(Readers who have not already done so are urged to read my previous essay, Original Introductory Overview, before reading this one, as helpful Christian-historical context is provided there in preparation for this present essay.)
Ask not for whom the bell tolls….it tolls for thee!
irredentism A doctrine advocating annexation of foreign lands by a country with historic or ethnic links.
caesaropapism The doctrine that the state is supreme over the church in ecclesiastical matters
(Source: Wordnik)
As war casualties continue to mount in the benighted land of Ukraine, the vast majority of them Ukrainian, we should understand that the bell is tolling for all of us, whether we are Ukrainians, Russians, Western Europeans or North Americans….in a word, the bell tolls for all of Christendom. In all my years of writing on matters geopolitical, I’m not sure that I have ever treated a subject with greater historical complexity...any thread we pull from the tangled ball of Ukrainian history exposes yet deeper unresolved, dynamic issues that remain poignant and relevant today. No single narrative offered by either side in this current conflict gives us the full picture. I tend to be something of a Russophile, so I began this deep dive with a pro-Russian perspective. But I have no dog in this fight except to promote peace, and peace and partisanship seldom make a happy marriage. I have discovered that the fault lines underlying this conflict (and here I use the term “fault” in both of its senses) run deep on both sides. Whilst I still remain entirely unsympathetic to the current regime in Kyiv, prosecuting a suicidal war at the behest of the NATO powers and the corrupt Biden Administration (though let’s recall that Trump supported it too), I have gained an appreciation and sympathy for the people of Ukraine whose centuries of trauma have bred understandable Russophobia, and thus susceptibility to the US/NATO’s puppetry which panders to it: Russian irredentism meets Ukrainian revanchism, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Thus there is real need for some objective outside party to mediate a settlement before the slow bleeding to death of Ukraine becomes the bloodbath of a final military solution – there is little doubt that Russia will launch a sweeping, massive offensive some time this winter, unless our prayers are answered and a permanent peaceful resolution is somehow negotiated relatively soon.
We’ll begin, then, with the recent history of the conflict – the facts on the ground, as it were. Then we’ll zoom out to look at post-Soviet geopolitical history to gain a larger context, then zoom out further still to review the history of Russian-Ukrainian history from Tsarist to Soviet times, then finally set our historical lens to maximum dilation as we reconsider the history of Byzantine Christianity and its indisputable progenitor, Constantine the Great. Only by thus broadening our historical scope can we hope to better understand this simmering flashpoint in a way that might help identify root causes of the conflict and therefore potential, durable peaceful resolutions.
1. The historically myopic view: Yanukovych to Zelenski
Viktor Yanukovych was the last democratically elected president of post-Soviet Ukraine.. His foreign policy consisted of a delicate balancing act between Moscow-dominated East and Brussels-dominated West. When he began to pivot more towards Moscow than the US State Dept and CIA liked, they went into action fomenting a color revolution (the “Maidan Coup”) to effect regime change, which eventually succeeded succeeded, accompanied as it was by sporadic violence from agents provocateurs to force the issue. Yanukovych fled for his life to Russia, and a new regime was installed in his place, in which six major posts were handed to the neo-Nazi elements who had provided the militant muscle behind the coup. The Eastern Ukranians, in the Donbas and Crimea, were having none of it, and forthwith began organizing militant separatist activity. The Russians, anxious to maintain their only warm water seaport, promoted and accepted the results of a Ukranian plebiscite to join the Russian Federation, thereby restoring the situation that existed prior to Kruschev’s donation of Crimea to the Ukraine from Russia in 1954 (for internal political reasons, it is argued, though some Russians today still believe he was drunk when he signed the transfer agreement). Russia did not at that time accept similar plebiscites from the Donbas republics. The putschists in Kyiv then began a long military offensive against the Donbas, ostensibly targeting the separatist militias but also inflicting many civilian casualities, largely from the incessant shelling of the area and since 2014 aerial bombardment of urban areas -- total casualties exceeded 14,0001 by the UN’s own count by the start of 2022. The civil war was fought to a standstill leading to the ill-fated Minsk agreements, which the Ukrainian side showed little interest in honoring. The Kyiv regime imposed harsh, culturally genocidal rules on these eastern, Russian-speaking provinces, and when it appeared they were poised for a huge military offensive against them February of 2022, the Russian Duma finally accepted the Donbas oblasts’ declarations of independence, then invaded at the request of these (in Russian eyes) newly independent republics to quell the Ukranian attacks and defend the Russian-speaking population. Later plebiscites were held about joining the Russian Federation, and these reportedly succeeded….The Kremlin now considers these provinces an integral part of Mother Russia.
