The War in Ukraine: Challenges to Just War Doctrines in Eastern Orthodoxy

The succession of Russian–Ukrainian political and military collisions since 2014 (Russia's annexation of Crimea, the subsequent armed conflict in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region and the start of a full-scare war with Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022) have renewed discussions of just war theory and practice in general and, specifically, in historic and contemporary Eastern Orthodox cultures. These debates have important implications in related areas such as church–state relations and political theologies in these cultures as well as highlighting the tensions between inherited historic patterns of ecclesial pacifism/non-violence and the justification of war/military necessity by earlier or current political and military leaderships.

The roots, evolution and modern transmutations of the attitudes of Eastern Orthodox cultures and ecclesiastical elites to the problems, methods and ethics of warfare demonstrate important similarities and correlations with the respective Western Christian stances but also some significant divergences. These Eastern Orthodox attitudes have not yet been subjected to the close, exhaustive analysis that has been dedicated to their Western Christian counterparts. At the same time, since the 1980s the topics of the Eastern Orthodox churches’ and cultures’ traditional and current stances on the legitimization and conduct of just, justifiable and ‘holy’ war (as well as on pacifism and non-resistance to violence) have become the focus of intense disputes among clerics, theologians, Byzantinists, historians of the modern period, political scientists and scholars of current affairs. ¹ These debates have been evolving against the background of shifts in Western Christian (especially Catholic) thinking regarding the necessity to redefine the moral framework for war justification and favour non-violence, just peace and peace-building. ²

In their formative stages East Roman Christian/Byzantine ideologies display a synthesis and cross-fertilization of diverse notions, normative regulations and rhetoric, drawing extensively on largely secular late Roman just war tradition, with its precepts being recast in the framework of Christian ethics and Christianized Roman imperial political theology. In contrast with Western Christendom, no evidence of a systematic attempt at conceptualizing a just war theory stemming from within the Byzantine church has been brought to light as yet. With very few exceptions the mainstream of Eastern Orthodox Church discourse and practice, particularly from ecclesiastical elites, held out against notions such as Christian military martyrdom for fallen soldiers, despite some occasional pressure from the Byzantine imperial court keen to facilitate the growth of lay military piety among its warrior classes. Outside the clerical sphere the provenance and precepts of the evolving Byzantine imperial just war theory developed by the imperial court and government are discernible in the medieval record, comprising categories of warfare justification such as ‘self-defense’, ‘recovery of lost territory’, ‘breach of agreement’, and so on. ³

This composite Byzantine synthesis of the pre-Christian legacy of concepts as well as norms of war and Christian ethics and piety, accompanied by some innovations in the discourse and conduct of warfare, seemed also well-suited to the Orthodox monarchies and principalities that sprung into existence, expanded and declined in the medieval ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ in Southeastern Europe, Ukraine and Russia. In the case of medieval East Slavonic Orthodox states and principalities (Kievan/Kyivan Rus’, Grand Duchy of Moscow/Muscovy, etc.), both lay pacifism, and secular and religious concepts of just war came to be formulated in their early phases. Generally, defensive war was considered justifiable along with military conflicts designed to regain territories unjustly occupied by an aggressor—such campaigns could be regarded as wars of liberation. These concepts of just war were blended with the notion of the inviolability of frontiers and war's outcome as the judgment of God.

In the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453, a newly formulated religio-political ideology in Muscovy ventured to claim the imperial leadership of the Orthodox Christian Commonwealth through the notion of ‘Moscow the Third Rome’ which underwent gradual, if initially not methodical, amplifications in the Tsardom of Muscovy and the Russian Empire. This Russian new incarnation of imperial Orthodox Christianity was bound to develop some new perspectives on the moral and religious problematic of war and peace but the inherited and newly-emerging notions in this sphere were not subjected to more systematic exposition and elucidation even in the period when Russian military thinking was transformed under emphatic Western European impact during and after the reforms of Peter the Great (1682–1725).

The nineteenth century also witnessed the military enactment of the Russian Empire's self-appointed mandate as a protector of Eastern Orthodox communities in the Ottoman empire. Russian diplomatic and military interventionism in the Balkans and Caucasus coincided with the rise of Russian Slavophile and European Pan-Slav movements and their repercussions in the ideological, political and religious spheres. The articulation of religiously-based legitimacy framing anti-Ottoman warfare in Pan-Slav discourse combined notions such as the providential destiny of Russia as the religio-military guardian or liberator of the Christian Orthodox East (being heir to and resurrecting Byzantine imperial heritage) with pronounced anti-Occidentalism. In the decades leading to WWI and the Russian revolution in 1917, following Lev Tolstoi's (1828–1910) influential re-affirmation of Christian pacifism in the 1880s, the issues and dilemmas of ethics, justifiability and sanctification of warfare, pacifism, just war reappraisal and polemics were of considerable importance for a number of authoritative theologians, intellectual figures and clerics in the late Russian Empire. ⁴

