“To our peril, what we had assumed was Putin’s blustering and bragging was actually a game plan,” said Koropeckyj, who believes the religious motives that Putin - channeling Kirill - used to justify the war were actually monetary ones under the guise of spirituality. At the time, Putin alluded to Western meddling and said there could be “bloodshed” if the property of the Moscow Patriarchate was redistributed to the new church.
The host of the virtual roundtable, Roman Koropeckyj, a professor of Slavic, East European and Eurasian languages in the UCLA College, kicked off the discussion by citing a 2018 speech by Putin in which the Russian president bemoaned the establishment of the independent and nationalist-minded Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which broke from the traditional and Moscow-loyal Ukrainian Orthodox Church (called the Moscow Patriarchate) in the wake of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. To help make sense of this and other aspects of the fraught religious drama playing out in the conflict, UCLA’s Center for European and Russian Studies hosted a panel of international scholars and theologians this week who addressed topics ranging from Russia’s church-state alliance and the recent schism in the Ukraine’s Orthodox church, to the effects of the war on ordinary worshippers and on religious denominations worldwide. But how can this be when three-quarters of Ukrainians are Orthodox themselves? The devastation Vladimir Putin has unleashed in Ukraine has deep ideological roots in the Russian Orthodox Church, whose leader, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, has thrown his spiritual weight behind the invasion, characterizing it as sacred mission to protect traditional Orthodox values from the decadent West.
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