Viktor Yanukovych, official portrait
It would take much more than a paragraph to provide a comprehensive account of this conflict since the Maidan Coup, but the above paragraph encapsulates the version often proffered, with minor variations, iby alternative media. It is essentially accurate as far as it goes: the Ukranian nationalists at their most extreme expression openly profess a neo-Nazi exterminist agenda towards the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine. Their current leader Vladimir Zelenskiy, a second-rate comedian turned first-rate tragedian, openly invites the West to “invest” in a proxy war against Russia, feeding the flower of his country’s youth into the endless meat-grinder that is the Russian war machine, which is slowly decimating it beyond all possibility of recovery. Many alternative commentators have grown comfortable with this narrative that portrays Russia as the reluctant savior of a beleaguered Eastern-Ukranian Russian-speaking population, and the Kyiv regime as a neo-Nazi aggressor who, out of the blue, decided to launch a war of ethnic cleansing against its this population. And indeed, if Ukrainian history began with the Maidan Coup of 2014, such a narrative might be entirely justified. But as we shall see, Ukrainian history starts much earlier, and as we explore its contours we shall see that things are not so simple, and the historical roots of the inter-ethnic conflict go pretty far back. And neither side can be said to be historically blameless. It is my thesis that unless both sides in this conflict own their history and acknowledge each other’s legitimate rights, the civil war will continue to rack up its carnage, as these very historical fault lines are exploited and inflamed by the war-mongering West, now under the Russophobic leadership of the Biden regime, whose principals are inextricably entangled in Ukrainian financial corruption, and the ongoing money-laundering operation that the current Ukraine proxy war represents.
Clown Prince Vladimir Zelenskiy
2. Gorbachev to Putin: Russophobia on Parade
As the Soviet Union disintegrated, explicit promises were given to then-president Mikhail Gorbachev by Western leaders that Russia would have nothing to fear from NATO if the existing Soviet military bloc were dissolved, that NATO was a defensive alliance only and if the Soviet “threat” disappeared, Russia could be sure that NATO would not expand beyond its current configuration. But this assurance was betrayed, and NATO showed its true colors by ceasing to masquerade as a defensive alliance and soon took advantage of Russia’s weakness to expand its military alliance in all directions, and to involve itself in offensive wars well beyond its Atlanticist purview. Russia naturally viewed this menacing metastasis with growing alarm. As NATO continued to encircle Russia with new encroachments and forwardly based nuclear capable military installations, Russia could only regard it as an “existential threat.” It turns out that NATO was not an anti-Soviet alliance after all...it was nakedly anti-Russian. And Russophobia is the ideological fuel on which NATO depended for its very existence, so the “existential threat” was mutual: if Russian-Western relations were amicable, NATO would lose its very raison d’etre. A hyper-aggressive NATO threatens Russia’s integrity, but it is ironically a pacific Russia that threatens the very existence of NATO! So NATO’s survival depended on serving up a new Russian military threat to the Western World, and the Ukraine was identified as the perfect place to prepare this delicacy, and NATO is now licking its chops as it prepares to slow-roast the Russian bear in Hell’s kitchen. The West is now under the leadership of exactly what the S viet Union leadership referred to in its glory days as “war mongers.” This somewhat quaint but entirely accurate epithet means that for the West, the commerce of war serves as economic flywheel. We only need look at current US and NATO-allied military expenditure, at a time when no nation presents an active military threat, for all the proof we need.
