‘Beyond visible causes’ Why Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s new book has so little to say about the invasion it seeks to justify
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Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Patriarch Kirill has become one of the war’s most prominent defenders. He’s described the war as a spiritual battle, blessed crosses for military commanders, and promised Russians that dying in the line of military duty will wash away their sins.
Now the Moscow Patriarchate’s publishing house has released a book under Kirill’s name that justifies the invasion in religious terms. Titled War. Beyond Visible Causes and Consequences, the book was assembled by editors from his sermons and public speeches. Yet it says remarkably little about the invasion itself. There are no dates, real people, political decisions, or specific episodes from the war. The word “Ukraine” doesn’t even appear until page 177.
Why would a book about the war barely mention Ukraine?
In a new essay for Meduza, historian Ilya Venyavkin writes that this isn’t an oversight but the book’s organizing principle. Kirill isn’t interested in the war’s earthly causes and consequences. He asks readers to see it instead as the latest chapter in a centuries-long spiritual struggle in which Russia always fights on the side of good against the forces of evil.
A never-ending story
Kremlin propaganda has long drawn parallels between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany. Kirill goes a step further, treating the Great Patriotic War — the Soviet and Russian name for the war against Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945 — as the key to understanding all of Russian history. In his telling, the war became the Soviet people’s atonement for earlier godlessness, and the tide turned only after they abandoned atheism and returned to the true Christian faith.
From there, the same story is stretched across Russian history. The Russo-Turkish wars. World War I. Yugoslavia. Different centuries, different armies, but always the same plot: Russia sacrificing itself in defense of Christianity and justice. The enemies change, but only on the surface. They are all “the same evil, simply under different masks,” Venyavkin writes.
That framework also changes what it means to die in war. “In a war that takes on sacred meaning, self-sacrifice becomes a form of co-crucifixion, an ascent to the Cross,” Kirill writes, “and even for nonbelievers, wartime heroism became a feat filled with religious meaning.” In Kirill’s account, the religious meaning of a soldier’s death comes not from his own faith but from the cause he fights for.
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‘The prism of salvation’
Once the war against Ukraine is folded into a larger sacred story, the obvious questions about it lose their importance. Venyavkin argues that Kirill wants readers to see command failures, “meat assaults” (the soldiers’ term for human-wave attacks), and even burning Wildberries warehouses as belonging to a “lower level of reality.” They can be discussed, but they say nothing about the spiritual meaning of what is happening. Kirill asks readers to judge events not through politics, economics, or military strategy, but through the “prism of salvation.”
By Kirill’s logic, there’s only one explanation for why victory hasn’t come. If Russia by its nature cannot fight an unjust war, then failure can’t mean the war itself was wrong. It just means society hasn’t yet been mobilized enough. “Everyone must be mobilized,” Kirill insists, “the army, the political forces, and, first and foremost, the Church.”
Venyavkin doesn’t expect many people to read War. Beyond Visible Causes and Consequences. He describes it as repetitive and plotless. But popularity may not be the point. The book gives the Russian Orthodox Church a ready-made language for explaining the war to its parishioners: Russia is on “the side of light,” and death for the motherland is indistinguishable from Christian sacrifice. “A dangerous book doesn’t have to be good literature,” Venyavkin writes.
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