ROME – Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has defended Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a necessary response to Western intervention in the region.
“Western leaders are imposing such economic sanctions on Russia that will be harmful to everyone,” the “Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia,” said in a March 10 letter to the acting head of the World Council of Churches (WCC), Rev. Ioan Sauca.
“They make their intentions blatantly obvious – to bring sufferings not only to the Russian political or military leaders but specifically to the Russian people,” Kirill said. “Russophobia is spreading across the Western world at an unprecedented pace.”
The patriarch was responding to a March 2 letter in which Rev. Sauca urged him to “raise up your voice so that the war can be stopped.”
“I write to Your Holiness to intervene and mediate with the authorities to stop this war, the bloodshed and the suffering, and to make efforts to bring peace through dialogue and negotiations,” Sauca’s letter states.
In his response, Patriarch Kirill puts the blame for the “developments” in Ukraine on the shoulders of Western nations while insisting that the World Council of Churches (WCC) needs to stay “free from political preferences and one-sided approach.”
“As you know, this conflict did not start today,” Kirill writes, and “its initiators are not the peoples of Russia and Ukraine.”
“The origins of the confrontation lie in the relationships between the West and Russia,” he declares. “Year after year, month after month, the NATO member states have been building up their military presence, disregarding Russia’s concerns that these weapons may one day be used against it.”
“They spared no effort, no funds to flood Ukraine with weapons and warfare instructors. Yet, the most terrible thing is not the weapons, but the attempt to ‘re-educate,’ to mentally remake Ukrainians and Russians living in Ukraine into enemies of Russia,” he accuses.
“This tragic conflict has become a part of the large-scale geopolitical strategy aimed, first and foremost, at weakening Russia,” he declares.
Patriarch Kirill has come under fire for his unswerving support of Russian president Vladimir Putin, which has lent further credence to the Russian Orthodox Church’s reputation as a tool of the government. Kirill himself has moreover been accused of direct collusion with the KGB.
In 2015, Ion Mihai Pacepa — the former head of Communist Romania’s secret police and the Cold War’s most important defector — wrote that Kirill worked for the KGB for many years and had successfully infiltrated the WCC.
“The man who is now the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, secretly worked for the KGB under the code name ‘Mikhailov’ and spent four decades promoting liberation theology, which we at the top of the Eastern European intelligence community nicknamed Christianized Marxism,” Pacepa wrote.
The program mandated that “the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool,” Pacepa said.
The Soviets were aware that the WCC was the largest international ecumenical organization after the Vatican, he said, representing some 550 million Christians of various denominations throughout 120 countries.
In 1971, the KGB sent Kirill to Geneva as an emissary of the Russian Orthodox Church to the WCC, where his main task was to involve the WCC in spreading the new liberation theology throughout Latin America.
According to Pacepa, in 1975, the KGB “was able to infiltrate Kirill into the Central Committee of the WCC — a position he held until he was ‘elected’ patriarch of Russia, in 2009. Not long after he joined the Central Committee, Kirill reported to the KGB: ‘Now the agenda of the WCC is also our agenda.’”