3. The Bolshevik Era: the brutality of Soviet domination of Ukraine after the Russian Revolution
By and large, the American public is woefully ignorant of the history of Eastern Europe prior to WWII. Not so Europeans, however, and if we want to understand the profound sympathy western Europeans exhibit for Ukraine in the current conflict, it pays to revisit the long, sad history of Ukraine-Russian relations. The reason is that in many respects, we are witnessing a replay of this history even as we speak. The Tsarist regime fell, Ukraine struggled for national independence, the Bolsheviks crushed it. The Soviet Communist regime fell, Ukraine struggles to revive its national sovereignty, and wouldn’t you know it, who appears to challenge its sovereignty but that same Russia now wearing constitutional-republican garb – new package, same bitter taste. That the Russian invasion was baited and provoked by the covert instigation of the West is beside the point; from the mindset of Ukrainians and western Europeans unaware of NATO’s covert fomentation of this conflict, history just seems to be repeating itself.
In a nutshell, the Bolsheviks sought to subjugate the Ukraine almost as soon as their revolution began. Trotsky considered it a high priority. The Brest-Litovsk treaty provided an opening for Ukraine to launch an independence movement, but the Bolsheviks soon renounced it, and began infiltrating the Ukraine with their agents. A bloody warensued between the forces supporting Ukrainian independence and the Bolsheviks, but eventually the Bolsheviks prevailed. Soviet domination led to the great national trauma that still haunts the Ukrainian (and western European) psyche: the Holodomor. This man-made famine decimated the Ukrainian population, and left a scar on the national conscience that has not healed until this day. It really makes no difference if this famine resulted from a deliberate punitive act by the Stalinist regime, as some think, or callous bureaucratic incompetence….the fact is that it had deadly consequences for the people of Ukraine, taking millions of civilians to early graves, and more to the point, left some regions of the Ukraine rather depopulated. Adding insult to injury, from the Ukrainian point of view, Soviet Russia than sent Russian-speakers from its own inner reaches to repopulate some of these areas, particularly the coal-rich regions in Eastern Ukraine.2
World War II saw a similar scenario: Fighting was intense in Ukraine between the Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht, again leaving key areas of Ukraine relatively depopulated. And again Russia sent trainloads of Russian-speaking migrants to repopulate. 3 From the Ukrainian standpoint, it is is not hard to see why these Soviet Russian migrants might be regarded as interlopers, and why there might be a kind of lasting historical resentment against them, much as Palestinian Arabs who were depopulated by the terrorist Nakba naturally resent the European Jews who trepopulated their own villages in their forced absence. Indeed, the comparison is not all that far-fetched: Palestinians are perhaps the only ethnic group whose nationalist aspirations have been more brutally repressed than Ukraine’s (though we ought not exclude the benighted Kurds from this conversation). Never mind that latent revanchist sentiment was inflamed to fever pitch by NATO propagandists to foment the current war – its historical roots are real enough! Both the latent irredentist sentiment of some Russians and the latent revanchist tendencies of the Ukrainians might have been sleeping dogs left to lie, and a peaceful stalemate between the two have eventuated, but the warmongers of the West would have none of it, and provoked the Ukrainian side by empowering its most odious, neo-Nazi partisans to support the 2012 coup d’etat in Kyiv which set the war train between the two into fatal motion, with both sides declaring an existential threat. The CIA, the covert arm of the US war industry, must be feeling very pleaased with itself, but the world is now on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe thanks to their instigatory machinations .
NATO’s treachery with respect to Russia set the stage for the current crisis. When the Soviet Union introduced glasnost (openness and transparency) and perestroika ( political and economic restructuring) the West had a moral obligation to respond in kind. We did not. And thereby it is the moral failure of the West to respond to Russian goodwill and peaceful intent with our own that truly laid the groundwork for the current conflict. Our failure to dismantle our own Cold War apparatus when the Russians undid theirs left us with the onerous burden of an increasingly secretive and repressive “Deep State” which has undermined our own traditional democratic-republican way of life. What goes around comes around.
