The war for Christmas: Using the Church to fight Russia
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In Ukraine, the war of churches has gone to a new level as the NATO-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine seeks to establish a new narrative for a Western-aligned Ukraine at the cost of identity, history, and faith.
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Amidst the ongoing military war in Ukraine, there is a war of narrative and identity as the West, once again, aims to rewrite history to fit its foreign policies.
Over the past months, one thing has become clear: the war in Ukraine will determine the future of the world order. In the event of a military win for NATO and its allies, which appears highly unlikely, Russia would be “contained”, once again, as the Minsk Agreement confessions revealed by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel aimed to achieve, through the expansion of NATO’s eastern flank.
In my previous article titled How the war on the Moscow Patriarchate is a war on collective identity, I underscored how the West had employed multiple soft power strategies to create a false narratove for Ukrainian national identity, which would allegedly be framed as independent from Russia and the Orthodox Church of the Moscow and Kiev Patriarchates [which play a significant role in the collective identity of Eurasia and former USSR countries]. In this article, I will continue to highlight the unfolding of events within this content and show the significance of the battle of churches taking place in Eastern Europe.
As explained in the previous article, the US, alongside its collective West allies, utilizing the Resistance Operating Concept (ROC) strategy, have found religion to be the most efficient component of collective identity that they can exploit to their advantage. The idea was to create an allegedly national-religious divide that would create the following equation: A patriotic Ukrainian will reject any Russian-affiliated form of Christian Orthodoxy, such as that of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), and adopt the new, only partially-recognized, Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
This equation would entail that anyone who does not accept that illusive division as an “objective fact” would be considered a ‘traitor’ and dubbed a ‘Russian propagandist.’
Subsequently, this dresses Russia up as an enemy, despite the fact that an honest objective analysis of reality, grounded in the study of histography, shows that Ukraine is an extension of Russia. This is true to the extent that previously, Ukraine was known regionally as Kyivan Rus, even by the admission of notorious US foreign policy strategist and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
The plan in motion
In 2008, a cable titled “Interfaith Dialogue” revealed that discussions regarding how to approach the strategy for religious exploitation of the targeted collective identity started as early as 2004 [at least to our knowledge and based on tracking the history of communications thanks to Wikileaks].
The Wikileaks-released cable written by the then US embassy in Kiev read: “The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodoxy, arrived in Ukraine on July 24 for a five-day visit to celebrate the 1,020th anniversary of the Christianization of the Kyivan Rus.”
Once again, this is significant, as the terminologies reaffirm the historical identity of Ukraine through its original name of Kyivan Rus, whose Christian identity dates back to 1,020 AD.
The US ambassador then made an unfounded claim and outlined the then-potential soft power strategy: “Although he [Bortholemew] has no jurisdiction over other Orthodox patriarchs, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople is viewed as the spiritual leader and primary spokesman for Eastern Orthodoxy, and many anticipated his visit might help begin to resolve the long-running split within Ukraine's Orthodox community and lend support for President Yushchenko's push to establish a unified Orthodox church free from Russian influence.”
Ten years later, in 2018, the fears of Moscow became a reality after the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate canceled the Synodal Letter of 1686 granting the right to ordinate the Metropolitan of Kiev to the Moscow Patriarch. Soon after, in 2019, the NATO-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine was granted a tomos of autocephaly (decree of ecclesial independence), by Bartholomew I of Constantinople, but remained only canonically partially-recognized. However, according to the Russian Orthodox Church, it was considered, as it continues to be, uncanonical.
[Note: The previous article highlights the relationship between Bortholemew I of Constantinople with the West and what the two would gain from such an endeavor, and how it would be translated in Western foreign policy applications.]
In 2022, the former president of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, who served as President following the Maidan coup in 2014 until 2019, described this as “a great victory for the devout Ukrainian nation over the Moscow demons, a victory of good over evil, light over darkness.”
Significantly, in an interview with Lally Weymouth, Poroshenko said, "From the beginning, I was one of the organizers of the Maidan,” highlighting his work in service of the NATO-backed color revolution in Ukraine aimed at containing Russia while expanding NATO’s eastern flank and ending Ukraine’s neutrality between Eastern and Western alliance.
In March of 2022, Ukraine's National Kiev-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Preserve announced that it had ordered monks of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate to leave the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, one of the most important Orthodox Christian monasteries by March 29, claiming a breach of contract.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow slammed, in the same month, Ukraine's National Kiev-Pechersk Historical and Cultural Preserve's order to expel the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) clergy from the Kiev Pechersk Lavra monastery.
At a UN Security Council meeting on Ukraine, in January of 2023, the Chairman of the Department of External Church Relations of the Patriarchate of the Moscow Metropolitan in Volokolamsk, Anthony, told UN delegates of the political repression exercised against the Orthodox Church clergy of Ukraine and called on the UN to intervene.
One example he evoked at the meeting was the revocation of Ukrainian citizenship of the Orthodox Church clergy of Ukraine.
