Kirill

I was shocked, shocked I say, to learn that the head of the Russian Orthodox church is backing Putin's war of terror on Ukraine ... Russian Orthodox leader backs war in Ukraine, divides faith

But no one would have been surprised if they had ever read about Kirill, his relationship to Putin, his autocratic attitudes, and his antipathy for Ukraine. As I wrote in a 2011 post, Dress code for Russian women? , Kirill is an ex-KGB agent, like Putin. Here's a bit from a 2009 Forbes article ...

Putin Runs The Russian State--And The Russian Church Too

[...] Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in theSoviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies ...

And apparently, Kirill just really really loves Putin: see this 2012 Reuters article - Russian patriarch calls Putin era "miracle of God".

So Kirill runs his church just as Putin has long wished, as a tool of Christian Orthodox nationalism. Here's a bit from a 2007 article in TIME ...

Putin's Reunited Russian Church

[...] Nationalism, based on the Orthodox faith, has been emerging as the Putin regime's major ideological resource. Thursday's rite sealed the four-year long effort by Putin, beginning in September 2003, to have the Moscow Patriarchate take over its rival American-based cousin and launch a new globalized Church as his state's main ideological arm and a vital foreign policy instrument. In February press conference, Putin equated Russia's "traditional confessions" to its nuclear shield, both, he said, being "components that strengthen Russian statehood and create necessary preconditions for internal and external security of the country." Professor Sergei Filatov, a top authority on Russian religious affairs notes that "traditional confessions" is the state's shorthand for the Russian Orthodox Church ...

And since Russia has been stealing parts of Ukraine, Kirill has been on the side of Russia. Check out this PBS news video from 2019, which is pretty informative on this issue ...



So it's not surprising that Kirill is all in with Putin's current war on Ukraine. Depressing, though, how easy it is for conservative religious leaders to subvert Christian values for political purposes.