4. Ukraine under the Tsars
As we widen our historical lens still further, we may argue that the complex interrelationship between Russians and Ukrainians essentially begins with the declaration by Kievan Rus leader Vladimir the Great in 988, on the occasion of his acceptance of Orthodox Christianity as the national religion, that Russians and Ukrainians were one people. This hasn’t quite worked out according to his dictate, but put a pin in the Orthodox aspect for the moment, as we will come back to that in our final dilation of our historical lens, and consider this potential source of ultimate reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine: both are branches of the same stream….both trace the origin of their nationhood to this same fountainhead: Kievan Rus. Ukrainians first became separated from their Russian confreres during the Mongol invasion, which left their western land occupied for centuries. Then the Ottomans took their turn, then the Polish-Lithuanian alliance, and finally Imperial Russia reabsorbed much of it through conquest. In my reading, however, the Russian Tsars regarded the Ukraine as something of a satrapy. The development of Odessa by regal trollop Catherine the Great is a case in point...it was something of a playground and investment opportunity for the rich and famous. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to compare isarist Russia’s attitude towards Odessa and Ukraine to the situation in Havanna and Cuba in the post WWII era, America’s backyard getaway for those with large disposable incomes (and mafiosos). Modern Russia is at a crossroads. Its more ignorant critics accuse it of trying to restore the Soviet Union but this is obvious nonsense. More credible is the claim that it is taking up the mantle of old Imperial Russia which, to repeat, regarded Ukraine as its “backyard.” Old habits die hard, and it is perhaps no more likelythat we will see Russia come to regard Ukraine as an equal and sovereign entity as that the United States will come to regard modern Cuba as a free and independent equal in the family of nations, but I suggest that the road to lasting peace ultimately requires such transformations of attitude. Domination and national chauvinism do not get on well with peace.
historic Odessa, founded by Catherine the Great
5. Religiously Sanctioned War: the Lasting Legacy of the Constantinian Compromise
We complete our survey of the fault lines beneath the current conflict by opening our lens to its widest angle, back through the mists of antiquity for a serious look at the origins of Orthodox Christianity and the relation of the Orthodox Church (and “official” Christianity in general) to national military endeavor. First, the relevant ecclesiastical history:
A number of excellent studies could be adduced that all reached the same conclusion: Christianity prior to the Age of Constantine was a pacifist religion. But as that is not our main subject here, I am going to limit my excursus to a single excellent work on the subject, which I cannot recommend too highly, especially for readers new to this subject who would like to see the historical documentation on which its author relies for these few summary sentences cited for the sake of brevity. Its title is Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace – A Historical Survey and Critical Reevaluation, and its illustrious author is Roland H. Bainton:
p.53 “War .. was repudiated until the time of Constantine, for until then no extant christian writing countenanced Christian participation in warfare.”
p.73 “Thus all of the outstanding writers of the East and the West repudiated participation in warfare for Christians.”
p.85 “The accession of Constantine terminated the pacifist period in church history.”
p.89 “Curiously the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate [an anomalous successor of Constantine] continued to regard Christianity as inculcating pacifism and partly for that reason rejected it.”4
This last citation demonstrates that pacifism (nonresistance) was so ingrained in primitive Christianity that even Constantine’s subversion of it failed to fully eradicate it. It survives even today in some of the so-called “peace churches” of Western Christianity, minority sects which have little influence over organized Christianity or, to be sure, the foreign policy of host nations. The on again – off again persecution of early Christianity only led to its proliferation, but Constantine accomplished the unthinkable: he weaponized this religion of peace, and this historic psychological contradiction underlies the tragic religiously sanctioned militarism which has sporadically characterized “Christendom” ever since.
This interweaving of state violence with Christian values, this mutual accommodation between church and state, this fatal Constantinian Compromise, has tainted Christian doctrine ever since, and lastingly inhibited the ability of the established church to promulgate the pure gospel of Jesus Christ, and its radical evolutionary humanitarian challenge. It is a gospel of peace, but Constantine cleverly converted it to a weapon in his arsenal, going so far as to emblazon its iconography on his soldiers’ shields, it is reported.