In Soviet Russia, where Bolshevik legislation and measures against the Russian Orthodox Church began as early as the Russian civil war of 1917–1923, World War II was to lead eventually to a reinstatement of the Russian Orthodox Church after several cycles of intensifying Soviet anti-Church repression in the 1920s and 1930s. This war-time rapprochement stemmed from Stalin's decision to utilize the Church's support to enhance national unity in the mobilization of the massive war effort against Nazi Germany. During the war leading Russian hierarchs blessed, prayed for and praised what they extolled as a heroic and just defensive war of the Soviet army, frequently describing the conflict as possessing universal religious and ethical dimensions. ⁵

During the Cold War the restored Patriarchate of Moscow functioned in a new political climate in which Eastern Bloc governments eventually became aware of the potential of making use of the national Orthodox churches as a tool of their foreign policy through the existing ecclesiastical networks of international Orthodoxy as well as the World Council of Churches and similar international bodies and initiatives: World Peace Council, Christian Peace Conference, the Peace and Disarmament Campaign of the 1980s, and so on. The collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 marked the beginning of a new period for the revival of the Orthodox churches and the reassertion of their traditional roles in the social and religious life of the Orthodox-majority ex-Eastern and Soviet bloc countries. With the rising prominence of the ethics of war problematic, triggered by post-Cold War conflicts such as the Wars of Yugoslav Succession in the 1990s, in a series of statements in the 1990s and 2000s the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I, focused on various issues related to the morality of modern warfare, inter-religious conflicts and militaristic religious nationalism. ⁶ Meanwhile, following a decade of redefining and cultivating its new models of relations with the post-Soviet Russian federal state and the military, in 2000 the Jubilee Council of Russian Bishops issued a statement of faith, The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Church, ⁷ which comprises an important section on ‘War and Peace’. The section attempts to formulate a more systematic and up-to-date Orthodox re-appraisal of the Christian just war tradition and its relevance to modernity. The statement borrows, reproduces and reworks some of the traditional jus ad bellum and jus in bello conditions of the Western Christian just war tradition (as modelled on St. Augustine's earlier formulations). The document employs some ambiguous language concerning the ‘difficulty’ of distinguishing an aggressive war from a defensive war and the identification of the cases in which war might prove necessary: national defence, defence of neighbours and ‘restoration of trampled justice’ which provide wide-ranging options for war-justification. ⁸ The statement emphasizes the special concerns of the Russian Orthodox Church for the Christian education of the military, the tasks of military chaplains and the Church's commitment to international peace-making and counteracting any war propaganda.

The use of religious and quasi-religious discourses by prominent Russian church hierarchs and political figures in relation to the armed conflicts in Ukraine since 2014 displays some continuities and discontinuities (or ruptures) with the earlier authoritative just war discourses. These war-justification discourses have been conditioned by several factors, ranging from the upgrading of new post-Soviet models of church–state relations in the Russian Federation, to the reintegration of Orthodox concepts and vocabulary in revived trends in post-Soviet Russian geopolitical thought and the gradual clerical penetration of the Russian armed forces and military establishment.

The phases of church–state interaction in the Russian Federation have caused various shifts in vital socio-religious and religio-political spheres such as religious freedom legislation, state building and ethno-religious identity politics, foreign policy and religious diplomacy. The models of this interaction have varied from an exclusive church–state partnership (along the traditional symphonic model) and selective cooperation models to an at-odds relationship (due to competing or antagonistic agendas). ⁹ The Russian Orthodox Church has not always acted as an ideologically monolithic structure in the socio-religious sphere, given the internal divisions and fault-lines among its rival principal trends which can be roughly categorized as traditional, fundamentalist and liberal (and their various sub-factions). Furthermore, notwithstanding the evolving politicization of Russian Orthodoxy in the first two post-Soviet decades, ¹⁰ its use as a tool for political legitimization and a unifying and homogenizing factor in state-building, in the period up until 2008 the influence of the Patriarchate of Moscow on political stances and decision-making or public opinion was inconclusive and restricted. ¹¹ Factors such as the official adoption and promotion of the ‘Russian World’ (‘Russkiy Mir’) ideology and programmes by the Kremlin administration in 2006–2007, ¹² the election of the ex-chairman of Moscow Patriarchate's Department for External Church Relations, Kirill, as a Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus in 2009 and the so-called ‘conservative turn’ in Russia's internal and foreign policies in 2011–2012 contributed to enhancing the role of the Russian Orthodox Church as a cultural, social and political actor on the Russian and international scene in the 2010s.

