Putin's Useful Priests: The Russian Orthodox Church
Putin's Useful Priests: The Russian Orthodox Church and the ... - Foreign Affairs Magazine posted at 11:49:11 UTC via "Open Source Counterintelligence Analysis" - Google News Foreign Affairs Magazine Putin’s Useful Priests posted at 13:47:55 UTC via foreignaffairs.com On July 23, one of Ukraine’s largest churches, the Orthodox cathedral in Odessa, was seriously damaged by a Russian missile strike. The strike highlighted one of the lingering enigmas of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine: Moscow has been waging war not only on a neighboring population but also on one that, like its own, is overwhelmingly made up of Orthodox Christians. In effect, the Russian government has been forced to target its own religion in its campaign to subdue Ukraine. Yet despite this, members of Russia’s Orthodox clergy have been among the most vocal supporters of the war, and criticism from Orthodox leaders in other countries has been comparatively muted.