Do Western and Orthodox established churches equally carry on this legacy? In the larger sense, yes they do. But in a narrower sense, Constantine enjoys a higher place in Orthodox hagiography than he does in the Roman Western tradition, and this means that there is even stronger psychological groundwork laid for subordination of church to state. The rabid antagonism of the Bolsheviks to the Russian Orthodox Church is explained in part by their recognition that it served as a handmaiden to Tsarism. It was not Russian serfs and workers, but Russian princes who are entombed in extravagantly appointed sepulchers in the crypts of Orthodox cathedrals.
The Constantinian Compromise soon evolved the so-called Just War Theory, famously articulated by Augustine of Hippo. We haven’t the space to examine it in detail here, but suffice it to say that it represents an attempt to limit warfare according to certain “humane” parameters. That it has been honored much more in the breach than in practice is only too historically evident. My point in bringing it up here is that Vladimir Putin, for the most part, has honored it in practice in the execution of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. He presented his just demands prior to the military conflict (an pan-European indivisible security arrangement in the face of NATO’s aggressive expansion), sought to minimize civilian casualties and, unlike his Ukrainian counterparts, has respected international law regarding humane treatment of prisoners of war, has been slow to escalate and has done so only in response to escalation by his foes, etc. He’s going by the book, despite the fact that his Ukrainian enemies are not. But before we go too far in acknowledging this Russian president, let’s remember that in exchange for his honoring Just War Theory in the conduct of this war, he receives the blessing of the Russian Orthodox church for his military effort, that ecclesial moral support which even Joseph Stalin sadly discovered he could not do without during the Great Patriotic War (WWII)!
“Saint” Constantine in Orthodox iconography
It is for this reason that I part company with my fellow critics of the Zelenskiy regime and refuse to condemn his repression of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. In time of peace, of course, such policy would appear unconsciionable, but all’s fair in love and war (and this is definitely not love). This clown president ultimately lacks military prowess or democratic values, but he is not the true instigator of this current war, the US Deep State, State Department, spooks and NATO operatives bear that onus, and we must not forget that. As feckless a commander in chief as he is, he has demonstrated astuteness in recognizing the Russian Orthodox Church as a fifth column in Ukraine. Propaganda aside, he is NOT attacking the church in general, nor even “Orthodoxy,” with these latest repressive measures. It is the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine that is his target (as opposed to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which we’ll touch on momentarily). How many readers, I wonder, are aware that Russian Orthodox priests have been seen blessing Russian weapons in the battlefields of the Donbas? Have they not thereby demonstrated that, true to their Constantinian legacy, they are themselves psychological weapons in this war? Why shouldn’t the Zelenskiy regime so regard them, and engage with them as such? As a belligerent, he is well within his rights. The Russian Orthodox Church has shown itself to be a vector of Russian nationalism on territory Ukraine regards as its own...the Ukrainian “immune system” must naturally seek to counteract it!5
When we appreciate the caesaro-papist character of the post-Constantine established church in general, and of Eastern Orthodoxy in particular, the development of an independent (autocephalous) Ukrainian Orthodox Church stands to reason….how can Ukraine stand truly independent if her church is bound to the Russian state? In 2019 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was granted autocephaly (having its own, independent head) by many Eastern patriarchates, yet shortly following this arose a tremendous internal controversy, the so-called Filaret-Epiphaniaus controversy. Study this matter as I may, I cannot understand it...it’s all very….Byzantine! But the fact that this confusion of ecclesiastic authority exists in its midst on the very eve of the current war strikes me as ominous, but that is simply my impression. I claim no expertise in this area.