These developments intensified the process of the securitization of Russian religious policies already under way since the early 2000s ¹³ since the Concept of National Security of the Russian Federation of 2000 ¹⁴ which articulated the link between ‘spiritual-moral’ legacy/welfare/values and national security for the first time. The interaction and cross-fertilization between some of the traditionalist and fundamentalist wings of the Russian Church with the revitalized and influential Neo-Slavophile and Neo-Eurasianist streams in Russian geopolitical thinking also deepened, being updated with newer concepts like ‘cultural sovereignty’. Orthodox monarchism, moreover, continued to find and utilize clerical channels of influence. ¹⁵ Nationalistic, anti-Occidental and religious rhetoric merged in aggressive discourses of ethno-religious chauvinism and militaristic neo-imperialist expansionism, seeking to bring a new sense of purpose and mission to the inherited and emotionally-charged notions of Russian exceptionalism and messianism. ¹⁶ In such an ideological climate certain underground apocalyptically-oriented trends of Soviet-era Russian religious messianism ¹⁷ began to assume the shape of a belligerent ‘apocalyptic imperialism’ ¹⁸ and utopianism.

The focus on the posited inextricable link between national security and traditional ‘spiritual-moral values’ was enhanced in a succession of legal documents such as the updated Concepts/Strategies of National Security of the Russian Federation (of 2009, 2015 and 2021), the amended Russian Federation Constitution of 2020, ¹⁹ the Declaration on the Values of the Union of the States of Russia and Belarus of 2018 ²⁰ and the Fundamentals of State Policy for Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values of 2022. ²¹ The Moscow Patriarchate contributed directly to the section on ‘spiritual-moral values’ in the last document and the expanding concept of ‘spiritual security’ started to pervade official Russian political, ecclesiastical and public discourse, though it was not actually legal terminology. ²² The notion of ‘spiritual security’ came to be also interpreted and promoted in relation to the ‘Russian World’ ideology and its outreach projects or schemes, both domestically and internationally. ²³

The higher echelons of political and clerical power continuously fortified and embellished the public image of the Russian Orthodox Church as central to Russian identity and statehood, the upholder of morality and the principal, indispensable driving force for moral renewal. The nearly complete cultural hegemony and privileged status achieved by the Russian Orthodox Church in the socio-religious sphere in 2010s (in what otherwise Russian foreign policy documents describe as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state built on the basis of harmonious inter-ethnic and inter-faith co-existence) indicates a process of mutual instrumentalization and legitimization of church and state. At the same time, the emphasis on patriotism, traditional Christian values and illiberal critique of international human rights regimes in the formal and public pronouncements of leading Russian clerics has established the Moscow Patriarchate as a major ecclesiastical force for neo-conservative Christian ideologies in the political, social and cultural spheres both in Russia and abroad. The consequent appeal and symbolic capital of the Russian Orthodox Church to act as a major transnational actor and a kind of ‘moral norm entrepreneur’ ²⁴ on the neo-Conservative Christian circuits and venture into the global culture wars ²⁵ have been integrated into the Russian government's soft power strategies and rather active and wide-ranging religious diplomacy initiatives. ²⁶

The start of the rapprochement between the Russian Orthodox Church and the armed forces in the 1990s was initially similarly underpinned by the Moscow Patriarchate's reassertion of the link between traditional patriotic values and faith. ²⁷ This rapprochement facilitated the reintroduction of military chaplains, the erection of churches in the military bases, the initiation of catechism courses for military personnel, the establishment of a Synodal Department for Cooperation with the Armed Forces and Security Organs by the Moscow Patriarchate and the revival of the practice of clerical blessing of weaponry. It also came to evolve into a variety of ecclesiastical-military alliances such as the striking establishment of a de facto institutionalized symbiotic relationship between the church and the nuclear weapons corps, labelled accordingly the ‘Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy’. ²⁸ Ecclesiastic reactions to the combat phases of the First and Second Chechen Wars (resp. 1994–1996 and 1999–2000) varied from discreet criticism of excessive militarism and appeals for a dialogue to a patriotic rhetoric endorsing the Russian military campaigns, the latter leading to early warnings that church support for the war effort is giving priority to military values over religious and spiritual. ²⁹ The proactive participation of the Russian Orthodox Church, from its upper echelons to the parish priests, in the creation of a redefined military-religious ideology ³⁰ is evident in emblematic projects such as the reconsecration and restoration of the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg in 1998 as a monument to historic Russian military valour in 1998 ³¹ and the opening of the monumental Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ) on Victory Day in Moscow in 2020. ³²

