What Putin’s “Holy War” Is Really Hiding

Elvira Bary

Putin’s “holy war” is theater. How the Kremlin captured faith and turned it into an empire.  👉 What World Leaders NEED to Know about Russia: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6d9EIByxz1AdkmIOYUlrDd0rmByq5zSN  Many outsiders read Putin’s religious imagery as conviction: candles, icons, priests, “traditional values.” But in Russia, religion survives on the state’s terms. In this episode, author Elvira Bary breaks down the mechanism: how the Kremlin uses Orthodoxy as a political asset, why Russian rulers never tolerate an independent church, how “faith” becomes a loyalty system in uniform, and how the Ukraine split proved power matters more than theology. This isn’t a holy war. It’s empire wearing incense.  Video Chapters:   00:00 Keywords Here 03:40 The Holy Mask  06:27 The State’s God 09:50 Useful Orthodoxy  12:31 Faith in Uniform  15:38 God for Empire  18:45 The Broken Cross 20:13 Prince of the Soviets 22:28 Candles and Magic  JOIN ME ON THE JOURNEY 👉 Sign-up for news about the New Book here:  https://elvirabary.com/elvira-barys-newsletter/ 👉https://www.facebook.com/baryelvira/ 👉https://www.instagram.com/elvira.bary/  MY HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK SERIES ➡️ Russian Treasures

Transcript

00:00Putin wants people to believe that his war in Ukraine and his broader confrontation

00:05with the West is holy. Not merely strategic, but sacred. The West is decadent. Its values

00:14are collapsing. Washington and Brussels, he says, dragged Ukraine into their peace.

00:21For some people in the West, especially those who are discussed with their own elites,

00:28that message has real appeal. They look at Russia and think, maybe this country is still fighting for

00:36order, faith and civilization. Maybe Putin is the last defender of Christian values.

00:44Look at his public pity. Look at the magnificent Orthodox cathedrals, the priests, the icons,

00:52their rituals. Surely, they think, this must be a war about something higher than power. It is not.

01:02In Russia, the church is not a moral check on the state. It is part of the state machine. It

01:09is

01:09tolerated, praised and funded only as long as it does what the Kremlin has always demanded. Bless

01:17hierarchy, sanctify obedience, and turn suffering into duty. So, here is the real question. If Putin

01:26wraps invasion, repression, and bloodshed in religious language, what does he actually believe in, not

01:33Christ? He violates the most basic Christian commandments from thou shall not kill to the

01:40moral law. It is the simple moral law of treating others as you would want to be treated, not repentance.

01:48Because there is no sign of remorse. Not the idea that a ruler stands beneath a higher moral law

01:56and will one day be judged by it. What he believes in is something much older and much more useful

02:03to

02:03men like him, empire, and the religion that serves empire. I am Elvira Barry, a writer born in the Soviet

02:13Union. Today, I will show you how the Kremlin captured faith and turned it into an instrument of rule,

02:21how the holy war costume works, who it is designed for, and what it hides. Here is our roadmap.

02:30The holy mask. Why outsiders mistake Kremlin theater for faith. The state's god. Why Russian rulers

02:40never tolerate a church they can't control. Useful orthodoxy. How Putin turned religion into a political

02:48asset. Faith in uniform. When the church stopped blessing the army and became part of it. God for empire.

02:57How orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism get flattened into one state cult. The broken cross. Why Ukraine

03:06proved power matters more than theology. Candles and magic. What Putin's style of belief really reveals.

03:15If you want to support independent analysis like this, you can join the think tank or use PayPal or

03:22super things or tap hype points. And if you are listening on Spotify, hit follow so the next episode

03:30lands in your feed. Now, let's start with the first illusion. The holy mask. The holy mask.

03:42A lot of Western conservatives look at Putin and see what they want to see. They see a man standing

03:49in the

03:49church with a candle. They hear him talk about family morality tradition and the sins of the modern West.

03:58They hear that Russia protects Christianity while Europe forgets it. And because many people in the

04:04West are tired of their own elites, they project their hopes onto Moscow. That is the first mistake.

