Saint Basil’s, in Moscow, photo by Nikolay Vorobyev on Unsplash

From Paul DeGroot at the London School of Economics, “Orthodoxy’s Missed Opportunity: Denying Putin Victory.”

Excerpt:

Smart despots like Vladimir Putin know that co-opting a culture’s fundamental values delivers the most devoted minions of all.

 

Having the most guns is good. Having followers willing to die for the sake of some self-serving, quasi-religious manifest destiny is unrivalled power. Add in the assertion that wholesale slaughter of innocents is God’s (Allah’s, Shiva’s) will and guarantees a blissful afterlife, and you have an army that will never retreat.

 

Any suggestion that Vladimir Putin’s goal is some Russian Christian crusade leading to a Holy Russia screams for evidence, all of which is contrary. If the means to some divine end includes assassinating rivals, committing war crimes, and indiscriminate killing of innocents, spiced with lies and inventions, it has no overlap with the Prince of Peace.

 

…

Instead of licking his boots, what if the Church excommunicated Vladimir Putin for the war crimes he has directed, the assassinations he has arranged, and the threats that he will unleash weapons of mass destruction on the world unless he gets what he wants?

 

What if the Moscow Patriarchate warned Russian soldiers that anyone whose military unit played a role in civilian casualties, destruction of hospitals and schools, and denying escape to starving people would be denied the eucharist, marriage in the church, and baptism of their children for the next decade?

 

What if the church proclaimed truth from the pulpit–this war is not some limited, patriotic exercise against Nazis, but indiscriminate and repulsive slaughter of civilians? Such a challenge would be the most significant intervention of a Christian community into the policies and practices of a wayward government in modern times.\

 

The church could quite possibly end the war.

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Glory to Ukraine!