Whether the church–military nexus has currently reached the form and stage of ‘military theocratization’ ³³ may be open to debate, but it is evident that since the ‘conservative turn’ of 2011/2012 the Russian Orthodox Church could provide a convenient and potentially powerful platform for war-justification proclamations, drawing on an array of notions and narrative from the evolving post-Soviet chauvinist, messianic, neo-Slavophile and neo-Eurasianist discourses. Apart from the ideological ‘benefits’ of a clerical war justification, the activities of military chaplains, the introduction of religious rites and calendar, patron saints for military units, and so on, could also have a bearing on the operational behaviour, military effectiveness and morale of nominally or practising Russian Orthodox soldiery. ³⁴ Both concepts of ‘spiritual security’ and ‘Russian World’ could be successfully mobilized for a religious legitimization of military campaigns involving additionally the so-called extended ‘canonical territory’ of the Russian Orthodox Church (in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, diaspora communities, etc.), blending thus the potential strategic goals of Russian political, military and ecclesiastic authority. ³⁵

Symptomatically, at the beginning of the Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015, Patriarch Kirill declared that the campaign had a defensive and just character for the protection of genocide-threatened Syrian Christians and civilians, echoing the historic Russian self-understanding of the imperial era as a military defender of Christian communities in the Balkans and the Middle East. ³⁶ While the Patriarch praised the intervention in the framework of traditional Christian just war theory, the then chairman of the Synodal Department for the Cooperation of Church and Society of the Moscow Patriarchate, Vsevolod Chaplin, while echoing the same theme of Russia's historic protection of Middle Eastern Christians and other oppressed communities, asserted that the battle against terrorism (of Daesh) is ‘a moral and holy fight’. ³⁷ As his ‘holy fight’ pronouncement triggered critique and controversies both in Russia and beyond, including the negative reactions of Syrian Christians, Chaplin was soon released from his duties. The episode indicated that the Moscow Patriarchate was not prepared to tolerate ‘holy fight’ terminology coming from within its ranks of prelates regarding the Russian military engagement in Syria and would resort to a simple version of the traditional Christian just war legimitization.

As the armed conflict in Donbas evolved, with phases of offensives, counter-offensives, static trench warfare and stalemates without proper resolution, the Moscow Patriarchate increasingly came to issue statements representing the hostilities as a war on Orthodoxy, its churches and Orthodox Christians in the contested region. ³⁸ In the early stage of the conflict in the summer of 2014, while being considered as a potential negotiator in peace discussions and process, Patriarch Kirill wrote to the primates of the local Orthodox Churches that representatives of the Greek Catholic and ‘schismatic’ communities were planning to take over Orthodox shrines, attack the clergy of the ‘canonical’ Ukrainian Orthodox Church and ‘eradicate Orthodoxy from the territory of Ukraine’. ³⁹ In a letter to the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate, Patriarch Filaret, promptly countered these claims that the conflict in Donbas represented religious war aiming to destroy ‘canonical Orthodoxy’ and accused the Moscow Patriarchate of blatant war propaganda. ⁴⁰ However, with the central message of the Moscow Patriarchate's statements that a war of eradication was being waged against ‘canonical Orthodoxy’ in Ukraine, unsurprisingly reports emerging from the war zone in eastern Ukraine began to describe a holy war mentality arising on the ground among the regional self-styled Russian people's militias and volunteers from Russia proper. ⁴¹

The heightened rhetoric of these ecclesiastic exchanges reflects the evolution of the complex and plural post-Soviet ecclesial situation of Ukrainian Orthodoxy with the completion of the movement towards аn autocephalous Orthodox Church in 2018/2019 against the background of the convoluted history of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of its main bodies: the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Kyiv Patriarchate, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate (alongside smaller Orthodox churches and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church). The build-up to the establishment of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2019, principally based on the unification of the first two churches under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, ⁴² had already caused a schism between the Moscow and Constantinople Patriarchates in 2018 and some strongly-worded official ecclesiastic exchanges among the Orthodox Patriarchates and Churches.