04:11That is the first mistake. Religious imagery is not the same thing as religious conviction. In an authoritarian

04:18country, public ritual is often just another costume of power. Putin understands this very well. He knows

04:28that the theater of faith works on two audiences at once. At home, it tells ordinary Russians that the state

04:35is

04:35not just powerful but righteous. Not merely armed but blessed. If the ruler appears next to icons and priests,

04:45then obedience begins to feel moral, not just practical. The system stops looking like a machine for

04:53extraction and starts looking like a sacred order. Abroad, the message is different. It is aimed at

05:01disillusioned people on the right, especially in Europe and America. It tells them you may hate your

05:08liberal elites, but here in Russia we still honor God, nation, family, and history. It is branding. Very

05:17effective branding. And Putin has spent years building that image piece by piece. One famous example came in

05:25in his interview with Larry King when he told the story of his aluminum cross. According to Putin,

05:32his mother had given him the cross, he lost it before a fire at his dacha, then found it again

05:39in the ashes

05:41and had it blessed in Jerusalem. It is a perfect political anecdote. Personal, humble, touched by danger,

05:49touched by miracle. It sounds like a man chosen by fate. And that is exactly the point. In Russia, rulers

05:59are always trying to rise above the level of mere administrators. They want to look marked out. And the

06:07church helps with that transformation. A real religion places limits on power. It tells the ruler that he too

06:16will be judged. Kremlin religion does the opposite. It wraps power in incense and tells the public to kneel,

06:27the state's God. By using religion this way, Putin stepped into a much older Russian pattern. The state

06:37may cooperate with the church, praise the church, hide beneath the church, and even weep inside the church,

06:45but it never accepts a church that is truly independent of power. In the Western imagination,

06:52church and state are often pictured as rival centers of authority. They may clash, bargain, or limit each other.

07:01In Russia, the deeper instinct has long been different. Authoritarian rulers wouldn't have any real competition.

07:09Not in politics, not in business, not in the media, and certainly not in the realm of ultimate meaning.

07:18Because religion is too important to live alone. If people sincerely believe there is a moral law above

07:25the ruler, then the ruler is no longer absolute. If people belong to a community that answers to something

07:33higher than the state, then their loyalty is divided. And empires hate divided loyalty. So Russian power

07:43developed a simpler solution. Instead of destroying religion entirely, it domesticated it. The church may speak,

07:51but in the right tone. It may keep its rituals. All of that is fine. Beautiful even. But the moment

08:01faith starts acting like an independent source of judgment, the state moves in and reminds everyone

08:09who owns the building. That logic survived every costume change. Under the Tsars,

08:15of course, orthodoxy was tied to the empire. Under the Soviets, the state first tried to crush religion,

08:22then later learned to manage and instrumentalize it. Their costume changed from cross to red banner

08:30and back again, but the instinct stayed the same. No rival authority above the ruler.

08:38This is why the usual Western argument, but Putin restored religion after communism,

08:43is too shallow. Yes, churches reopened and symbols came back, but public visibility is not the same as

08:52freedom. A burden may be taken out of a box and still kept in a cage. Even the post-Soviet

09:00religious

09:01revival had a strange quality. People baptized children, wore crosses, lit candles, venerated icons

09:09and spoke the language of faith, but often without deep theological knowledge or serious parish life.

09:15That made religion easier for the state to mold. Ritual remained. Discipline of conscious

09:23stayed weak. And that is the sweet spot for an authoritarian regime. Not deep Christianity,

09:30which might produce inconvenient questions. Not a morally serious church that would confront

09:38lies, corruption and war. But a broad, sacred atmosphere. A religion of symbols, moods and national

09:47belonging. Useful orthodoxy

09:53Many people now look backward and imagine a straight line, as if Putin arrived in the Kremlin already

10:00dreaming of some holy Russian mission. But in his first years, he looked much more like a pragmatic

10:08state manager. The Russian Orthodox Church was already there, but it had not yet become the center of the

10:16regime's moral performance. Then he saw what it could do. One of the clearest moments came in 2007,

10:24when the Moscow Patriarchate reunited with the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia,

10:29the emigrant church formed by people who had fled the Bolsheviks. Speaking at that occasion, Putin said

10:37restoring church unity was important for rediscovering the lost unity of the Russian people.

10:44That is the phrase to notice. Not unity in Christ, repentance or truth. Unity of the Russian people.

10:52In other words, he treated the church as a mechanism for gathering scattered Russians back

11:00under one symbolic roof. The Soviet Union was gone. Millions of Russian speakers were outside the Russian

11:08Federation. The emigrant world still carried old anti-Bolshevik legitimacy. Bringing that world closer

11:15to Moscow was a move of political consolidation. And this is where the idea of the Russian world

11:22starts to matter. It sounds soft, cultural, civilizational, maybe even comforting. A shared language,

11:31shared memory, shared faith, shared ancestors. But in Kremlin usage, that phrase is never just descriptive.

11:41It says that Russia has a special right to gather, protect, supervise and, if necessary,

11:47discipline all those people and spaces it calls spiritually its own. Orthodoxy fits that project

11:55beautifully. Not because everyone in that world is deeply religious. Often they are not. But that makes

12:02the church more useful, not less. Putin understood that this symbolic grammar could travel farther than

12:11ideology. Communism had burned out. Soviet internationalism was dead. Naked nationalism felt crude and provincial.