"Depriving the citizenship of Ukrainian religious figures is undoubtedly a form of mass political repressions, which contradict the Constitution of Ukraine and international agreements that have been signed by that state," Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Anthony said via videoconference.
He added that "In 2022 alone, 129 churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church were seized. At the same time, the legal registration of its new communities was completely blocked."
It was also witnessed that Ukrainian army members threatened people and religious figures of the UOC-MP.
A Chronology of events
At the beginning of 2023, the main Assumption Cathedral of the historical and UNESCO-marked site, the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, was officially transferred to the allegedly independent but realistically NATO-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine after multiple searches and violations of the sanctity of the church under the pretense that it propagated pro-Russia propaganda.
On January 7, OCU priests, for the first time in the history of the historical monastery, held a service in the cathedral, and Ukrainian President Zelensky shortly after stated that “there will never be anything non-Ukrainian here again.”
In April, Metropolitan Pavel, the abbot of the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, was sentenced to 60 days of house arrest, and the clergy of the Cathedral of Khmelnytskyi were charged with "hooliganism" after they refused to join the OCU or desert the Lavra.
After the refusal of the monks of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), who have resided in the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra for centuries, to desert their church and join the partially-recognized Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), the Ukrainian Culture Ministry also created a commission to seal the Lavra's premises, forcing the monks to evacuate before July 4.
At the time, Nikita Chekman, the clerics' legal advisor, posted part of the decree on Telegram. The decree read: "A commission has been created for sealing the buildings, which begins its work on July 4, 2023. In this regard, we ask you to vacate the premises and give the keys from them to the reserve. If the monastery refuses to give the keys from the buildings ... the locks will be replaced and the buildings will be sealed."
At that point, the Bishops of the UOC expressed that they felt threatened by the supporters of the NATO-backed Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU).
Bishop Gedeon, also given the name Yuriy Kharon, of Makarov, told Sputnik, "all my friends and acquaintances that I talk to feel threatened because the churches are being taken away from them. And what could be more threatening than them coming to you and taking away what belongs to the Church of Christ? And they don't take it away for anyone, they take it away for nothing. No one goes there, they don't even have parishioners."
Moreover, Kharon explained that "their [Ukrainian authorities'] very task is to transfer [the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra] to the OCU. After all, they do need some kind of Church. They cannot position themselves as theomachists or atheists, although they are, but they cannot say so openly, they do it through the OCU," he said.
To further reaffirm that the war against the Russian Orthodox Church and Ukrainian Orthodox Church is grounded in politics, Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada adopted on July 14, 2023, No. 9431, which denotes that the parliament changed the dates of three holidays, among which is Christmas.
People's Deputy of Ukraine, Yaroslav Zheleznyak, reported that the law changing the date of Christmas from December 25 to January 7, Ukrainian Statehood Day from July 28 to July 15, and the Day of Defenders of Ukraine and the Day of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos from October 14 to October 1, will go into effect starting September 1st.
It is worth noting that the date changes follow the Georgian calendar as opposed to the Julian Calendar, which Russian Orthodox churches and many Eastern Christian denominations continue to follow.
Only to further politicize and push forward the soft power strategy of NATO in the face of history itself, Ukrainian MP Irina Gerashchenko, via Telegram, slammed Russia, Eastern Orthodox, and non-Western denominations as uncivilized in a move that cannot but remind us of the dark history of Western Christianity, which gave birth to the era of the crusades and the racist ideology it propagated. Gerashchenko said: “Now Ukrainians – Orthodox and Catholics – will celebrate holidays with the whole civilized world, but not with Moscow.”
On August 11, the Ukrainian security forces actively blocked non-OCU followers from entering one of the most sacred places for Eastern Orthodox Christians, as the Christians of Ukraine have not yet abandoned the Ukrainian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox churches in favor of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, unlike what was planned by NATO and the Ukrainian government serving as a proxy tool in the war against Russia.
Will religion be allowed to be a tool of imperialism once again?
Many might now ask what the purpose of this chronological analysis of events offers. Indeed, it would be, at the very least, a call to return to the root problem and assess reality through a decolonized lens. Western imperialism and hegemony are shrinking, while their divisionary policies continue to flourish. The cost of playing into the Western-propagated narrative would be the destruction of society and collective identity while simultaneously tarnishing history. There is no country or minority that ever benefited from such narratives, and the examples from Africa, Latin America, and Western Asia are endless.
At a time when the church must be working toward unity, the collective West continues to manipulate and pull strings to achieve nothing but US and NATO goals, which could not be more contradictory to the collective good of Ukraine, Eastern Europe, or any other region seeking to liberate itself from destructive hegemony and regain its sovereignty and dignity. That applies to Christian denominations worldwide hoping to be liberated from Crusader ideology that has been forcefully imposed through multiple means.
Read more: The Future of Arab Christians: One path, one destiny
