Throughout the history of Ukraine's independence, Russia has always used the religious factor to spread various ideologies and schemes aimed at dividing Ukrainian society and keeping at least part of it in Russia's sphere of influence, and in recent years it has become the ideological basis for a full-scale bloody war.
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Since the 1990s, the Moscow Patriarchate's network in Ukraine has been a "fertile ground" for the spread of Russian great power chauvinist ideologies about "Triune Russia," "the Tsar-Father," and later - about the "Russian world."
We well remember how pro-Russian circles in Ukraine have been campaigning with the use of falsifications and dirty slanders since 2004, when UOC priests were involved in the distribution of "prayers for the servant of God Viktor Yanukovich" and provocative leaflets with false information about the presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who was not acceptable to Moscow, and priests were offered small amounts of money for it.
Remaining relatively marginal, but still noticeable in the UOC-MP environment, such pro-Russian organizations as Valentyn Lukiyanyk's Union of Orthodox Brotherhoods, Valeriy Kaurov's United Fatherland, and Oleksiy Selivanov's Faithful Cossacks, which constantly cooperated with St. Yonah's Monastery in Kyiv, have been operating for many years. Selivanov was a member of two synodal departments of the UOC-MP - for youth affairs and for pastoral care of the Cossacks of Ukraine and spiritual and physical education of youth, one of the leaders of the All-Ukrainian Coordinating Council of organizations of Russian compatriots, and in 2014 went to fight against Ukraine on the side of the "Lugansk People's Republic". In 2018, he stated that in Ukraine children are taught to hate their brothers, while LPR fighters teach children to love.
In 2017, journalist Tetiana Derkach conducted a series of investigations into the interaction of certain dioceses of the UOC-MP with terrorist groups in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, as well as Russian or pro-Russian forces to subvert other parts of Ukraine. Then the book "The Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine: Anatomy of Betrayal" with a series of 15 investigations was published. The book is based on open sources and contains hundreds of references, in fact documents, about what the UOC-MP was. These include quotes from clergy and members of pro-Russian organizations, photographs, data from the Ministry of Justice, and traces of the activities of Russian agents of influence who remained in the Church or became part of it.
Since President Yanukovych came to power in several regions, the Moscow Patriarchate has created unofficial militant groups in Ukraine to forcefully stop the Ukrainianization of the Church and the transfer of churches to the Kyiv Patriarchate.
Before the annexation of Crimea, Russia conducted a special religious operation in Ukraine under the guise of bringing the "gifts of the Magi" from Athos via Moscow. Together with the church delegation from Moscow, Igor Girkin, aka Strelkov, traveled through Kyiv and all of Ukraine to Crimea. It was his first visit to Ukraine. After the Russian intervention in Crimea began, Girkin organized a meeting of Crimean deputies to call an illegal referendum. In April 2014, he crossed the Ukrainian border into the Donetsk region with his unit and led the capture of Sloviansk, starting the fighting in Donbass. The Hague tribunal found Girkin guilty of the downing of Boeing MH17. He himself spoke about the support of his fighters from the church:
"From the very beginning of our "Slavic Epic", both in Slavyansk and in Donetsk, we have always felt the support of the clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church, of the monks. First of all, from the Sviatogorsk Lavra. Despite possible repression, they traveled openly and blessed the militia... Few people know that the Sviatogorsk Lavra closed its doors to President Poroshenko, who flew in the day after his election and wanted to receive a blessing from the priests of the Lavra. The Lavra simply did not allow him to enter its territory... All the priests I met supported our struggle. And they did so not from a national point of view, but from a religious one...".
A much more important role in this unit than Girkin himself was played by sniper Sergei Zhurikov, "an acolyte of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra". Another militant recruited to the subversive group "Crimea" from the ranks of Orthodox militants in Kyiv was Artem Razuvaev, call sign "Fritz," who once worked in Kyiv as head of security at the Holy Trinity Monastery.
An important aspect of the aggressor's instrumentalization of religion is to use it to provide an ideological basis for war. In fact, the current Russian-Ukrainian war has no rational purpose other than to satisfy the distorted ambitions of the supporters of the "Russian world".
In the spring of this year, the Kyiv Orthodox Theological Academy held a round table discussion on "Theological Aspects of the Doctrine/Ideology of the Russian World". The participants of the discussion emphasized in the final resolution, in particular
«To substantiate the Russian Federation’s claims to global domination, a quasi-religious doctrine was constructed that positions Russia as a defender of Orthodox spirituality against “Western values.” The Russian Orthodox Church took an active part in the formation of the modern version of the hybrid ideology of the “Russian world” in the late twentieth century. It organized the World Russian People’s Council in 1993, and it still determines the agenda of the World Russian People’s Council, which is chaired by the Moscow Patriarch. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the founder of the World Russian People’s Council, Kirill Gundyaev, was elected Patriarch of Moscow, the ROC has led this process».
