Putin sees Ukraine war as a spiritual mission

The toxic idea of annihilating Ukrainian culture may have taken hold of Vladimir Putin back in 2007, after an encounter with a dissident and blistering critic of the Gulag.

Putin, right, visits Alexander Solzhenitsyn, centre, in his house in Troitse-Lykovo in the outskirts of Moscow. Shown in the background are, Solzhenitsyn's sons, Stepan, far left, and Yermolai, wearing red striped tie. Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author whose books chronicled the horrors of the Soviet gulag system died of heart failure in 2008. He was 89.

Atrocities in war occur when soldiers have a sense of impunity, when they feel unobserved, when they are heady with power — and sometimes when they are convinced they have God, any god, on their side.

The alarm bells should have sounded when Kirill, the Moscow patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, prayed for victory in the “holy war” against Ukraine. That was the moment when it should have been clear to all that the conflict was not about national state interests, the sort that can be ended with conventional diplomacy, but rather a civilisational war aimed at the elimination of Ukrainian national identity.

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill releases white dove after a mass marking the Holiday of Annunciation in Moscow on April 7, 2022.

When attacking troops understand that message the gloves are off. Take the murder of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha. Why would an army do that? Why would their victims’ hands be tied behind their backs? Why would they be dumped outside their houses like roadkill? The conventional answer — that they were tortured for information — is not entirely plausible. More likely, it seems to me, they were killed by professional killers, mercenaries, who picked up their techniques in earlier conflicts in Chechnya or Syria. Muslim burial is supposed to occur within 24 hours. Placing corpses on public view and booby-trapping them so as to blow up their relatives became a cruel and cynical counterinsurgency tactic.

The Ukrainians are not Muslims, not insurgents, not waging jihad, don’t wear suicide vests, but they are standing in Vladimir Putin’s way of creating a Greater Russia. His claim that he’s mounting an operation against Nazis is used to justify a growing list of atrocities: the bombing of a crowded railway station; the flattening of Mariupol. The Russian war is being led by officers who won their spurs killing Syrian civilians. Ukrainian statehood is being treated as if it posed the same mortal challenge as ISIS.

The toxic idea of annihilating Ukrainian culture may have taken hold of Putin in 2007 when he met the dissident and blistering critic of the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It was an unlikely encounter but it turned out Putin was a fan of Solzhenitsyn’s Greater Russia convictions. Here’s the writer on pan-Slavism: “We all together emerged from the treasured Kyiv from which the Russian land began. The return of these lands to Russia was viewed by everyone as reunification.” For Putin, Russky Mir — the Russian world — was defined by the blood shed over the centuries rather than territorial boundaries. It was his duty to protect Russian minorities everywhere.

A forensic team remove the bodies of a mother and two children on April 12, 2022 in Bucha, Ukraine. The Russian retreat from towns near Kyiv has revealed scores of civilian deaths and the full extent of devastation from Russia's attempt to seize the Ukrainian capital.

A similar thought process seemed to be under way in the Russian military. The Greater Russia advocate Aleksandr Dugin, who used to lecture on geopolitics at the Russian general staff academy, argued the Cold War was not about the victory of liberal democracy over communism but merely the first phase in a civilisational conflict between Eurasia and the Euro-Atlantic world.

To this mix came the Moscow patriarchate, which under the leadership of Kirill has essentially become part of Putin’s armoury. At a sermon a few days ago in the Main Cathedral of the Armed Forces in Moscow, Kirill sought to rally the troops and stiffen their fighting spirit. At another ceremony the patriarch, once a KGB officer, handed an icon to the head of Russia’s national guard, which is fighting alongside Putin’s army in Ukraine. The icon depicts the appearance of the Virgin Mary to Russian soldiers during the First World War. For Kirill, Ukraine is a battlefield against western influence and decadence. And it is part of a campaign to bring Ukrainian bishops back under his control.

These may seem like rather obscure turf wars, the politics of resentment. But for Putin they add up to a spiritual mission. In his world view there is a seamless continuum between silencing supposedly western-inspired critics at home and bombarding the cities of his neighbours. The core establishment is on board. The generals may be biting their tongues about the mismanagement of the military offensive but they still seem to believe this depraved war is a just cause. They have Kirill’s icons to prove it and his assurance that Putin is a “miracle from God”. Those in the security services expressing doubts are being purged. Only pan-Slav loyalists will survive in the higher echelons of the security apparat. At the end of it all, the Ukraine slaughter will have to be dressed up as a historic victory for Russia.

The Ukrainians understand better than their western supporters what they are up against. Ask the curators who are wrapping up Ukrainian artworks in battered Kharkiv, bubble wrap as precious in its way as body armour. Some masterpieces have found their way via Lviv to Krakow in Poland. Volunteers are being mobilised not just to fill sandbags but shift paintings. In a war of cultural annihilation no one can count on invaders respecting the 1954 Hague Convention on the protection of art and antiquities.

When Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, visited the Balkans last year he was presented with a 300-year-old eastern Orthodox icon by the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad Dodik. Experts later realised the icon had probably been looted from a church in Luhansk by Bosnian Serb mercenaries fighting alongside Russian-backed forces in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Lavrov returned the icon to Dodik but he has yet to return it to Ukraine. Why should he, he might be thinking, when Russia, his great protector, is declaring Ukraine to be a non-state, an adjunct of Putin’s expanding empire? A place to be plundered?

The Times