the Kremlin view, unsurprisingly leaning into traditional values as the antidote to perceived Western domination: “Our fundamental values are alike. . . . Orthodox Christians and Muslims resolutely reject any attempts to make sin a social norm. . . . We can work together in opposing the [West’s] sophisticated propaganda of individualism and the worship of the human being.”13
The ROC and Kremlin have also harnessed traditional values to curry favor within other conservative political and religious circles. Notably, the historic 2016 Havana Declaration issued by Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill successfully tamped down potential Vatican opposition to Kremlin misadventures while portraying Russia as the defender of Christianity and a neutral peacemaker during Ukraine’s pre-2022 conflict. The ROC’s effort to win over the Vatican as a Russian ally during this period is rendered especially transparent when viewed alongside parallel Kremlin efforts to secure the same papal buy-in for the narrative of Russia “as a bulwark of morality and traditional values.”14 Similarly, at the 2017 World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians, an event organized by Billy Graham’s Evangelistic Association in Washington, D.C., the ROC again flexed its central role as a Kremlin proxy by using the religious platform to release a joint statement together with Rev. Franklin Graham that stressed “the importance of Russia and the United States setting aside their differences and working together to combat terrorism and protect Christians.”15 Backstage at the summit, ROC officials lobbied then Vice President Michael Pence for “one united, international anti-terrorist coalition which can combat terrorism and win,” and urged that Russia and the U.S. “put [their] political differences aside.”16
The ROC also exploits international meetups such as the World Congress of Families, often funded by Kremlin-connected oligarchs, to network with like-minded civil society groups and far-right political leaders and activists. Some of these groups have openly endorsed having Russia play “a very prominent role in the matter of family advocacy and moral values on a global scale,” and celebrated Russia as “the Christian saviors of the world.”17 The ROC’s ability to navigate among these constituencies and disseminate Kremlin views is especially useful given the potential stigma that might attach to more overt Kremlin participation.
A Useful Alliance
Returning to Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Kremlin’s commitment to restoring Russia’s imperial stature and defeating the West remains on full display. To help advance these objectives, Patriarch Kirill has discarded any pretense of the ROC serving a peacemaking or peacebuilding role. Instead, he has overtly committed the church to blessing a kinetic “holy war” against Western “satanism,” casting Russia as the sole savior capable of repelling the onslaught.18 To be clear, this religious fervor transcends mere ideological endorsement. The ROC has worked diligently to collect and distribute social services and humanitarian assistance across Ukraine’s occupied territories for the benefit of “compatriots.” It continues to provide spiritual but also material succor to soldiers, including thermal imagers and other combat supplies. It has sanctified the annexation of Ukrainian territory, declaring Donetsk and Luhansk as “liberated.” It actively operates within these occupied territories, regularly inaugurating localized church structures as well as branches of ROC-controlled civil society organizations. Most egregiously, the ROC has allowed its resources to be enlisted in the so-called evacuation of orphans and others from Ukraine to locations within Russia.19
By elevating traditional values and Orthodoxy as core components of Russia’s civilizational identity, the Kremlin has secured a useful ally that is well connected, often deeply embedded in local societies abroad, and—at least on the surface—able to present itself as free from government control. In addition to these highly desirable characteristics, the current church-state alliance exemplifies a high degree of stability precisely because of the Kremlin intention to wield traditional values as a malleable tool that can at once boost Russia’s international standing while reviling a degenerate and corrupting West. The more the Kremlin relies on this new civilizational identity to justify its resuscitated imperial policy, the more likely it will be to rely on the ROC to echo this messaging. The result is a partnership without meaningful daylight between the partners, especially in the context of advancing Russia’s temporal foreign interests.
1 Greetings to 24th World Russian People’s Council, Orthodox Christianity and the World in the 21st Century, Kremlin.ru, Oct. 25, 2022; Greetings to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia on enthronement anniversary, Kremlin.ru, Feb. 1, 2023.
2 Steve Rosenberg, “Ukraine War: Holy Trinity Painting on Display in Moscow,” BBC News, June 5, 2023.
3 Поздравление Святейшего Патриарха Кирилла Президенту РФ В.В. Путину с Днем Победы (Congratulations from His Holiness Patriarch Kirill to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Victory Day), Patriarchia.ru, May 9, 2025.
4 Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Kremlin.ru, Sept. 19, 2013.
5 Robert C. Blitt, “Agent of Russian Interests Abroad: Assessing the Moscow Patriarchate’s Activity in the Balkans and Beyond,” Gonzaga Journal of International Law 27, no. 2 (2024): 57.
6 Robert C. Blitt, “From Zero to Holy War: The International Community’s Failure to Confront the Russian Orthodox Church’s Escalating Support for War Against Ukraine,” Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy 15, no. 3 (2025): 1.
7 “Interviews to Serbian Periodicals Politika and Večernje Novosti,” Kremlin.ru, Jan. 16, 2019; “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Remarks and Replies to Questions in the Russian-Tajik Slavonic University, Dushanbe,” Mid.ru, Feb. 5, 2019.
8 Blitt, “Agent of Russian Interests Abroad.”
9 Ibid.
10 “The Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation,” approved by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 229, Mar. 31, 2023, par. 57, and “Russia-Africa Summit, Kremlin.ru, Jul. 28, 2023.
11 “Patriarchal Exarch for Africa Meets With Egypt’s Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Ambassador to Russia,” Patriarchia.ru, Feb. 1, 2022.
12 “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Remarks at a Meeting of the Russia-Islamic World Strategic Vision Group With Ambassadors From the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation Member States,” Mid.ru, Apr. 21, 2025.
13 “Address by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia at the Meeting of Russia-Islam Strategic Vision Group,” Mospat.ru, May 18, 2023.
14 Jacopo Barigazzi, “Why the Pope ❤ Putin,” Politico.eu, Aug. 11, 2017.
15 “Joint Statement From Franklin Graham and Metropolitan Hilarion,” Billygraham.org, May 13, 2017.
16 Elizabeth Dias, “Vice President Mike Pence Met Privately With Top Russian Cleric,” Time, May 12, 2017.
17 Hannah Gais, “In Search of the Russian Soul: How Russia Became the U.S. Far Right’s Mirror,” Public Eye Q. 99 (2019): 7; Natasha Bertrand, “I Really Believe That Russia Is the Leader of the Free World Right Now,” Business Insider, Dec. 11, 2016.
18 Наказ XXV Всемирного русского народного собора «Настоящее и будущее Русского мира» (The Decree of the 25th World Russian People’s Council “The Present and Future of the Russian World”), Patriarchia.ru, Mar. 27, 2024; Blitt, “From Zero to Holy War.”
19 Blitt, “From Zero to Holy War.”
Article Author: Robert C. Blitt
Robert C. Blitt is the Woolf, McClane, Bright, Allen, and Carpenter distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee College of Law. Prior to this he served as international law specialist for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent, bipartisan agency created by Congress to monitor freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief abroad.