Holy Russia? Holy War?: Why the Russian Church is backing Putin against Ukraine

Historian Katherine Kelaidis explains why the Russian Church is standing by the country’s leader’s decision to invade Ukraine.

It sounds like something from the time of the Tsars: On a wintry evening in 1952 a baby was taken by his pious grandmother through the frigid streets of St Petersburg to an underground church. There Friar Mikhail, whose own father had spent the previous three decades in Siberian gulags for his refusal to compromise his faith, baptized the baby into the Russian Orthodox Church, his own six year old son serving as the sole acolyte. 

The baby would become Vladimir Putin, the President of the Russian Federation. The little altar server would one day be Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus. Together the two men would lead a great revival of Holy Russia, reclaiming the rightful place of the Motherland and the Mother Church in the world.