The ideological dimension of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—marked by the active collaboration of the Russian Church (Moscow Patriarchate) with the Russian Federation—remains little known in the West outside specialist academic and Orthodox church circles. O’Hurley and Shadrina explore how it is driven by a quasi-religious ethno-nationalist vision synthesized by Patriarch Kyrill Gundyayev and his ecclesial underlings but having deep roots in today’s Russian church and state, Vladimir Putin displays a sort of violent apocalypticism akin to that which fueled Nazism and the rise of Hitler. This volume begins the crucial task of exposing to a wider non-expert audience the two-headed monster of “Russkii Mir” and “Holy Rus’.”

This rough “beast” has not only deformed Orthodox Christianity (being a sort of “heresy”) but has also bound the Russian Church, as the largest Orthodox church in the world, to a brutal and devious regime bent on national conquest and the destruction of both the Ukrainian people and the West itself. Only when the secular West opens its eyes to the religious and historical dimensions of the war in Ukraine—and acknowledges Russian religious nationalism and fundamentalism as key motivations of contemporary Russia—will it be able to defend the democratic, humanistic, and religious ideals that underpin Europe and the West. One can only hope this awakening comes before it is to late…

Professor Brandon Gallaher
University of Exeter (UK)