Based on the "order" of the XXV World Russian People's Council adopted in March 2024, the "Russian world" can be defined as ideological Nazism.
Since February 2022, the Moscow Patriarchate has actually created a new "theology of war" that proclaims the invasion as a "holy war".
«The basic ideas (“dogmas”) of this new religion are the doctrine of millennial existence (“from Vladimir to Vladimir”); identification of the term “Rus” with “Russian statehood” (“Rus is Russia”); messianism and the cult of “Holy Rus” as a “withholder” (“katechon”); the cult of Victory and the myth of fascists (not real or historical, but invented to achieve Russians’ own goals) as the embodiment of global evil; the Gnostic-Manichaean vision of history as a radical binary confrontation between good and evil, where Russia is a “besieged fortress”; … the myth of Muscovy/Russia as a defender of oppressed peoples (Orthodox, Slavs, etc.) against oppressors (Catholics, non-Slavs, the West, etc.)».
The practical consequences of the instrumentalization of religion were particularly evident in the disorientation of a certain part of the UOC-MP parishioners during the first weeks of the full-scale invasion. Recently, a book by priest Grygoriy Shvets "Is Bucha a Fake?" was published, which is an important eyewitness account of an observer who lived through the entire occupation in Bucha. The author, a UOC priest who serves at Pokrovsky Monastery in Kyiv, recounts his and several other personal stories from Bucha, Moshchun, Irpin, etc., and honestly admits that some of his parishioners and acquaintances had openly pro-Russian sentiments before the invasion. The author also tells how, at the beginning of the invasion, his spiritual children asked him on the phone what was happening, because they could not believe that war had broken out. As well as later, after the liberation of the Kyiv region, when it became known about the numerous killings of civilians in Bucha, they said that these were not real photos, but Western fakes (currently 509 civilians have been identified as dead in Bucha, and most of them died as a result of bullet wounds, not shrapnel wounds, which indicates targeted fire).
After listening to the audio version of this important book, I was very surprised that I had not heard about how our people from the occupation gave the locations of enemy equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces. Did the author not know about it because none of his acquaintances did? It's strange for me, because I also lived under occupation for the first 17 days of the Great War, but even then I knew that some people risked their lives to give our defenders information about the location of an enemy tank or other equipment in the village. My neighbor Andriy Voznenko was tortured by the "liberators" for this, he disappeared a few days before I left, and his body with signs of torture was found in a neighboring village after the liberation.
I vividly remember the moments of my communication with the occupiers. The ordinary soldiers of the Russian army, in their early 20s, who entered my village near the Hostomel airport on the morning of February 25, 2022, did not call themselves "liberators" at that time. They were rather disoriented themselves. And it was a representative of the Russian Church who gave them the reasons why they should fight their neighbors. The day before I was released, I met a military priest from Russia on my street, who introduced himself as Father Vadym, and when I asked him why they had come to war with peaceful people, he listed all the main points of the propaganda narrative about fascists in Ukraine, eight years of killing children in Donbass, and the hostile West, and added: "God revealed to me that Russia is right in this war".
When the world learned of the crimes in Bucha (and unfortunately there are many similar crimes wherever the Russian occupation forces have invaded), some on social media suggested that if the Russian army had chaplains, they probably would not have committed such atrocities. At least they would have been more humane. The bitter truth is that there were priests in the Russian army near Kyiv at that time. And they did what they did. It is 8 kilometers from my village to Bucha. It was the Russian priest, not the Chechens who came to my house to check my documents and my home, nor the common soldiers, the Russian priest was the one who knew the purpose and justified the sense of their presence on foreign soil.
And I heard from representatives of the UOC-MP that the OCU was to blame for the February 24 invasion. They say that if Poroshenko, with the support of America, had not created the OCU, if Ukraine had not started to suppress the UOC-MP (which it did not do at that time from any point of view), then Putin would not have had to send troops to protect the "canonical church".
Finally, I would like to make one clarification. The small but noticeable percentage of openly pro-Russian priests and the faithful they have raised, as well as the fact that collaborators have been discovered among them, create a persistent negative image of the UOC-MP in Ukrainian society. A significant part of the clergy and parishioners of the UOC-MP are Ukrainians who want to live freely on their God-given land. But they do not dare (yet?) to take a step to decisively break all ties with the Church of the aggressor country. The reason why is a question for another discussion.