Understanding the Orthodox Christian worldview motivating Vladimir Putin in war with Ukraine

It seems a good, if not vital, moment to try and look beyond the narrow analysis of the dreadful war in Ukraine provided by the vast majority of our politicians and mainstream media, given the current conflation of related and significant events all happening around the same time.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky is currently visiting the US to drum up further military support for his beleaguered country – including being able to fire western missiles deep into Russia – while Russian President Vladimir Putin is again warning that the nuclear option is not off the table if Russia feels threatened enough, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is saying that if he becomes the next US President he will end the war in Ukraine.

Ten years or so ago, a popular documentary film on prime-time Russian television drew attention to the lessons for Russia about the fall of Byzantium. It was from Byzantium that missionaries had brought the Orthodox faith to Russia in the 10th century, and it was to the Byzantine Emperors that the Tsars of Russia had traced their line of descent, all the way back to Constantine the Great.

The film The Fall of an Empire: The Lessons of Byzantium claimed that the foundations of the modern West’s banking system derive from the Fourth Crusade’s loot of Constantinople in 1204, and also that a significant factor in the Empire’s final collapse had been its impoverishment by rapacious Western oligarchs through aggressive exploitation of trade concessions granted to them in 1082 by a cash-strapped Byzantine Emperor.

Constantinople’s sack in 1204 remains firmly embedded in the consciousness of the Orthodox East, partly because it so weakened Byzantium to the point that its final collapse became inevitable, causing Christendom’s centre of gravity to shift westward, but also because of the barbaric savagery of the Crusaders, who looted their way across Constantinople in a manner even the Vandals and Goths would have found unpalatable.

Although the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople from the Crusaders in 1261, the West’s collective failure to honour the agreement they made with the Byzantines at the Council of Florence in 1449, and to provide them with military assistance against the advancing armies of Mehmet the Conqueror, was a further contributory factor in Constantinople’s final fall to the Ottomans in 1453.

A particular source of scandal for the Orthodox East is that the Crusaders had been engaged in a Holy War. The concept of Holy War has never really been accepted by the Orthodox East, which is why Patriarch Kyrill’s support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is so controversial within the Orthodox world.

In the West, however, since at least the time of St Augustine and his Just War Theory, later expanded on by St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, there has long been an acceptance that there are circumstances in which war can be justified, one example of which is if the war is to be fought for the “common good”.

The Byzantines avoided war as much as they possibly could, relying on diplomacy and the use of bribery instead, in order to achieve their foreign policy objectives. However, they did also accept that there are circumstances in which the oikoumene – the ordered hierarchy of subordinate, Orthodox Christian states bound by a common allegiance to the Emperor of Byzantium – might use armed force in order to protect the integrity of its people.

Importantly, as far as the Byzantines were concerned, the Empire existed not for the purposes of material profit, or for political and social “progress”, but rather to provide the basic material conditions within which the Emperor’s subjects could pursue their one, over-riding duty and purpose in life – the quest for deification (theosis), or union with God. This quest required that a man be able to master himself to the extent that he ceased to be a creature of appetite.

The Byzantines strongly believed that one of the Emperor’s sacred duties was to act as the katechon, “the one who withholds” (2 Thessalonians 2: 6-7), a biblical concept developed by the Byzantines into a political philosophy, according to which the Emperor’s most sacred duty was to act as a restraint on the rise of the Antichrist. Any threat to the existence of the Empire, so long as the Empire was led by an Emperor mindful of his duty to act as a katechon, raised, in the view of the Byzantines, the possibility of the victory of the Antichrist.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is regarded by some in the Orthodox world as a 21st-century katechon, a view of Putin that is obviously very different to the one that prevails in decision-making circles in the West and among our media.

Despite recent claims in various Western press outlets that Putin dabbles in the occult, and likes to discuss nuclear weapons policy with Mongolian shamans – as described in a recent story by UK media The Times – it is an undeniable fact that Putin is a practicing Russian Orthodox Christian, who regularly attends the Divine Liturgy, and takes guidance from Orthodox spiritual directors, known as starets, as well as from his confessor Father Tikhon Shevkunov, who directed the film The Fall of an Empire.

In much the same way that many in the Orthodox world believe that, in order to weaken the Byzantine Empire – and maximise profit – the late medieval West instigated the separation of Serbia and Bulgaria from the Empire, so too, in around 2004, the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned Vladimir Putin that the US-led, neo-liberal West would set about Russia’s dismemberment by encouraging its “Balkanisation”.

Solzhenitsyn said that this policy would be justified in the name of liberal “progress” – an encouragement of the “rights” of the constituent parts of the Russian Empire to exercise the principle of self determination, and break away from Russia. In actual fact, some would argue, that dismemberment of Russia would have nothing to do with high moral principle, and everything to do with weakening Russia’s sovereignty in order to open it up to commercial exploitation by outside interests.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, initially an atheist and later a Russian Orthodox Christian, stands within the “Slavophil” tradition of Russian intellectuals – a core belief of this tradition being that the Russian people are a Chosen People, with a unique destiny to act as a catalyst for the spiritual transformation of the world. Much of the reason for this ancient belief derives from the “Russian situation” on a boundary between East and West – long regarded as a necessary preliminary for the emergence of a new civilisation.