6. Conclusion
No party in the Ukrainian conflict is entirely blameless. For its part, Mother Russia may be more reluctant than she admits to let her “Little Russians” (a traditional Russian epithet for Ukrainians) grow up into full independence, and may secretly wish to keep them tied to her apron strings. This remains to be seen. The historically traumatized people of Ukraine are stuck with a feckless leader who, despite his own evident corruption, is no more than a puppet of the real culprit here: NATO and the Western establishment, with its coterie of warmongers. How much of the multi-billion dollar gravy train is sidetracked into Zelenskiy’s own pockets we may never know, as congressional Democrats have blocked a Republican-led effort to audit the endless money trail. Biden, Nuland and the Neocons are unlikely to ever open the door to a just peace...they have too much at stake. But even if (and this is my prayer) an objective third party could mediate a peaceful resolution to the conflict, listening carefully to the legitimate historic grievances of both sides,we can be sure that some new threat to world peace will be engendered by the powers that be somewhere else. There’s no business like war business.
But war business is antithetical to authentic Christianity. We need look back no farther than the Crusades to see the wanton damage weaponized Christianity is capable of inflicting on the world. What would Jesus say to all of this? There can be no ultimate resolution to the problem of war but for Christians to revisit the fatal compromise made with Constantine and to repudiate it once and for all. There is no easy Christianity...it is a hard discipline that requires constant effort to replace our vengeful tendencies with unconditional love, and like our earliest Christian forebears, to be willing to die for our faith if needed, but never to kill for it. It’s a tall order, but as our Master said, the burden is light. How so? Because it alone offers freedom from moral burden...all harmful intent is strictly prohibited, so there can never be any sanctioned violence. No harm, no foul. Americans , for our part, have a special responsibility to dismantle our Deep State, that vile vestige of the Cold War that threatens to bring the world to nuclear war and as it subverts our constitutional republic. We are, as a nation, seriously delinquent in this respect, and the fiscal hemorrhage of support for the Ukraine war is only the latest of the price we pay for our foot-dragging.
These are the deeper fault lines that crisscross and undermine our entire geopolitical landscape, not only in Ukraine,but unless we have the courage to confront them, and conquer militaristic spirit with Christian love, we can be reasonably certain to be swallowed up by the devastating earthquake they inevitably will visit upon us. Lest we founder on the shores of cynicism, let’s begin this new year by recalling the revealing words of a Russian, no less, whose quintessentially Christian understanding of history resonates with our own, Alexsandr Solzhenistyn:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either --- but right through every human heart – and through all human hearts.” [The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956]
1https://bitterwinter.org/donbass-did-ukraine-kill-14000-pro-russians/ In general Russian propaganda tends to be far more accurate than Ukrainian propaganda, especially when it comes to reports of outcomes on the battlefield. This 14,000 figure, so often bandied about by pro-Russian commentators as a civilian death toll , is thus a notable exception. According to this report, the figure is actually a slight understatement of the UN estimate of between 14,200 to 14,400 deaths, horrifying had these victims all been civilians but, according to this article, 10,900 of these were armed combatants on both sides of this civil war: comprising 4,400 pro-Ukranian and 6,500 pro-Russian combatants. Of course, this still leaves over 4,000 civilian casualties which is unconscionable enough, and the Ukrainian practice of shelling urban areas of the Donbas is reported to this day, so this civilian death toll has likely increased substantially since the initial UN report.
3 Op cit. We recoil when we read that the Ukrainians made efforts to prohibit the use of the Russian language in Eastern Ukraine in recent years, but consider this: “He [Stalin] tried to strengthen this position with a new wave of immigrant workers sent from Russia to settle in Donbass, and—as demonstrated by Lenore Ann Grenoble in her book “Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union” (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003)—by greatly restricting the use of Ukrainian language in the two oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, where most schooling was in Russian only. As a result of these policies, the last Soviet Census, of 1989 reported the population of the two oblasts as 55% Ukrainian and 45% Russian.” (emphasis added) With respect to Russian irredentism, this treaty consideration bears careful reading: “After Ukrainian independence, there were almost immediately Russian voices that claimed that Donbass (as well as Crimea) was in fact part of Russia. The matter became part of the negotiations leading to the Memorandum of Budapest of 1994, a treaty that settled the question of the large quantity of Soviet nuclear weapons left in Ukraine by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By that treaty, Ukraine agreed to give these nuclear weapons to Russia (which it did), and Russia agreed to respect “the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” thus abandoning its claims on Donbass (and Crimea).”
