The Russian bishop who has joined Vladimir Putin in war on Ukraine
Behind most evil men are willing accomplices. In the case of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, that man is the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Evil seldom walks alone. Indeed, it tends to have a henchman.
Adolf Hitler had Heinrich Himmler – the “Final Solution” was his – along with Adolf Eichmann, whose industrial extermination camps killed millions.
Pol Pot was accompanied by the coolly defiant Nuon Chea, Brother Number Two, who, many believe, cranked the killing machine that sacrificed two million Cambodians.
Ali Khamenei may be supreme leader of Iran, but it is low-key Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who is in charge as Iran exports terror, develops its nuclear weapons program, destabilises the Middle East, attacks the West and plans to exterminate Israel.
There are common denominators at the core of these dark souls: they are liars, psychopaths and narcissists; men who understand only that the ends justify the means.
Vladimir Putin readily displays all of these traits – and neither does he travel alone. He is loyally served in his attack on humanity and defended in his war crimes by Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyayev, otherwise known as Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Kirill gives Christian cover to Putin’s butchery while remaining preoccupied with Europe’s acceptance of gay rights among other liberal democratic “crimes” and “decadence”.
Between them, and with a complex caravan of ambitious generals and undereducated, often illiterate Russian conscripts, they have gone clumsily to war with their neighbour based on a mix of Putin’s old hatreds and new contempts.
Most of Putin’s “convictions” are just skin deep. His opponents are routinely murdered. He funds massacres in Syria. He is reported to be secretly the world’s wealthiest man. Fortune magazine reported recently that a staff of 40 maintains the gardens of his $US1.4bn Black Sea “weekender”.
His attacks in Ukraine form part of an ambition to recreate a Russian empire over which he would be a messiah of sorts. He has run rings around the West for decades. President George W. Bush, who said many funny things, was never more amusing than when he stated that he had “looked (Putin) in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul”.
The brain squirming behind those eyes has now set Eastern Europe alight with war crimes the world only last week fully came to understand. A few days ago, Ukraine’s lion-hearted President, Volodymyr Zelensky, walked the shrapnel- and corpse-strewn streets of Bucha, a once serene, almost pastoral part of northern Kyiv. Zelensky later addressed the United Nations to describe the crimes that had taken place there – like those of the Germans in World War II, or Rwanda in 1994 or even Srebrenica the following year: children murdered; women and girls raped; torture; indiscriminate mass killings; executions of sometimes bound civilians shot from behind; butchering of innocents; and ambulances carrying the injured machinegunned.
And then gutless, drunk Russians planting landmines, even on cadavers, as they retreated.
One Australian understands better than most what has been happening in Ukraine and last week he returned from his ancestral home to help us understand what it means. Stefan Romaniw, who lives in Melbourne, is co-chair of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations and First Vice-President of the Ukrainian World Congress.
And he focused on Putin’s priest: “How Kirill ever became head of a church is unbelievable,” he says, having days before witnessed first-hand the suffering of Ukrainians in the war to which Kirill has given his blessing.
“He has bluffed his way through. There are priests now leaving his church because they don’t believe what is happening. He is part of the problem. He encourages Putin and he encourages Russian fascism,” says Romaniw.
In a sermon on March 6, Kirill announced: “We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance.”
For Ukrainians, whose own Orthodox Church was made autonomous three years ago, and for Russians, the church is a vital part of national identity. But Kirill has never accepted the Ukrainian church’s independence and Putin insists the two countries’ “spiritual unity” had been undermined.
Romaniw’s organisation wrote to Pope Francis, when news broke that the pontiff would meet Kirill, urging him not to do so. “Why are you giving him the time of day when what he is doing is very un-Christian?”
Romaniw adds: “Everyone is focused on Putin, but the other root of this evil is Kirill. He drives Putin’s agenda. They are very close.”
The papal encounter took place at Havana Airport in Cuba, the first time in almost 1000 years that the leaders of the two churches had met. “We are brothers,” Pope Francis gushed as the men kissed three times. But the relationship may have soured.
Ten days after Kirill’s inflammatory call to arms, Pope Francis organised a Zoom meeting at which he urged Kirill “not to use the language of politics, but the language of Jesus”.
London-based human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson believes Kirill is “a crucial element in preaching support for Putin’s barbaric war to the Russian Orthodox Church followers and that Kirill perverts Christianity, a religion that stands for peace and especially for protecting children and other innocents.
“Instead he indoctrinates his followers into a belief that such groups should be slaughtered if they get in the way of Russian aggression.”
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