Russia

Putin is but the latest in a line of varjagi in Russian history, who tried to ‘bring civilisation’ to the lands across the border and around the world. Today, annexation is calculated not so much in square kilometres, but in sums of ‘traditional values’ such as the socialist revolution or the tsarist defence of autocracies might have been in the past.

A report in Novaja Gazeta documents the dramatic situation of the Russian and Ukrainian refugees. Governor Aleksej Smirnov stated that their number exceeds 150,000 people, abandoned by the authorities as the military defence of the area is already problematic.

The Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow’s main university held a forum on current events in Russia where speakers expressed positions that were not obvious and unambiguous. Without openly criticising the country’s power structure, philosophers show that they do not want to give up on the true dimension of the Russian soul, that of openness to all variants of the spirit.

As pressure grows from Moscow for the only ‘official and patriotic language’, Russian, Tatar intellectuals are discussing the ethnic prospects of their own and other ‘minor peoples’ within the Federation.

In response to Ukrainian raids on Russian territory with long-range missiles, Putin has repeatedly returned to conjuring up atomic weapons. The West is convinced that this is merely ‘psychological pressure’, but it is a belief based on 60-year-old theoretical models. While Karaganov, one of the Kremlin's most senior advisors, while ruling out the use of the ‘most devastating’ weapons, speaks of their use ‘in proportion to the attacks suffered’.

Today, Orthodoxy in Russia is increasingly characterised as a separate religion, which retains the formal aspect of Slavic-Eastern rite Christianity, while at the same time increasingly extending to other ‘patriotic’ confessions, to the point of also associating Islam and Buddhism in the single expression of the trinitarian homeland.

The commander of the Akhmat battalion continues to spread videos and messages for his 300,000 followers. Since the beginning of the clashes in Kursk everyone in Russia has been quoting him and inviting him more and more often on various war propaganda talk-shows.

Trying not to limit himself to the usual statements of state propaganda amid the universal conflict between Russia and the West, the Patriarch of Moscow spoke a few days ago in St Petersburg using philosophical and literary arguments to further explain the reasons why Russia today feels called to spread the “great values” that universal society has seemingly abandoned.

Pope Francis has appointed German Jesuit Stephan Lipke, 49, as auxiliary bishop of the diocese of the Transfiguration in Novosibirsk, alongside Bishop Joseph Werth, the last of the three bishops appointed in 1991, when Catholic structures were restored in Russia. An important task in a particularly delicate period for the country's political and religious history.

Russian and ex-Soviet economists abroad question Moscow's ostentatious optimism about a great development through relations with the East. But oil companies are increasingly burdened with tax levies to finance the war and increasingly difficult access to new technologies make a general degradation of the economy more evident every day.

Isljam Tokhlu, head of the Crimean Tatar cultural centre, on the prayers in favour of the ‘fighters of the special military operation’: ‘They are a foreign element of the Muslim tradition in the service of occupation armies. And even the justification with the defence of traditional values against the West can hardly be applied to the Caucasian context’.

On Radio Svoboda the testimony of one of the religious living abroad after refusing to recite the prayer for war and being suspended by the Moscow Patriarchate. Having left Jerusalem, where he worked for the Russian mission, in Belgium he is now studying the Fathers of the Church to understand how this slide into ‘extreme neo-conservatism, to the cult of militarism and neo-imperialism’ was possible.