Eight months after the start of the war, with winter looming, what are the ways out of a possible apocalyptic scenario? To stop the madness as Pope Francis has repeatedly pleaded would require looking to the present and the future rather than the past. Although unlikely, a victory by one of two sides can only guarantee permanent divisions. Instead, we should throw off hypocritical masks and put on the table what we really want.
The great Russian writer Viktor Erofeev likened the president - with his resentments and war manias - to 'a street thug' seeking to retake the world and vengence all the humiliations suffered. 'Russophobia' is one of the main motivations for Putin's war, but the problem is that it is not a sentiment peculiar to opponents, but a part of the 'Russian soul' itself
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Belarusian Ales Bialiatsky, Russia’s Memorial movement, and Ukraine’s Centre for Civil Liberties to honour their worldview, which radically differs from the exaltation of the “sovereign" identities that led to war. The only answer to any “hegemony” lies with the defence of freedom, peoples, and individuals.
Amid sporadic protest and resistance , resignation seems to predominate in Russia today. Russians are afraid of losing Putin because they do not know what may await them next. Kirill's opacity and Orthodox theologian Georgij Kočetkov's prophecy: "Let each of us learn to live in Christ, so that we are not ashamed of our faith and our lives... We must seek the way of service to God and neighbor, even if there is an enemy before you."
The "religion of fire" has devastated and destroyed hundreds of churches, while Kirill has announced a new plan to restore buildings destroyed by bombs, he prayed for.
The death of Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth, the Pope in Central Asia, the war in the Caucasus and the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Xi Jinping's trip: all events that evoke the end of a era, to make way for a world as yet to be described.
Without “foreign agents” Russia would not be Russia, starting with the metropolitans sent by Constantinople to Christianise Kievan Rus'. Perhaps no country can truly be itself without influences from near and far.
Opening up to religious freedom was not part of the initial reform programme. It was the events following the Černobyl disaster that forced the secretary-president to change his attitude to the point of reaching the harmony he established with John Paul II. But the Russians blamed him for the end of the USSR and renunciation of its role as a world power.
Fear that some voices in the Orthodox world in Nur-Sultan would launch accusations of "philetism," also weighed on unwillingness to meet in Kazakhstan. But Russian culture and tradition are a universal heritage of Christendom. And when the bombs are silenced (hopefully sooner than later ) and rebuilding begins, the embrace between Francis and Kirill will be more necessary than ever.
In two recent speeches President Putin and Moscow Patriarch Kirill speak again of the war not just against Ukraine but the entire West, with its model of society that places "absolute value on individual choice." A political, moral and spiritual challenge.
In Russia, Western sanctions are starting to bite. Putin and his acolytes have de facto privatised the country, and consider it their property. The ongoing transformation is falling on the majority of the population, deprived of any say in the matter.
Following in the footsteps of John Paul II, Francis is set visit the former Soviet republic from 13 to 15 September to take part in the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions. His agenda includes a meeting with Kazakh President Tokayev while a second tête-à-tête with Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill is a real possibility.
A moral counter-revolution, as some Russian media call it, is the global and declared aim of the war in Ukraine; for this reason, it has touched a sensitive nerve in the West, much more than the geographical proximity between NATO forces and those of neo-Soviet Russia.
Exactly one hundred years ago more than 300 distinguished representatives of the scientific, literary and artistic intelligentsia were expelled from Soviet Russia to Germany.They saved Russian culture from erasure. Even today because of the "Ukrainian revolution" thousands of teachers, artists and scholars from various fields have fled the country. Will they be able to do the same?
More than war, prison camps and food, what has revived Moscow's past is the unbearable illusion of moral and religious superiority, one that seeks to celebrate the ability of Russians to unite in solidarity and support for the country's leaders, proclaiming the end of libertarian individualism that ruined the souls of depraved Westerners.
The great ideal of peace is anchored to unquestionable values such as the absolute dignity of human beings, the superiority of international law, and even mutual economic dependence. Yet we find ourselves once again discussing the principles that have always incited the powerful to war: the affirmation of one's national and cultural identity, the defence of one's territorial and political interests, and the rejection of economic dependence on international potentates.