These deepening ecclesial divisions and antagonisms were made plain and escalated in the build up to and the first stages of the Russian invasion in February 2022. On the eve of the invasion, on ‘Defender of the Fatherland Day’, the patriarch addressed the military with standard just war rhetoric (emphasizing the importance of the military vocation to be always prepared to fight the enemy, defend the Russian people and the ‘sacred borders’ of the realm); ⁴³ his follow-up statement, on the day the incursion was launched, recommended prayers for the speedy restoration of peace. ⁴⁴ However, in a sermon two weeks after the onset of the war, Patriarch Kirill explicitly endeavoured to present the strategic and military goals of the Russian military assault on Ukraine in wider religious and ‘metaphysical’ context. ⁴⁵ While the sermon again nominally called for prayers for a quick peace settlement, it also linked the Russian military campaign with themes from the global culture wars, setting in anti-thesis traditional Christian norms and the values of those ‘who claim world power’/‘powers to be’ who ‘justify sin’ such as the Gay Pride marches, and so on. The central message of the sermon was that in embarking on armed conflict Russia has entered a ‘struggle’ that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance and in the sphere of international relations has not only political importance but pertains to human salvation.

Patriarch Kirill's ‘metaphysical war’ stance stood in sharp opposition to the reactions and pronouncements of the Ukrainian Orthodox ecclesiastical leadership. On the eve of the Russian invasion the Primate of the newly established autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, Metropolitan Epiphany, called for a united resistance to the Kremlin aggression, to fight for Ukrainian statehood, to struggle with the aggressor until victory and the establishment of just peace. ⁴⁶ The head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Onufrii, issued an appeal for the defence of the sovereignty and integrity of Ukraine, pleading with the Kremlin to stop the fratricidal war, which the metropolitan denounces further as a ‘repetition of Cain's sin’, a war which cannot have ‘justification from either God or man’. ⁴⁷

Patriarch Kirill reacted with a reiteration of his aspiration for the restoration of peace but also with an appeal for the preservation and enhancement of the unity of Rus’ (described as the land which now includes ‘Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and other tribes and peoples’) and the Russian Church against the ‘diabolical attacks and provocations’ and evil, dark and hostile external forces and enemies that have always strived to destroy this unity. ⁴⁸ In the unfolding ecclesiastical ‘war of words’ Metropolitan Epifanii responded with an address praising the heroic resistance and invincible spirit of the Ukrainian military, denouncing the Russian political leadership (as displaying signs of the ‘spirit of the Antichrist’) and the discredited Patriarch Kirill. ⁴⁹ In a sermon on the second Sunday of Lent, Metropolitan Epifanii framed the armed conflict in metaphysical terms as a ‘struggle of darkness against light, death with life, slavery against freedom’, as destruction and murder are wreaked on Ukraine by Russia which has become ‘the personification of darkness, the empire of evil, the tyranny of slavery’. ⁵⁰

Vocal and circumspect opposition to and critique of the war of aggression in the Russian Orthodox Church domestic and international ‘canonical territory’ emerged early after the start of the invasion. In early March 2022, 292 Russian Orthodox priests and deacons from around the world signed an open letter calling for an immediate cessation of the fratricidal war and reconciliation, asserting that the people of Ukraine should make their choice on their own, not under military threat and pressure. ⁵¹ In early April 2022 more than 400 clergymen of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church–Moscow Patriarchate signed an appeal and petition to the Council of Primates of Ancient Eastern Churches, accusing Patriarch Kirill of committing moral crimes, blessing Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine (through statements and actions) which does not meet either the norms of Christian morality or even Moscow Patriarchate's own regulatory documents such as The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Church. ⁵² The appeal called for the establishment of an International Ecclesiastical Tribunal to denounce Russia's military aggression against Ukraine and to review the public statements of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow on the war against Ukraine and assess them scripturally and theologically. The appeal also called for a doctrinal assessment of the ‘Russian World’ ideology (with Patriarch Kirill recognized as one of its main ideologues) at the Pan-Orthodox level. In case the tribunal condemned this ideology, it would consequently need to bring Patriarch Kirill to justice and ‘deprive him of the right to hold the patriarchal throne’. The ‘Russian World’ ideology was similarly condemned and rejected in March 2022 in an international declaration (signed by more than 1,500 Orthodox clerics and theologians) as non-Orthodox and a ‘form of Orthodox ethno-phyletist religious fundamentalism, totalitarian in character’), being at the root of many of Moscow Patriarchate hierarchy's support for the war against Ukraine. ⁵³

The priests behind the appeal for the examination and sanctioning of Patriarch Kirill by an international ecclesiastic tribunal had also affirmed that they could not remain in any form of canonical subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate. In May 2022 a council of this ecclesial branch of Ukrainian Orthodoxy announced its complete independence and autonomy from the Moscow Patriarchate in protest of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and specifically in reaction to Patriarch Kirill's support for the aggression, explicitly expressing its condemnation of the war and disagreement with his pro-war stance in the resolutions of the council. ⁵⁴ This self-declared autonomy opened a new stage in the Orthodox ecclesial crisis in Ukraine and the complex and shifting interrelations between ecclesiastical jurisdictions and dioceses, especially in the Russian-occupied areas of the country. The continuing ambiguities surrounding the affiliations and loyalties of the clergy of the newly self-announced autonomous church was to lead to a series of enacted and proposed Ukrainian government legislative measures against individual clergymen and the ecclesial body as a whole, triggering further controversies and inter-church polemics.