4 Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, A Historical Survey and Critical Reevaluation, Roland H. Bainton, 1960, Abingdon Press, New York, Nashville
Note that in the final citation here we should compare the Putin Administration’s repression of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia...as they are essentially pacifist in practice a frank appraisal of their military inutility may equally have been applied to this policy, history repeating itself once again...
5 Lest Western Christians become too self-righteously horrified by this blessing of weapons by priests on the Ukrainian battlefield, let’s recall that it was not that long ago that our Western pope blessed the battleships of Mussolini as they set off to conquer Ethiopia.
For discussion: Russia has radically reconstituted itself twice in the 20th century: does each iteration bear any responsibility for the preceding regime’s behavior? What is the responsibility of the average American for the warmongering of the NATO alliance? What should the relationship look like between the US and Russia?
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Christendom in the Crucible: The deeper moral and religious dimensions of the war in Ukraine
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(Readers who have not already done so are urged to read my previous essay, Original Introductory Overview, before reading this one, as helpful Christian-historical context is provided there in preparation for this present essay.)
As war casualties continue to mount in the benighted land of Ukraine, the vast majority of them Ukrainian, we should understand that the bell is tolling for all of us, whether we are Ukrainians, Russians, Western Europeans or North Americans….in a word, the bell tolls for all of Christendom. In all my years of writing on matters geopolitical, I’m not sure that I have ever treated a subject with greater historical complexity...any thread we pull from the tangled ball of Ukrainian history exposes yet deeper unresolved, dynamic issues that remain poignant and relevant today. No single narrative offered by either side in this current conflict gives us the full picture. I tend to be something of a Russophile, so I began this deep dive with a pro-Russian perspective. But I have no dog in this fight except to promote peace, and peace and partisanship seldom make a happy marriage. I have discovered that the fault lines underlying this conflict (and here I use the term “fault” in both of its senses) run deep on both sides. Whilst I still remain entirely unsympathetic to the current regime in Kyiv, prosecuting a suicidal war at the behest of the NATO powers and the corrupt Biden Administration (though let’s recall that Trump supported it too), I have gained an appreciation and sympathy for the people of Ukraine whose centuries of trauma have bred understandable Russophobia, and thus susceptibility to the US/NATO’s puppetry which panders to it: Russian irredentism meets Ukrainian revanchism, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Thus there is real need for some objective outside party to mediate a settlement before the slow bleeding to death of Ukraine becomes the bloodbath of a final military solution – there is little doubt that Russia will launch a sweeping, massive offensive some time this winter, unless our prayers are answered and a permanent peaceful resolution is somehow negotiated relatively soon.
We’ll begin, then, with the recent history of the conflict – the facts on the ground, as it were. Then we’ll zoom out to look at post-Soviet geopolitical history to gain a larger context, then zoom out further still to review the history of Russian-Ukrainian history from Tsarist to Soviet times, then finally set our historical lens to maximum dilation as we reconsider the history of Byzantine Christianity and its indisputable progenitor, Constantine the Great. Only by thus broadening our historical scope can we hope to better understand this simmering flashpoint in a way that might help identify root causes of the conflict and therefore potential, durable peaceful resolutions.