Moscow today is complaining that its culture is being ostracised. Yet as early as during Kyivan Rus’, the Russians have removed any reference to the “Mother Church” in Byzantium, already victim of an ancient “cancel culture”. East and West, Russia, America and Europe, are all united by the self-destructive madness of “rewriting history”, and the ongoing war is nothing more than everyone punishing everyone else.
The countries with which Russia feels itself at odds today are not "enemies," but "unfriendly" countries. The theses of Vladimir Solov'ev, who at the threshold of the 20th century recalled the "feminine nature" of Russia to ponder the depths of this definition. In this perspective, war is a reaction that affirms the injustice and masculine violence of a West that lives for itself and does not honor its bride's capacity for sacrifice, her desire to generate a new world.
Why does the Moscow Patriarchate strongly support aggression against Ukraine rather than peace? Its ambiguities are already found in the “Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church”, adopted in 2000. Kirill would like to mark military victory with the reunification of all Russians, but so far all he has seen is the loss of many parts of a Church that would like to become universal.
Max Scheler argued that the best demonstration of the Russian culture of resentment are the 'humiliated and offended' heroes of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Today, the Russians think they have done their part after the end of the Cold War, while 'the others' have taken advantage of it. This anger has exploded in Ukraine, showing the whole world how little has been understood about a people not only proud of their traditions, but able to expose the hypocrisies and weaknesses of others.
At every political, social and even religious level, the direct line of command has become increasingly important for Putin and his inner circle, as the main propaganda tool to convey the image of a super-efficient president, close to everyone’s problems, invested even with a divine mission, which the country cannot do without.
The mission of the two Thessalonian brothers is indeed a prophecy not only of the development of the peoples of Eastern Europe, but even of their conflicts. Well before the Baptism of Kiev in 988, the endless wars between Russians and Poles, up to the present conflict, Europe had remained unfinished. And their language remained 'written on water' and blood, waiting for a new miracle of peace.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought a slew of accusations, many against the so-called Anglo-Saxons, a view repeated on several occasions by the Kremlin. Notwithstanding cultural juxtapositions, the expression reveals a strategy designed to drive a wedge among Russia’s enemies. Moscow wants to see the ongoing conflict end with a world in which Russia, the Anglosaksy, and Europe are well defined.
Beyond the actual military conquests, and the destruction of population centres, to what extent do the people of the so-called 'independent republics' wish to reunite with Russia?
Rushism is the new ideal of conquest in the post-global world. Instead of cultural levelling, everyone is trying to win against everyone. After almost a century of laying in the background, weapons are heard again, like at the end of La Belle Époque, a time when the invention of electric lighting, radio and cars seemed to have definitively let humanity out of the caves.
It was the members of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia who gave rise to it with the call to "go to the people" after the abolition of serfdom. But today the dictatorship of the "simple man" is destroying Russia even more than the tormented Ukraine, much more than militant Soviet atheism has done in seventy years.
Holy Week rituals and traditions are exploited in Russia and Ukraine. The mid-June Jerusalem meeting between the pope and the Moscow patriarch has been cancelled “until better times”. Going against the current, Metropolitan Onufriy's offers hope: “[T]he world lives for the sake of those righteous who have placed in their hearts the Risen Christ, the Strong and Mighty God, who made them strong and powerful. Such people sacrificially love the whole world”.
Russian spirituality recognises a category of saints known as strastoterptsy, 'those who suffered the passion', often persecuted for political reasons, who were able to live through their ordeal by bearing witness to a deep faith. Like the Orthodox priests who today are willing to pay a price to invoke an end to the aggression of Ukraine: "I am not dead and I have not flown to Mars, I am not abandoning the priesthood, but I cannot pray for war".
In an 1864 novel by Dostoevsky, a short imperial officer sits in the basement of his home, angry at the whole world and eager for revenge. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, unlike the war litany of the priest, Natasha “prayed to God to forgive them all, and her too”. These are the two faces that show how Russian culture, today a victim of propaganda and ideology, can help to truly understand what is happening in this war.
In the fog of mistrust and hostility that has long imobilized relations between Catholics and Orthodox in Russia, the charge of proselytism has been progressively "neutralised". However, another accusation remained, far more incisive and historically well-founded in its various interpretations: that of Uniatism in Ukraine. The history of a Church since 1596 reluctant to exalt the Moscow "third Rome".