Patriarch's Kirill's support for the Russian invasion may have been reinforced by the equally strong endorsement of the military campaign by Metropolitan Korniliy, Primate of the Russian Orthodox Old-Rite Church, ⁵⁵ but his emphatic pro-war stance was beginning to trigger divisions, opposition and a series of ecclesial crises across Russian Orthodox ‘canonical territory’, especially among its dioceses abroad. Inside Russia individual clergymen who have actively opposed the military incursion in Ukraine with anti-war statements and sermons have faced intimidation, censoring, prosecution and defrocking. ⁵⁶ The dismissal of the experienced and long-serving church diplomat, Metropolitan Hilarion, as the chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church Department of External Church Relations in June 2022 and his ‘exile’ appointment to the Metropolis of Budapest-Hungary was undoubtedly provoked by his unwillingness to join in the justification of the Russian war effort in Ukraine with clerical militarist statements of the kind issued by Patriarch Kirill and the Moscow Patriarchate. ⁵⁷

In the Moscow Patriarchate-aligned dioceses outside Russia, the intra-Russian Orthodox critique of Patriarch's Kirill's war-justification stance included open letters, and actual moves to seek or declare independence from Moscow. ⁵⁸ In the wider sphere of Orthodox ecclesiastical leadership, critique and condemnation of the Moscow Patriarchate's war-legitimization stances were also growing, as demonstrated by the public pronouncement issued by the Orthodox Churches of Cyprus and Finland, ⁵⁹ among others. In a series of public statements the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, articulated sustained denunciations of the invasion on theological and ecclesial grounds, while also addressing the ideological and historical notions exploited to justify the Russian military campaigns in Ukraine. In his first reaction to the Russian military incursion he condemned it as an unprovoked military attack which represents a ‘blatant violation of any notion of international law and legality’. ⁶⁰ Subsequently, the patriarch asserted that a war between Orthodox Christians is ‘absolutely unacceptable’ ⁶¹ and that the Russian state and church ‘cooperated in the crime of aggression and shared the responsibility for the resulting crimes’, so inter-religious dialogue needs to focus on ways to ‘neutralize the capacity of the leadership of the Moscow Patriarchate to undermine unity and to theologically legitimize criminal behaviour’. ⁶² In a speech delivered at the World Policy Conference at the end of 2022 in Abu Dhabi, Patriarch Bartholomew acknowledged the deepening intra-Orthodox divisions over Moscow Patriarchate's endorsement of the Russian military campaigns in Ukraine and highlighted the role of the ‘Russian World’ ideology, actively promoted by the Russian Orthodox Church, as a vital ‘instrument of legitimization of Russian expansionism’, with the church siding with the Russian state, faith thus being turned into ‘the backbone’ of state ideology. ⁶³

The Moscow Patriarchate's endorsement of the war also came early under scrutiny in the framework of the ecumenical movement, international relations and diplomacy. In its early reactions to the outbreak of the military conflict the World Council of Churches (WCC) issued appeals affirming and supporting Metropolitan Onufrii's call for the halting of the fratricidal war and the restoration of peace ⁶⁴ and following appeals to the presidents of Russia and Ukraine the then acting general secretary of the World Council of Churches, Fr Ioan Sauca, implored Patriarch Kirill to ‘raise up’ his voice to intervene and mediate with the Russian authorities to stop the war and bloodshed. ⁶⁵ In his response Patriarch Kirill stated that the origins of the military confrontation (including the earlier outbreak of hostilities in Donbas) stemmed from NATO's eastward expansion, Western ‘large-scale geopolitical strategy’ to weaken Russia, spread unprecedented Russophobia and incite animosity between the brotherly Russian and Ukrainian people. ⁶⁶ Following calls to suspend the membership of the Russian Orthodox Church in the WCC due to its justification and legitimization of the war on Ukraine, ⁶⁷ at the WCC 11th General Assembly in June 2022 its Central Committee issued a formal statement which deplored ‘the illegal and unjustifiable war inflicted on the people and sovereign state of Ukraine’, rejected ‘any misuse of religious language and authority to justify armed aggression’ and urged ‘dialogue and negotiations to secure a sustainable peace’. ⁶⁸ Around the same time the United Kingdom (to be followed by some other countries) sanctioned Patriarch Kirill because of his public support for the invasion of Ukraine. ⁶⁹

