Cyril Hovorun, a 48-year-old Ukrainian, has worked in the innermost sanctum of the Russian establishment. An Orthodox monk, he was for 10 years the private secretary and closest theological counselor to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. Now living in elective exile in the West, Mr. Hovorun is a professor of religion and international relations in Sweden. He knows better than most how those two subjects collide in his former home. Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he says, isn’t simply a project of subjugation. It is also “a sacred war.”

The website of Saint Ignatios has this, in part, to say about Brother Hovorun:

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is a Professor of Ecclesiology, International Relations and Ecumenism.

He is originally from Ukraine, where he first began his studies in theoretical physics before moving to the study of theology at the theological seminary and academy in Kyiv. He continued theological education at the National and Kapodistiran University of Athens and Durham University in the United Kingdom, where he defended his PhD under the supervision of Prof Fr Andrew Louth. The topic of his thesis was related to the post-Chalcedonian Christology.

Fr. Hovorun taught theology in a number of confessional and public institutions, including theological academies in Kyiv, Moscow, Minsk, National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” in Kyiv, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, and others.

And as reported by the Pulitzer Center:

Patriarch Kirill (through translator): We are a very peace-loving country and a peace-loving and long-suffering people.

Nick Schifrin: The reality? Kirill uttered those words the very day Ukrainian authorities in Bucha exposed mass graves full of executed civilians bound and shot. Hovorun used to work for Kirill, and quit in 2012.

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun: I tried to convince him that this ideology is going to be extremely dangerous, destructive for the church, for himself, for Russia, and for Ukraine. We see this outcome, this result of this ideology moving masses of people, masses of Russian soldiers to fight in Ukraine and securing a very wide support for Putin in his war.

Nick Schifrin: Cyril Hovorun is a Ukrainian Orthodox priest and professor of theology at University College Stockholm. I spoke to him from Ukraine via Skype.

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun: They believe Ukraine is the cradle of what they call the Russian civilization, and it has a kind of mystical, I would say, mythical connectedness with modern Russia. I personally would call this ideology make Russia great again. I think that is a kind of the essence of what Putin tries to achieve with the support of the church.

UkrainianGlory.org has been arguing from the very beginning that Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is as much a spiritual as military battle, an invasion to be resisted and repelled by Spiritual Justice Warriors from all over the world.  The resistance fighters must, and are, be battling for moral and spiritual legitimacy against the pretensions of Patriarch Kirill, of Moscow, and his puppet Putin.