In the photographs that he publishes on his Telegram channel “A priest in Donetsk”, Father Roman wears a camouflage jacket over his cassock. He poses alongside pro-Russian soldiers, the wounded in military hospitals, raises funds for his proteges and tells uplifting stories from the front.
For this religious, the war in Ukraine is the mother of all wars. It is a confrontation “against Satanism”, he explains to us, from the webcam of his mobile phone, against the background of a flag representing a Christ icon, without ever losing a benevolent smile. Ukrainian Satanism, whose origins he traces back to the schism of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church with the Moscow Patriarchate in 1992; but above all the Satanism of a West that he describes as wallowing in lust and sin, with pell-mell, marriage for all, LGBT rights, the advent of transgender people, all completed by ambient “neo-Nazism” .
Father Roman is not the only Orthodox priest to have gone to the front, alongside Russian troops; nor the only one, far from it, to hold this discourse (even if many avoid the subject). It must be said that since the start of the war in Ukraine, the religious hierarchy, including Patriarch Cyril himself, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has worked to legitimize Vladimir Putin’s war. “Mad people thought that mighty Russia […] could be defeated, that we could impose on it so-called values that we cannot even qualify as such […]. We pray to the Lord to make them listen to reason. We believe that God will not abandon our Russian land, our authorities, our Orthodox president and our warriors”, thus sermonized on January 18 the one who had already affirmed that the sacrifices of the Russian soldiers “washed away” all their sins.
In April 2022, a spokesperson for the Orthodox Church claimed on Russian television that Ukraine was using “demonic and witchy means” to resist Russia. Last October, the theme of “Satanism” even ended up making its way to the top of the state, when the Russian Security Council officially added the “de-Satanization” of Ukraine to its “denazification” and its ” demilitarization” among the Russian war aims.
“The official Russian Church has always been linked to the State”
“It’s a real subject for practicing Orthodox,” explains Sergei Shtyrkov, a sociologist specializing in religious practice in Russia. “It comes up most often in anti-Western diatribes against the normalization of homosexuality and the deconstruction of traditional gender roles. The idea that this could happen in Russia terrifies many Orthodox. more satanic than gay pride in Moscow, and Kremlin ideologues are actively nurturing these fears.”
Nothing surprising, moreover, in this alliance between power and religion… “The official Russian Church has always been linked to the State”, summarizes Leonid Sevastyanov, the president of the World Union of Old Believers. and one of the figureheads of this orthodox schismatic movement which, in the 17th century, had rightly refused the subordination of the clergy to the power of the tsar. “The Church justified serfdom and autocracy by religious precepts and supported all the wars waged by the Russian state throughout its history. She served the Tsars, Stalin and the other leaders of the Soviet era, and now Putin, without qualms, by providing them with a sacred guarantee. It gains the financial and political support of the state, and therefore an influence on society out of proportion to its real moral authority.
The perfect embodiment of this collusion: the patriarch Cyril, by his civil name Vladimir Goundiaïev, close to Putin and… former KGB agent. More recently, he was targeted by several anti-corruption investigations carried out by Russian opponents, accusing him of his taste for luxury watches and large sedans, and, also, of secretly owning prestigious apartments in the most chic neighborhoods. from Moscow. This love of wealth is another point in common with Putin, moreover a divorced man, parent of children born out of wedlock and maintaining, according to the investigations of Alexeï Navalny, his family hidden on state funds. But these contradictions do not seem to worry the Russian Orthodox Church either…