Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia: a True Patriarch or a False One, a Senior Cleric or a Senior Politician of the Russian Federation? The Russian Patriarch and the War in Ukraine
Journal: Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe
Year: 2025

This paper focuses on the behavior of the current Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill (Gundyaev) in the context of the Russia’s military aggression against sovereign Ukraine – a religious leader who fully supports the war policy of the Kremlin. The pro-war and pro-Putin views and messages of Patriarch Kirill proved him in the eyes of the Orthodox world more as a false Patriarch and a politician than as the primate of the Russian Orthodox Church. To a large extent, the Russian political narratives