For years, the two leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church with whom Pope Francis met by videoconference on March 16—Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, and Metropolitan Hilarion, the Church’s chief ecumenical officer—have worked to buttress Vladimir Putin’s efforts to reconstitute a simulacrum of the Soviet Union in the name of a
Russkiy mir
(“Russian world”). Kirill and Hilarion’s efforts have run the gamut from falsifying the history of Eastern Slavic Christianity to the virtual beatification of President Putin as a figure providentially ordained to save the world from Western decadence and “liberalism.” Most recently, Kirill blasphemously blessed a war of aggression with holy icons.
