The formula for war in Ukraine is simple: war equals guns plus ideas. The weapons are provided by the Kremlin, but the ideas do not come from Kremlin-affiliated think tanks. Russian political leaders borrowed them from the Russian Orthodox Church.

The head of this church, Patriarch Kirill, is more than just a religious leader. He is the architect of the Russian worldview that has framed the conflict in Ukraine – my home country – since it began in 2014.

I closely followed the work of the Patriarch in Moscow and saw how the religious ideology of the Orthodox Church was shaped. The original intention was for it to be an instrument of re-evangelization of the Russian people after the period of militant atheism under the communist regime, filling the void of meaning left by the collapse of the dominant political belief.

However, this ideology has taken on a life of its own. Over time, the Russian people have adopted a kind of cultural Christianity, which does not even oblige them to believe in God. Such Christianity has been manipulated by the Kremlin to create narratives that incite Russians to support aggression as they look to the church for national identity rather than faith.

Within the Russian Orthodox Church itself, this has taken on a more intense and dangerous form. A majority within the church actively or passively supports the war in Ukraine, viewing it as “sacred” and a form of self-protection against the imaginary imposition of “Western values”. Russian propaganda presents these values ​​as promoting sexual minorities, destroying families and generally spreading “immorality”. Such a perception is little different, for example, from that of Isil members in the Middle East, who also justified killing by claiming to protect what is dear to them from Western aggression.

Vladimir Putin was particularly interested in the role of the Church in his attempt to create and strengthen a brand of Russian nationalism capable of retaining adherents beyond the borders of the current Russian Federation. The president’s understanding of ‘Greater Russia’ – which he says includes Ukraine – rests not just on history and ethnicity, but also on a common church, no matter how tenacious his faith is. original have become distorted.

The reality is that the ideology invoked by Patriarch Kirill and his confederates is actually a distortion of Orthodox Christianity, despite its claims to protect it, and must be condemned as heretical.

This is particularly the point of A statement on the teaching of the “Russian world” (Russkii mir) recently signed by many Orthodox scholars, as well as theologians from other Christian traditions. In it, theologians explicitly condemned Russian ideology as incompatible with the broader Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition: “We reject the heresy of the ‘Russian world’ and the shameful actions of the Russian government in unleashing war against Ukraine. that stems from this vile and indefensible war. teaching with the connivance of the Russian Orthodox Church, deeply anti-Orthodox, anti-Christian and against humanity.

One of the premises for such condemnation is the accusation that the Russian Orthodox Church is guilty of “phyletism”, which can be translated as “tribalism”. This was rejected as heretical doctrine by a council of the Orthodox Church in 1872, a decision which effectively declared that the structure and idea of ​​the Church should be separated from the kind of extreme nationalism we see in Russia.

The confrontation is therefore not between Russian “traditional values” and Western “impiety”, as Patriarch Cyril claims, but between brutality and civilization. It is a clash between totalitarian autocracy and democracy.

Ukraine is at the forefront of this confrontation. What Ukrainians stand for and shed their blood are Western values. These values, which include solidarity, justice and responsibility, are not only political, but also spiritual. They are all an integral part of the Christian tradition, which President Putin and Patriarch Kirill claim to protect, but which in fact damage and destroy.

Dr Cyril Hovorun is Professor of Ecclesiology at Sankt Ignatios College, Sweden