
Russia is fighting a “holy war” against the evil embodied by a coalition of Nazis, Islamists, Westerners and the LGBT community, according to a narrative promoted, among others, by the Moscow Patriarchate. The thesis regarding a “fight between Good and Evil”, which includes this narrative as well, transpires also in disinformation narratives, fake news and conspiracy theories promoted by Russia in the West and in Romania.
Russia's collective “enemy”: Jewish-led Nazis, NATO and the CIA, globalists, Western-manipulated Islamists and the LGBT community
On the evening of March 22, four gunmen stormed a concert hall near Moscow, opened fire randomly on the people in attendance and then threw petrol bombs. 144 people were killed and over 500 injured in the attack claimed by the Islamic State. For decades, such attacks have been the “signature” of Islamist terrorists. They entered the collective mindset after the massacres committed by Al Qaeda in the early 2000s: 9/11, the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid, which killed almost 200 people, the July 2005 London attacks, in which 70 of people were killed, etc. Al Qaeda terrorists were neither the first nor the last to commit such acts of mass terror: Egyptian jihadists who attacked tourists in the 1990s and the Algerian Islamists of the same period, Al Shabab extremists in Somalia and Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria, the Indonesian group Jemaah Islamiyah, which killed over 200 people in a terrorist attack in Bali in 2002, and of course, the Islamic State, responsible for a wave of attacks in the Middle East and beyond, from the November 2015 attack in Paris, which killed over 130 people, to the 2024 bombing in in the Iranian city of Kerman, which killed over 130 people.
The long list of countries affected by Islamist terrorism also includes Russia, whom extremists have for decades seen as an enemy of Islam due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the two Chechen wars, Russia’s involvement in the Syrian civil war and the way Russian authorities treat the Muslim minority. In spite of this long history of conflict with Islamists, in the wake of the March 22 Crocus City Hall attack pro-Kremlin propaganda and numerous Russian officials have tried to promote the idea that Ukraine and the West were behind the attack. When the involvement of Islamic State in the Crocus City Hall attack could no longer be denied, Vladimir Putin said that it was carried out “with the hand of radical Islamists”, but he also suggested that the real perpetrators were those identified by propaganda from the early hours of the attack.
The “enemy” that threatens mother Russia has thus acquired a new identity, having become a sort of post-modern Frankenstein's monster, created from putting together a Jew (Volodymyr Zelenskyy) and the band of Nazis he leads, NATO and the CIA – who are depicted as menaces just as they were in the USSR period that Putin now yearns for – pedophile homosexuals, the collective West as a whole, globalists and, lately, Islamists, who, according to the narrative, have suddenly set aside their hatred for the Americans and are now working with them.
Russian organization chaired by Patriarch Kirill: Russia is waging a “holy war”
This Frankestein’s monster has besieged the Orthodox citadel of ‘Good’ (Russia) which, fortunately, has a hero ready and able to defend it, bare-chested, of course: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
It is an epic struggle between Good and Evil, a struggle to save the Russian people and identity, a genuine "holy war", as explicitly stated in a document adopted by the Russian People's Council on March 27, 5 days after the terrorist attack at the Crocus concert hall. The document was published on the website of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is no coincidence: the Council was chaired by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, a staunch supporter of Putin's policies (and the war in Ukraine) and reportedly Putin’s former coworker in the KGB.
The document states that the highest expression of Russia's existence and spiritual mission is to defend the world against “Evil” and any attempts to enslave humanity. The state must protect the family and its traditional values against propaganda about “abortion, sexual immorality, debauchery, but also sodomy and various forms of sexual perversion”. The document doesn’t fail to refer to migrants, describing them as a threat to the “civilizational identity of Russia” and possible a source of terrorism. Finally, the Council chaired by Patriarch Kirill also demanded the Russian authorities carry out a “critical review of Western scientific theories”.
This meta-narrative of the struggle between Good and Evil addresses not only a domestic audience. It is exported outside Russia as well, through numerous fake news and disinformation narratives and by amplifying conspiracy theories, which, although do not necessarily originate in Russia, are nevertheless exploited by it. The story of Evil that wants to enslave or even annihilate humanity, or to destroy ethnic and religious specificity and the moral fiber of peoples, permeates conspiracy theories such as the one regarding the Great Reset, or other similar ones such as the Great Replacement or the LGBT “agenda”.
It is enough to take a look, once again, at the document adopted by the Russian People's Council to recognize themes also present in conspiracy theories - the questioning of science, which is also a starting point for the Great Reset (and a whole wave of conspiracy theories and false pandemic narratives), or the suspicion that migrants threaten the identity (and very existence) of the local population, which we also find in the theory of the Great Replacement.
The struggle between Good and Evil in Romania as seen by conspiracists, extremists and pro-Russians
On March 30, 2024, a Romanian publication wrote that US President Joe Biden declared Easter, “the holiest of Christian holidays”, as “Transgender Day of Visibility”. It was an obvious disinformation thesis, which reiterates two of Moscow's favorite themes (while at the same time referencing the sovereigntist / alt-right currents in Western countries): the attack on Christian identity and the endorsement of the LGBT “agenda”.