The WCC followed on its stated aspiration for ecumenical dialogue with a meeting with Patriarch Kirill and his entourage in October 2022 during which the WCC delegation focused on the topical questions of the theological argumentation and support of the war in Ukraine in terms of the patriarch's sermons and orations. ⁷⁰ Patriarch Kirill (and his delegation) responded that certain phrases from his pronouncements had been used selectively and out of context, declaring that war cannot be holy (while self-defence and self-sacrifice for the lives of others represent a different issue) and his invocation of ‘metaphysical war’ did not refer to the physical conflict in Ukraine but to Ephesians 6:12 (in an allusion hence to the spiritual battle which the faithful face in their lives). The patriarch also asserted that the churches’ mission is to act as peacemakers and the clergy ought to aim to bring peace through dialogue, avoiding any conflict and violence.

The indistinct peace assertions of Patriarch Kirill in these communications with the WCC meetings echo to some extent the rhetoric employed in some of his early wartime sermons regarding the potential peace-bringing and peace-sustaining role of an unified Orthodox church in Ukraine beset by a fratricidal war ⁷¹ or the importance of defending the ‘peace-loving’ Russia and its long-suffering people who lack any urge to wage war (while calling on the army, navy and all ‘defenders of the Fatherland’ to realize the historic importance of the present moment). ⁷² But these assertions also contradict pronouncements and claims advanced by the patriarch in other homilies and public statements. In a pre-war oration at the Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, Patriarch Kirill, as in earlier attempted formulations of Orthodox just war positions, resorted to John 15:13, to characterize the Christian military ethos underpinning the ideal of the ‘holy feat’ of self-sacrifice on the battlefield. ⁷³ But in his speech he went further than these earlier traditions, urging the soldiers to boldly fulfil their military duty and remember that if they gave their life for the motherland and their friends (as postulated in the Scriptures), they ‘will be with God in His Kingdom, His glory, His eternal life’. The patriarch elaborated this notion in another sermon in late September 2022, days after the Russian authorities announced the first partial mobilization in Russia since WWII, which (acknowledging that many are dying on the battlefields of internecine warfare) declared that when soldiers driven by a sense of duty and the necessity to fulfil their oath, remain faithful to their vocation and die while performing their military duty, sacrificing themselves for the others, they undoubtedly will have achieved an act equivalent to sacrifice which ‘washes away all the sins’ they may have committed beforehand. ⁷⁴

These striking statements blend the notions of military battlefield martyrdom (which was by and large rejected by the medieval Byzantine Orthodox Church) ⁷⁵ and remission of sins awarded in exchange for military service, a concept and practice not accepted or attested in Eastern Orthodox cultures. Since the time of the last sermon Patriarch Kirill has made a ‘Prayer for Holy Rus’ compulsory at church services; the prayer implores God to grant war victory and a number of priests who have refused to read it or exchanged ‘victory’ with ‘peace’ have been subjected to punishment (including defrocking), court procedures and fines. ⁷⁶ In one of his most recent sermons the Patriarch highlighted the importance of special prayers asking God to save Russia from the invasion of foreigners—only when Russian human, military and political power is united with God's power, can victory over the enemy be achieved. ⁷⁷

Symptomatically, Patriarch Kirill also resorted to the concept of katechon (‘restraining force’, 2 Thess. 2:6-7) ⁷⁸ in explicitly apocalyptic terms: first, in a reference to the historic Roman Empire and/or the Church ⁷⁹ and then (in an oration addressing Russian Orthodox hierarchs in November 2022) to present-day Russia. ⁸⁰ Patriarch Kirill entreated the hierarchs to fulfil their role as the core of spiritual resistance against the powers and movement of the Antichrist, inspire the military and mobilize to join the struggle against the global evil, the ‘Antichrist movement’ unleashed on Russia, a struggle which would decide the future of the world. This appeal represents further evidence of the Moscow Patriarchate's alignment with the fundamentalist, apocalyptic trends in Russian Orthodoxy which earlier Russian clerical elites sought to neutralize and tame, ⁸¹ and foster a justification of the war on Ukraine as a self-defence military operation. ⁸²

