His goal was to alienate religious members of Ukrainian society from Zelensky’s government, which tries to keep secular neutrality
Dr Cyril Hovorun is a professor of ecclesiology at Sankt Ignatios College, Sweden
Vladimir Putin is a master of cracks. He skilfully finds them in what he believes to be his enemies’ camps and then tries to widen them as much as possible, for his political ends. It has become a common wisdom that he tried, and continues to be hopeful, to crack the unity of the West, including Nato. Sometimes it felt like he was not far from success, but then the fully fledged invasion in Ukraine in February 2022 pushed the Western allies to tighten their ties with one another.
Putin tests not only “hard” powers but also “soft” ones. He uses Russia’s “soft powers” to weaken his enemies. These powers include ideology, language, culture, and faith. Putin does not hide that they are instrumental for expanding Russia’s influence globally. For example, on 5 September 2022, he signed a “Concept of the humanitarian politics of the Russian Federation abroad”. The document presents Russian culture as a “soft power tool” which, among other things, “contributes to ... neutralising anti-Russian sentiments of political and ideological origin”. Moreover, “international cultural and humanitarian cooperation” is supposed “to create favourable conditions for the implementation of foreign policy tasks”. Similar statements could be applied to all other Russian soft powers.
In explaining his rationales, Putin often swaps reasons and excuses for what he is doing. It is quite clear that for him, protecting Russianness in general and Russian soft powers in particular is not a reason, but rather an excuse to enhance and apply his hard powers. That is why the Ukrainian areas that suffered from the aggression most used to be traditionally pro-Russian, there is a global tendency to cancel the Russian culture, and most of the churches destroyed by the Russian shelling belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate.
It seems that for Putin, it is more important to weaponise his soft powers than to protect them. He uses them to widen the cracks he finds in the West. He flirts with both alt-Right and alt-Left – not for their own sake, but for the sake of chaos. As a result, he paradoxically appears to be popular with figures who have opposite ideological orientations, such as Viktor Orbán and Nicolás Maduro. Sawing chaos is on his mind when he is destroying Aleppo or energy infrastructure in Ukraine. In both cases, he tries to create waves of immigration that, he hopes, would overwhelm the West.
In the Western culture wars, Putin’s goal is not so much to protect the “traditional family values”. He does not care about these values when he sends his soldiers to rape children or orders to separate children from their parents and send them for re-education to the Russian families. He adds fuel to the fire of the Western culture wars for the same purpose he does everything else regarding the West, to increase entropy.
Putin applies the same principle of divide et impera to faith. Although he presents himself as an Orthodox Christian and is seen by many Orthodox as a protector of Orthodoxy, he has contributed significantly to the present fragmentation of the global Orthodox church. The Moscow Patriarchate, in the spirit of Putin’s isolationism, unilaterally broke relations with some other Orthodox churches, including the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Such steps have been endorsed by the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
The Kremlin, through its proxies, also tries to deepen divisions within the Ukrainian Orthodoxy. It is divided and managed by two jurisdictions. One of them is Ukrainian and independent from any other religious centre. Another one struggles to gain more independence from Moscow. Putin and his propagandists call the latter jurisdiction “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine” and pretend they care about it. However, they care more that this jurisdiction, which calls itself “Ukrainian Orthodox Church,” continues to be in conflict with the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Russian propaganda’s narratives about assumed “persecutions” by the Ukrainian state against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church serve this end well.
In the same spirit of exploring cracks, one can see Putin’s recent initiative for ceasefire during the Julian-calendar Christmas on January 7. Although this initiative was first suggested by the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill, one should not have an illusion that it did not come from Putin. It is being played by two actors, but Putin is its sole production director. His goal was to confuse the Ukrainian society, which is quite religious and sensitive to such issues. His hope was also to alienate religious members of this society from the government, which tries to keep secular neutrality.
That chaos and alienation – and not ceasefire – were Putin’s main goal is evident from the fact that the Russians kept sending shells to the Ukrainian cities and villages.
Dr Cyril Hovorun is a professor of eccle
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