That publication (which two years before had also written that the European Commission is “cancelling” Christmas and banning the use of the Christian name “Mary”) has over the years made a name for itself for promoting numerous false narratives about vaccination. It is also known for its support for one of the most controversial Romanian clerics, the Archbishop of Tomis, Teodosie. Himself a promoter of certain conspiracy theories, Teodosie (a former collaborator of the dreaded Securitate, the political police in communist Romania, as well as a figure targeted by several criminal investigations over the years) does not conceal his admiration for Vladimir Putin. In an interview for the Dobrogea radio station, owned by the Archdiocese of Tomis, Teodosie described Putin as a “good Christian” and a “victim of Russophobic speech”. In the same interview, granted shortly before the large-scale invasion of Ukraine and cited extensively by one of the Kremlin's propaganda mouthpieces, Sputnik, Teodosie also endorsed the thesis according to which “Russophobia is used to mask the lack of patriotism, the transformation of Romania into a Western colony and the subversion of traditional values underpinning Romanian society”. These all virtually echo the theses promoted by Russian propaganda: Evil is assaulting Romanian identity and trying to destroy sovereignty and enslave an Orthodox people.
In fact, Russia has been promoting the theme of Orthodoxy in Romania directly. It was also Sputnik that wrote, in the fall of 2021, that Romania is becoming an Orthodox front against the West, evidence of which can be found, according to Sputnik, in the rise of the AUR extremist party. Obviously, the Russians do not regard AUR as an extremist party, but an exponent of the nationalist current thanks to which “Romania will become a sovereign country”.
Closely tied to the narratives about the “assault” on Romanians’ Christian identity and the traditional family are those related to the so-called “LGBT agenda”, which is allegedly promoted by the EU and “sexist Marxists”. In February 2023, for instance, an NGO called Alianța Părinților (The Parents’ Alliance, part of a coalition that supports the promotion of Christian traditional values) complained that Romanian students are “forced to watch films that promote suicide and homosexuality”. The film the NGO criticized (Close) actually raised awareness with respect to the phenomenon of bullying and homophobia in schools. The same NGO later spread another false narrative, according to which “traditional teachings will be replaced with LGBT propaganda in schools” in order to change the sexual orientation of Romanian children.
Why Russia focuses on the thesis about a civilizational and religious clash with the West. “Holy war”, a concept foreign to orthodoxy
Historian Cosmin Popa, a researcher with the “Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History of the Romanian Academy who specializes in the history of the Soviet Union, says that “the discourse about Russia’s civilizational and religious clash with the West is a distinctive feature of Russian political culture. The appeal to religious philosophy is meant to awaken Russians' imperial instincts, in the form of a supposed war of defense against the West's attacks. Religious language is also credited for highlighting the essence and blurring the details, as well as for its mobilizing power, giving people the impression they are serving a “rightful” cause. Moreover, a Power that defines itself in religious terms, such as present-day Russia, thus becomes unchallenged, uncriticized, a worldly expression of the supposed divine will, embodied in the individual who exercises it”.
In Putin's Russia, the Church seems to have become just an extension of state power, a tool by means of which the state promotes its ideology and interests. Such a Church has nothing to do with what religion stands for, says Teodor Baconschi, former Foreign Minister of Romania and the holder of a PhD in religious anthropology and comparative history of religions at Paris IV University of Sorbonne:
“The fact that the Moscow Patriarchate calls the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine (a sovereign and independent member of the UN, as well as a country with a majority Orthodox population, with many churches subordinated to Patriarch Kirill) a holy war is a sacrilege, evidence of Russia’s apostasy and a monstrous way of “justifying” the strand of imperialism promoted by Putin. This “theological” mystification, an alternative to Christian teachings, will in the long run isolate the Patriarchate of Moscow within the pan-Orthodox community and from the rest of the Christian world. Kirill's anti-Western “apocalyptic” rhetoric is tragic proof that post-Soviet Russia regards religion as nothing more than a deceitful propaganda tool at the disposal of a totalitarian regime that goes from committing one war crime to the next in order to prolong its barbaric agony, no matter the cost”.
Teodor Baconschi, who over the course of his diplomatic career also served as Romania's Ambassador to the Holy See, also reckons that the very concept of “holy war” is foreign to Orthodoxy and has been outdated in Western Christianity for centuries:
“In the biblical and patristic understanding of Christian tradition, the only legitimate war is the war of defense against foreign invaders. You defend your homeland, when facing a military attack. The term holy war does not exist in the Orthodox canon. Orthodoxy focuses on the unseen war against human temptations and passions, not on an ideological machine that seeks to justify a war of conquest against other nations. And the time of the Crusades (which some historians refer to as the foreign policy of the medieval Papacy) has long passed, even if at the time that Christian Europe reacted to the expansion of Islam, it received some military support states affiliated to Orthodoxy”.
Supported by Science+