“Sophisticated” people in the West, of course, scoff at the idea of a people having a unique, God-given destiny, but plenty of the greatest intellectuals produced by Russia, including, for example, FM Dostoevsky and Vladimir Soloviev, fully subscribed to such a view of Russia as the bearer of a messianic mission.

If a people believe that they are descended from God, and not so much from apes, then it is not surprising perhaps if they believe that they have a God-given destiny to fulfil in life.

The Slavophils of the nineteenth century were especially exercised with the problem of how best to respond to the Enlightenment-conditioned ideas that began to penetrate Russia from the West in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

They firmly believed that the Russian Orthodox faith is a purer, spiritually superior interpretation of Christianity than Westernised versions, and that Russia, which even at the end of the 19th century had not yet fully industrialised, was in a strong position. This was due to its unique situation as a Christian country on the boundary between East and West, and it being in a position to learn from the mistakes made by the West during the latter’s process of rapid industrialisation, which the Slavophils believed had led to a degradation of European character, intelligence and creativity.

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The Slavophils were not imperialists – in fact they were probably more akin to the “off-the-grid” hippy types and eco-warriors of our times. Many, if not most, were, like Alexei Khomiakov, who had served in the Imperial Guard, high-minded, country gentlemen, nourished by the ascetic traditions of their Orthodox faith, with a deep love and respect for what they saw as the exemplary character of the Russian peasantry.

The Slavophils were absolutely determined to resist any attempt to Westernise Russia. Khomiakov, for example, was famous for wearing a kaftan when visiting his club in Moscow, rather than the Western-style frock coat that Peter the Great had ordered on the gentry as part of his efforts to Westernise and “modernise” Russia.

The Slavophil vision for Russia was of a trans-national, decentralised Russia, based around a network of village republics, rather like Gandhi’s vision for a post-independence India, all held together under the leadership of a father figure, the Tsar Autocrat, protector of the Orthodox faith, spiritually bound to the service of his people through the act of solemn anointing at his coronation.

The Slavophil vision for the world was of a universal brotherhood of man, as outlined so eloquently, for example, by Dostoevsky in his famous “Pushkin Speech”.

It is said that when Solzhenitsyn met Putin in 2000, there was a meeting of minds about how best to rebuild Russia, although it is also said that Solzhenitsyn later expressed disappointment at Putin’s failure to properly prioritise action to prevent impending ecological catastrophe.

Putin, for his part, was especially impressed by Solzhenitsyn’s focus on what Solzhenitsyn called “The Great Catastrophe of the 1990s”, which was one way of describing the fact that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, 25 million Russians had suddenly found themselves cut off from their homeland.

The question that Solzhenitsyn believed Russians must ask themselves was, “shall our people be or nor be?” Solzhenitsyn believed that the Russian people were not so much an ethnic identity as a spiritual consciousness, and that any dismemberment of the Russian people, via, for example, the break up of the union of the Slavic people, would lead to the ultimate death of a unique spiritual consciousness – with all the negative consequences that loss would bring to the world as a whole.

In the light of all this it is not unreasonable, therefore, to understand Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine, the place where the Russian people were first united by the Christian faith, in terms of an attempt by Putin to protect Russia’s particular spiritual consciousness, which Solzhenitsyn believed will wither away and die if Russia’s leaders allow it to be dismembered.

The French playwright Honoré de Balzac once said that “behind every fortune there is a crime”. One of the justifications for Byzantine autocracy was that it was needed to act as a check against the kind of oligarchic corruption that had helped bring about the collapse of pagan Rome.

Although the Russian aristocracy was hated by many for having allowed itself to become heavily Westernised, many Russian aristocrats only ever spoke Russian when dealing with their servants, and there was an undeniably close link between the Russian peasanty and the Tsars. It was Tsar Alexander II, for example, who had forced the emancipation of the serfs, and it was to the Tsars that the peasantry would directly appeal when they felt that their rights were being undermined by government elites in St Petersburg.

One of the themes of the campaign leading up to the US presidential election this November is widespread distrust of what President Trump has called the “Washington Swamp”, which Robert F Kennedy Jr believes has been pervaded by corporate corruption and subsequently caused innumerable harm to the physical and environmental health of the US.

At the same time, vice presidential candidate JD Vance is known to have been involved in conversations about whether or not America’s pursuit of economic growth, the cornerstone of corporate profit, really is conducive to the nation’s health.

If the Republicans win the next US presidential election, there may well emerge a strong degree of synergy between the anti-establishment policies of President Trump, Vice President Vance, John F. Kennedy Jr and President Putin, all of whom bear a deep distrust of global, oligarchic elites – the kind of elites that brought both Byzantium, in the late Medieval Era, and Russia in the 1990s, to their knees.

And the kind of elites, as some in the US are arguing, who, driven by a deluded faith in the false of gods of economic growth and human “progress”, are more than capable of bringing America to its knees.

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Photo: Russian President Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Patriarch of Russia Kyrill, places a candle as he visits the New Jerusalem Orthodox Monastery outside the town of Istra, some 70km outside Moscow, Russia, 15 November 2017. (Photo credit should read ALEXEY NIKOLSKY/AFP via Getty Images.)

Mark Jenkins is a philosopher and writer who specialises in the intersection between religion and geopolitics. He is currently preparing a book about his travels to Mount Athos and then on through the Russian Federation, where he spent several weeks in a remote, Orthodox Christian hermitage in the Mary El Republic.

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