12:21But religion added depth. It made expansion sound like inheritance. Faith in uniform.

12:34The real turn came in the 2010s, when the Russian church effectively became part of the military machine.

12:42Before that, Orthodoxy helped the regime look deeper and more legitimate. After that, it began helping the regime

12:50punish, mobilize, mobilize and bless force. The shift happened in public, almost theatrically. And one of the

12:59clearest early triggers was the Pussy Riot protest in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The performance

13:07itself was crude and designed to provoke, but what mattered was the state's response. The Kremlin understood that

13:15this scandal could be used to redraw the line between dissent and sacrilege. In 2013, Russia passed a law

13:25making the insulting of religious feelings a criminal offense punishable by up to three years in prison.

13:33This measure was proposed right after the Pussy Riot action. The sacred was now policed by the state in ways

13:41the

13:41state itself could define. When that happens, religion stops being a source of truth and becomes one more

13:50weapon of discipline. Then came the cathedral. In 2020, Russia opened the main cathedral of the Russian

13:57Armed Forces outside Moscow, a giant military church dedicated to victory in the Second World War. Its

14:06symbolism is not subtle. The cathedral's dimensions were designed around war dates. The main dome's drum measures

14:1419.45 m for the year 1945. The belfry is 75 m high for the 75th anniversary of victory. And

14:26another dome stands

14:26at 14.18 m for the 1,418 days of the war. Metal from captured Nazi weapons and tanks was

14:38used in the

14:39floor so that each step becomes a symbolic blow against the enemy. This is not a church built around sin,

14:47mercy,

14:47repentance, forgiveness, or the dignity of human life. It is a church built around military triumph,

14:54sacred violence, sacred violence, and national memory. And even the scandal around its planned mosaics was

15:02revealing. Early designs included images of Putin and Stalin. And one panel celebrated the annexation of Crimea

15:11with the slogan Crimea is ours. That's how today's Russian church helps the regime by turning soldiers into martyrs,

15:20war into duty, war into duty, and obedience into holiness. It wraps the state's violence in the smell of incense

15:28and tells people that by fighting for the state's interests they are serving God. God for Empire

15:40Once you understand that religion is useful to the Kremlin only as a tool of rule, one strange thing suddenly

15:47makes perfect sense.

15:49Putin no longer needs orthodoxy alone. He needs a broader formula, a state language that can cover the empire's

15:57different peoples without giving anyone faith the right to stand apart from the state. So the message shifts.

16:06Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, all of them are now praised as carriers of the same traditional values,

16:15the same moral code, the same civilizational loyalty. To a believer that should sound absurd.

16:24These religions are not interchangeable. They do not imagine God the same way. They do not prescribe the

16:32same way of life. But theology is not the point here. In a 2014 Valdai speech, Putin described Christianity,

16:41Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, and other religions as an integral part of Russia's identity and heritage.

16:48Years later, in his Tucker Carlson interview, he said that as Russia expanded and absorbed peoples who profess

16:56Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism, our traditional values are very similar. The meaning behind this is whatever

17:04God you pray to, your real job is the same. Respect hierarchy, accept authority, defend the state.

17:13That is why I call this radical ecumenism, but in a very Russian way. Ecumenism as administrative

17:20flattening, all differences is tolerated only after it has been reduced to usefulness.

17:28And there are hard political reasons for this turn. Russia is not a purely or even mostly Russian

17:35orthodox country. It is also a state with large Muslim populations, Muslim majority regions,

17:43Buddhist minorities. It cannot afford a model of sacred identity that speaks only to ethnic Russians.

17:50It needs a portable moral formula that can travel from a cathedral in Moscow to a mosque in Chechnya,

17:58to a Buddhist temple in Buryatia, and still point upward to the same center of power.

18:04This is especially true in wartime. The Kremlin needs troops from Muslim majority regions,

18:10it needs minority elites to remain invested in the imperial structure, so religion is quietly

18:17translated into state service. This is another reason the Western fantasy about Putin as a Christian

18:24defender falls apart. A genuine Christian statesman would care about the content of belief. Putin's

18:33system does not. It cares about whether a religion can be made to support imperial coercion.

18:41The Broken Cross

18:45What happens in Russia when theology collides with empire? Empire wins. The clearest proof came in 2018,

18:54when the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople moved towards recognizing an independent

19:01Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The Russian Orthodox Church responded by severing all relations with

19:09Constantinople over its support for Ukraine's request for an autokephalius or independent church.

