by Michael Wood

This article is extremely important because it outlines the very basic worldly reasons why the war in Ukraine simply goes on without stop and will end with Russia gaining the defensive territory it needs – the ancient cradle of Russia: the remnant of Kievan Rus and Novo Russiya.

That, however, is not the whole story A religious or moral case in favour of Russia’s present actions is made elsewhere, from the perspective of the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church, and this centres upon defending traditional Christian societal values, and protecting Russian civilisation from the disastrous Western society’s moral decline.

Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has described the war as a spiritual battle against decadent Western liberalism which was seeping into Russia through the porous border with Ukraine. Westerners don’t understand how very close Russia’s population is to the Russian population of eastern Ukraine, with many, many families having branches on both sides of the border and constant unregulated passage to and fro across the border both physical and electronic.

Russia has, over the past thirty years virtually completely replaced the communist ideology with a return of the great Orthodox Church, converting vast swathes of the population, building for themselves literally tens of thousands of church buildings and educating tens of thousands of clergy. Russia sees itself as a bastion of traditional values, contrasting them with the perceived erosion of morality and family structures in the West. Orthodox Christianity is seen as a central component of this traditional moral framework. The war in “Ukraine” is seen in Russia as a defence of Russia’s unique civilisational identity and spiritual heritage against encroaching Western influence of catastrophic moral decline and secularism.

The formulation of the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome” is primarily associated with the monk Philotheus of Pskov, who stated that “Moscow alone shines over all the earth more radiantly than the sun” because of its fidelity to the faith. The marriage ofIvan the III to Sophia Palaiogina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and the defeat of the Tatars, helped to solidify this view. In 1589, during the reign of Feodore I under the influence of Boris Godunov, Metropolitan Job of Moscow, was elected as the first Patriarch of Moscow, with the blessing of Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople. In the decree establishing the Patriarchate, the Russian state is termed as the “Third Rome”.

Given the catastrophic nineteenth-twenty-first century moral-spiritual decline of the schismatic western “churches”, this concept of Russia as the last effective bastion of real Christianity, looks valid not only to Russians, but to an increasing number of westerners. It has nothing to do (for westerners) with “loving Russia” but a lot to do with loving true Christianity. They see the retrieval of the remnant of Kievan Rus, the ancient cradle of Russia and Novo Russiya as vital to the physical and moral defence of Russia as it puts the very physical five hundred mile barrier of the wide Dnepr River between Western Ukraine and Russia.

Whether western self-described Christians like it or not, the adherents of genuine first millennium Orthodox Christianity see Russia as the likely citadel of true Christianity, and support Russia’s defence of its whole country from the incursion of the demonic, toxic western society of the twenty-first century.