Russian Orthodox Church declares Russia's war against Ukraine 'sacred'

A cathedral congress of the Russian Orthodox Church under the leadership of Moscow Patriarch Kirill was held in Moscow on 27 March. A "decree" was adopted, in which the war against Ukraine was called a "holy war". The document was published on the official website of the Moscow Patriarchate.

The "edict" called the war in Ukraine "a new stage of the national liberation struggle of the Russian people, which has been waged in the lands of South-Western Russia since 2014 against the criminal Kiev regime and the collective West behind it."

From a spiritual and moral point of view, the special military operation is a Holy War, in which Russia and its people, defending the unified spiritual space of Holy Russia, fulfil the mission of the "Holder", protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism. - the document says.

It also says that after the end of the war, "the entire territory of modern Ukraine should enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia."

The document also says that the borders of the Russian world "as a spiritual and cultural-civilisational phenomenon" are "significantly wider than the state borders of both the current Russian Federation and the greater historical Russia".

The UOC said that calls for the destruction of Ukraine and justification of military aggression are incomparable with the evangelical teaching.

In this connection, we declare that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church disassociates, categorically does not share and condemns the ideas outlined in this document," the UOC said in a statement.