19:16To understand what this means, here is a bit of context. For Orthodox believers,

19:23Constantinople is the historic center and senior symbolic authority like Vatican is for Catholics. So,

19:32when Moscow chose rapture, it was choosing political goals over spiritual unity. If Putin's system were

19:40truly centered on Christian faith, then the highest priority would have been preserving the unity of

19:47believers and peace inside the church. Instead, the Kremlin treated the church exactly the way it treats

19:54its land, pipelines, media and courts. As property. So, when people tell you Putin is defending Christianity,

20:03remember this moment. He was willing to break with the historic center of his own religious tradition

20:09rather than losing his grip on Ukraine. Before we move on, I'd like to share a short book trailer for

20:17my novel

20:18The Prince of the Soviets. One of its central themes is how the Soviet government dismantled traditional faith

20:25and replaced it with a substitute, preserving the rituals that worked while stripping away the moral core.

20:48Find out who he really is. Officially, Klim Rogoff's biography read like something safe and respectable.

20:56A journalist from New York, a foreign correspondent working for a prestigious news agency.

21:02In reality, Klim Rogoff was a white hemigre.

21:10And if that troop were ever exposed, he would be arrested on the spot.

21:18He came to the Soviet Union for one reason only, to find his wife abducted by the Bolsheviks.

21:31And he did find her, just not where he expected. It turned out she had caught the attention of the

21:40only red

21:41of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union in the Soviet Union.

21:43A man inexplicably allowed to run a private business in a state supposedly devoted to building Socialism.

21:51A man powerful enough to break the rules in Stalin's Moscow.

21:57A man powerful enough to break the rules in Stalin's Moscow.

22:12Will you catch him?

22:18We'll catch them all.

22:27Candles and magic.

22:31So, what does Putin actually believe in?

22:34Not God in any serious theological sense.

22:38Not in the sense of submitting himself to a higher truth.

22:43What he practices is something much more common in the post-Soviet world.

22:49A religion of symbols without depth.

22:51And this is not just my impression.

22:55Pew's work on Orthodoxy found that in Russia, only 6% of Orthodox Christians said they attended church weekly.

23:0415% said religion was very important in their lives.

23:08And 18% said they prayed daily.

23:11At the same time, public identification with Orthodoxy remained very strong.

23:17As a daily routine, these self-identified Orthodox believers were especially likely to

23:23light candles in church and wear crosses.

23:26That tells you a great deal.

23:29In Russia, religion functions less as a demanding moral practice than as a badge of belonging.

23:35You light a candle, cross yourself, baptize the child and kiss the icon.

23:41But you don't really need to read and understand the Bible or have faith judge your own conduct.

23:48That is the soil Putin grows from.

23:52He is a man shaped by the post-Soviet spiritual marketplace, where orthodoxy, nationalism, superstition,

24:00hero worship, fear and state mythology all mixed together into one thick emotional paste.

24:07This is where the border between faith and magic gets blurry.

24:14Not magic in the fairytale sense.

24:16I mean the belief that sacred objects and rituals have the power to protect you.

24:22It is a very old instinct.

24:24In insecure societies, people often want not a demanding God but a protective force,

24:31something that guards the ruler and the nation.

24:35That mentality is perfect for authoritarianism.

24:39Because once religion becomes mainly protective, tribal and symbolic,

24:45it stops asking hard questions.

24:49It no longer says, are you lying, stealing or killing your fellow human being?

24:54It says, are you one of us?

24:57Are you defending our people?

25:00Are you keeping the sacred circle intact?

25:04And once that happens, the ruler can do almost anything.

25:09He only has to perform belonging.

25:11That is why Putin can stand in church, talk about morality, present war as purification,

25:18and still govern through corruption, violence, cynicism, and fear.

25:22In a morally serious Christian framework, those things would tear the whole picture apart.

25:29In a tribal ritual framework, they do not.

25:32Now I want to leave you with one important question.

25:35How have you seen religion used this way in your own country or community?

25:41Not to humble power, but to decorate it.

25:44Not to restrain violence, but to bless it.

25:48Not to demand repentance, but to demand obedience.

25:53What did it look like in real life?

25:56A speech, a ritual, a symbol, a holy phrase that suddenly showed up next to politics.

26:03If this episode helped you see the holy war costume more clearly,

26:08please like the video and subscribe.

26:10Share it with one person who still thinks Putin is fighting for faith instead of the empire.

26:17And if you want to support this work directly, you can join my think tank or use PayPal or Super

26:24Thanks.

26:25You can also tap Hype Points to help the video travel.

26:29And if you are listening on Spotify, hit follow so you don't miss the next episode.

26:38See you next time.

26:59Bye.

27:05Bye.

27:10Bye.

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