The Moscow Patriarchate’s evolution towards the concept of ‘holy war’ has accelerated with the approval and publication (on the patriarchate’s official website) of the decree (or edict) of the XXV World Russian People’s Council which was held in late March 2024 under the presidency of Patriarch Kirill (himself head of the council). The first section of the decree is devoted to the Russian ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and defines it as ‘a new stage in the national liberation struggle of the Russian people’ against the criminal Kiyv regime, a struggle which from ‘a spiritual and moral point of view’ represents a ‘Holy War’ in which they are ‘defending the single spiritual space of Holy Russia’ and ‘fulfil the mission’ of the apocalyptic ‘Restraining Force’ (a vital spiritual mission re-emphasized further in the decree) which protects the world from the ‘globalism’s onslaught’ and the ‘victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism’. ⁸³ The Moscow Patriarchate's multifaceted justification of Russian military campaigns in Ukraine, the dissenting anti-war clerical currents and initiatives across the Russian Orthodox Church canonical territory, as well as articulation of defensive just war rhetoric and appeals by the newly autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine ⁸⁴ or the re-emergence of a militarist Mariology with a revamped iconography ⁸⁵ inevitably had serious repercussions beyond the Eastern Orthodox world. Debates will continue whether Russia's invasion of Ukraine represents the first religious war of the twenty-first century, ⁸⁶ whether it was triggered by Christian nationalism ⁸⁷ or whether religion was used as a rhetorical device for the justification of the war and sacralization of the ‘Russian imperial project’. ⁸⁸ The exact role of the Moscow Patriarchate and Patriarch Kirill in providing the theological and ideological justification for the warfare in Ukraine will continue to be under close scrutiny ⁸⁹ in and beyond Russia and Ukraine. The war has intensified the debates in the Catholic and Protestant theological milieux and clerical leaderships on the contemporary challenges to traditional and modern Christian stances on the ethics of war, the current reappraisal of the Christian just war tradition and patterns of peacemaking and reconciliation. The Holy See and Pope Francis have been particularly active in peace-making efforts and sustaining humanitarian initiatives ‘that may lead to a just peace’ ⁹⁰ : in an early initiative the Pope communicated to Patriarch Kirill his views on modern warfare and the need for a new Christian understanding of current military conflicts and the applicability of inherited just war criteria, ⁹¹ while also condemning the invasion as an ‘act of violent aggression and a sacrilege without justification’, ⁹² and a ‘crime against God and humanity’. ⁹³ Following Patriarch Bartholomew's Abu Dhabi speech ascribing to Moscow the deliberate use of the ‘heresy of ethnophyletism’ (which he defines as a form of ecclesial racism) for its religio-political purposes and the condemnation of the ‘Russian World’ ideology as a militaristically weaponized ‘heresy’ in the international declaration co-published by the Fordham University/Volos Academy, ⁹⁴ Cardinal Kurt Koch (President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) has stated that Patriarch Kirill's ‘pseudo-religious justification’ of the ‘brutal and absurd war in Ukraine’ represents a heresy which has fractured the unity of Orthodox communities. ⁹⁵

These polemical statements and exchanges as well as the various greater and micro-crises across the ‘canonical territory’ of the Russian Orthodox Church and Ukrainian Orthodoxy add further urgency and relevancy to the ongoing intra-Orthodox, ecumenical and inter-religious disputes, meetings and consultations focused on topical issues such as modern critiques of the premises and current pertinence of the just war tradition, justification of humanitarian intervention and the environmental consequences of military conflicts. The publication of the document, For the Life of the World: Towards a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church ⁹⁶ (coordinated by the Ecumenical Patriarchate), and especially its chapter on war and violence, provides an important corrective to the ideologies of warfare crystallizing in post-Soviet Russian Orthodoxy. Categorizing all human violence as a ‘rebellion against God and the divinely created order’, the document acknowledges that on occasion self-defence or the defence of the oppressed cannot be achieved without the ‘judicious use of force’, but at the same time reasserts that the Orthodox Church itself has never developed a just war theory and could never refer to war as ‘just’ or ‘holy’. The problematic of the contemporary challenges to Eastern Orthodox traditional and modern stances on war and peace have been explored in the context of the theology of just peace, ⁹⁷ critiques of the basic premises of the just war tradition, ⁹⁸ just peace-making and Christian realism, ⁹⁹ Orthodox social ethics and the dynamic praxis of just peace-making, ¹⁰⁰ and so on. These new perspectives on this increasingly topical problematic may indeed contribute significantly to the capacity of modern Orthodox thought to seek ‘to bridge pacifism and just war theory through a re-conception of justice and peace-making’, ¹⁰¹ especially relevant in view of the current comparable theological and ethical pursuits of new war and peace frameworks in Catholic thinking. The unfolding and course of the ecclesial conflicts involving Russian and Ukrainian churches and parishes, triggered in the build-up and escalation of the military conflict, will show whether Orthodox religious actors might begin to play a key role in peace negotiations, peace-building and reconciliation, realizing the obvious potential of the Eastern Orthodox plurality of approaches to diverse Christian models of peace-making. ¹⁰²