Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has “earned the hatred of the whole world,” according to the leader of Orthodox Christianity, who rebuked the Russian leader for inflicting a devastating war.
“We are entering a new era of cold war,” Patriarch Bartholomew of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople said in a Turkish-language broadcast interview. “We do not know what will happen next. I hope this cold war period will last a short time. I hope World War 3 won’t break out.”
Patriarch Bartholomew posed an overt challenge to Putin’s justification for the invasion. The Istanbul-based bishop — who holds the title of primus inter pares, or “first among equals,” in the Orthodox communion — praised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for “set[ting] a very good example for his people” in resistance to the Russian invasion and rebuked Putin for inflicting “a great injustice” on Ukraine.
“Ukraine was liberated 30 years ago, but they continue to be brothers, they continue to be coreligionists, yet Putin has declared a war against them,” he said. “Putin is a very intelligent and dynamic leader, so it is not easy to understand how he decided this, so Putin did himself an injustice. He earned the hatred of the whole world.”
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That rebuke could prove to be a severe blow to Putin’s ideology, as Kremlin officials have used the traditional links between the Russian Orthodox Church and Ukrainian believers to secure Russian political influence in Ukraine.
“This is a tectonic move,” former Turkish opposition lawmaker Aykan Erdemir, senior director of the Turkey Program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “I find this potentially as impactful as the role [the] Vatican played toward the end of the Cold War. … Although the ecumenical patriarch is different from the pope, the impact of his words on the Russian hegemonic project could be as destructive as the impact of Pope John Paul II’s impact on the Soviet hegemonic project.”
Patriarch Bartholomew sat for the rare interview with CNN Turk last week, but his representatives in the United States have published only a partial translation of his remarks, while the bulk of the Turkish-language discussion has gone largely unnoticed among Anglophone audiences. The Washington Examiner commissioned a translation of the interview.
“Mr. Putin should not have done this,” the religious leader emphasized. “I repeat, he has done himself and his country an injustice because he has provoked the hatred of the whole world.”
Russian authorities have passed a new law that makes it a crime to refer to the conflict in Ukraine as a “war,” as Putin prefers to call it a “special military operation.” That euphemism caps an elaborate justification for the hostilities, developed in Moscow over the last several years, in terms calculated to portray Zelensky as an illegitimate president while portraying Ukraine as a natural constituent in Russia’s “historical and spiritual space,” as Putin put it in an essay last year.
“Since time immemorial, the people living in the southwest of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians,” Putin said last month on the eve of the invasion.
Putin regards Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine as “a single large nation, a triune nation.” He has pressured Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko to bring Russia and Belarus into a formal “union-state.” Ukrainian officials believe that Putin wants to force Zelensky, or a future Ukrainian leader, to follow Lukashenko into the union-state.
Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow has offered moral legitimacy to those ambitions, even in the prayers for peace that he has offered in the days since the invasion began.
“God forbid that a terrible line stained with the blood of our brothers should be drawn between Russia and Ukraine,” he said on Feb. 27. “May the Lord preserve the Russian land. When I say ‘Russian’ … the land which now includes Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and other tribes and peoples.”
The Moscow patriarch blessed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a defense of the church in a sermon delivered on March 8. He insisted that the war stemmed from the aversion of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas to gay pride parades, which are common in “the club” of U.S. and European liberal democracies that Ukraine aspires to join.
“What is happening today in the sphere of international relations has not only political significance. We are talking about something different and much more important than politics. We are talking about human salvation,” Kirill said. “Around this topic today there is a real war.”
Kirill has been characterized as an “agent” of Russian intelligence services. His representatives in the United States, known as the “archons of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in America,” lent credence to this view by promoting a recent op-ed by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. They highlighted Pompeo’s comment that “for Putin, the church is merely another tool of power.”
Patriarch Bartholomew, by contrast, expressed “solidarity … spiritual, moral, [and] through prayer” with the defenders of Ukraine as he praised the Ukrainian government for refusing to cave to Putin’s demands.
“They do not want to surrender, and they are right,” he said in the broadcast interview. “Why should they surrender their freedom to the invader? Because right now, Ukraine is under Russian occupation. Will we say war or occupation? It’s the same. A very bad situation, a foreign country, but a coreligionist and a neighbor at the same time.”
Those rebukes could provide an effective antidote to Putin and Patriarch Kirill’s justifications for the war, analysts suggest.
“Bartholomew has lots of supporters in Ukraine,” Valparaiso University’s Nicholas Denysenko, author of The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation, told the Washington Examiner. “And his allies in Ukraine will rise to the occasion to bring that to the fore.”
His message could find an audience among Orthodox Christians in societies relatively aligned with Moscow, such as Serbia, according to Denysenko. And, while the ecumenical patriarchate is not as prominent in Western societies as the Roman Catholic papacy, Bartholomew has cultivated a wide range of relationships in Europe and the Middle East since he took office in 1991.
“That should be a cause for concern for Russia, because here is someone — not just a religious leader, but also a religious institution — with significant soft power, and no amount of disinformation campaigns by the Kremlin can undo or overturn that soft power,” said Erdemir. “There is really an asymmetric dynamic here. The ecumenical patriarch’s soft power is on the rise at a time when the Kremlin’s soft power, one could argue, is way below that of Soviet Russia.”
Patriarch Bartholomew has flexed that soft power deliberately in recent years at the expense of both Kirill’s religious jurisdiction and Putin’s political plans. The Orthodox Christian parishes in Ukraine traditionally have been subject to the Moscow Patriarchate, but the Istanbul-based patriarch intervened in 2018 to authorize the formation of a self-governing, or autocephalous, Ukrainian Orthodox Church — a decision made despite Russian objections.
“We upset our Russian brothers, but this had to happen,” Patriarch Bartholomew said in the CNN Turk interview. “Unfortunately, they did not accept our decision. Our Patriarchate and I have personally become their target for two or three years.”
That dynamic resulted in the existence of two parallel ecclesial institutions that claim to be the national Orthodox Church amid an intense dispute between Patriarch Bartholomew and Patriarch Kirill. Putin’s government has treated the controversy as just another aspect of a broader geopolitical competition between Russia and the West.
“The idea behind this is obvious — another step in tearing Ukraine from Russia, not just politically, but also spiritually,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said of the initiative to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian church.
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Yet it is Russia that has torn itself away from the West in Patriarch Bartholomew’s judgment.
“The whole world is against Russia,” he said. “We are entering a new era of cold war. The distance between Russia and not only Ukraine, but the whole Western world, Russia and the Western world, is getting bigger, and this means that we are entering a new cold war period. Anyone who thinks right and acts right does not want this situation, this new cold war period.”