1. The historically myopic view: Yanukovych to Zelenski
Viktor Yanukovych was the last democratically elected president of post-Soviet Ukraine.. His foreign policy consisted of a delicate balancing act between Moscow-dominated East and Brussels-dominated West. When he began to pivot more towards Moscow than the US State Dept and CIA liked, they went into action fomenting a color revolution (the “Maidan Coup”) to effect regime change, which eventually succeeded succeeded, accompanied as it was by sporadic violence from agents provocateurs to force the issue. Yanukovych fled for his life to Russia, and a new regime was installed in his place, in which six major posts were handed to the neo-Nazi elements who had provided the militant muscle behind the coup. The Eastern Ukranians, in the Donbas and Crimea, were having none of it, and forthwith began organizing militant separatist activity. The Russians, anxious to maintain their only warm water seaport, promoted and accepted the results of a Ukranian plebiscite to join the Russian Federation, thereby restoring the situation that existed prior to Kruschev’s donation of Crimea to the Ukraine from Russia in 1954 (for internal political reasons, it is argued, though some Russians today still believe he was drunk when he signed the transfer agreement). Russia did not at that time accept similar plebiscites from the Donbas republics. The putschists in Kyiv then began a long military offensive against the Donbas, ostensibly targeting the separatist militias but also inflicting many civilian casualities, largely from the incessant shelling of the area and since 2014 aerial bombardment of urban areas -- total casualties exceeded 14,0001 by the UN’s own count by the start of 2022. The civil war was fought to a standstill leading to the ill-fated Minsk agreements, which the Ukrainian side showed little interest in honoring. The Kyiv regime imposed harsh, culturally genocidal rules on these eastern, Russian-speaking provinces, and when it appeared they were poised for a huge military offensive against them February of 2022, the Russian Duma finally accepted the Donbas oblasts’ declarations of independence, then invaded at the request of these (in Russian eyes) newly independent republics to quell the Ukranian attacks and defend the Russian-speaking population. Later plebiscites were held about joining the Russian Federation, and these reportedly succeeded….The Kremlin now considers these provinces an integral part of Mother Russia.
It would take much more than a paragraph to provide a comprehensive account of this conflict since the Maidan Coup, but the above paragraph encapsulates the version often proffered, with minor variations, iby alternative media. It is essentially accurate as far as it goes: the Ukranian nationalists at their most extreme expression openly profess a neo-Nazi exterminist agenda towards the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine. Their current leader Vladimir Zelenskiy, a second-rate comedian turned first-rate tragedian, openly invites the West to “invest” in a proxy war against Russia, feeding the flower of his country’s youth into the endless meat-grinder that is the Russian war machine, which is slowly decimating it beyond all possibility of recovery. Many alternative commentators have grown comfortable with this narrative that portrays Russia as the reluctant savior of a beleaguered Eastern-Ukranian Russian-speaking population, and the Kyiv regime as a neo-Nazi aggressor who, out of the blue, decided to launch a war of ethnic cleansing against its this population. And indeed, if Ukrainian history began with the Maidan Coup of 2014, such a narrative might be entirely justified. But as we shall see, Ukrainian history starts much earlier, and as we explore its contours we shall see that things are not so simple, and the historical roots of the inter-ethnic conflict go pretty far back. And neither side can be said to be historically blameless. It is my thesis that unless both sides in this conflict own their history and acknowledge each other’s legitimate rights, the civil war will continue to rack up its carnage, as these very historical fault lines are exploited and inflamed by the war-mongering West, now under the Russophobic leadership of the Biden regime, whose principals are inextricably entangled in Ukrainian financial corruption, and the ongoing money-laundering operation that the current Ukraine proxy war represents.
2. Gorbachev to Putin: Russophobia on Parade
As the Soviet Union disintegrated, explicit promises were given to then-president Mikhail Gorbachev by Western leaders that Russia would have nothing to fear from NATO if the existing Soviet military bloc were dissolved, that NATO was a defensive alliance only and if the Soviet “threat” disappeared, Russia could be sure that NATO would not expand beyond its current configuration. But this assurance was betrayed, and NATO showed its true colors by ceasing to masquerade as a defensive alliance and soon took advantage of Russia’s weakness to expand its military alliance in all directions, and to involve itself in offensive wars well beyond its Atlanticist purview. Russia naturally viewed this menacing metastasis with growing alarm. As NATO continued to encircle Russia with new encroachments and forwardly based nuclear capable military installations, Russia could only regard it as an “existential threat.” It turns out that NATO was not an anti-Soviet alliance after all...it was nakedly anti-Russian. And Russophobia is the ideological fuel on which NATO depended for its very existence, so the “existential threat” was mutual: if Russian-Western relations were amicable, NATO would lose its very raison d’etre. A hyper-aggressive NATO threatens Russia’s integrity, but it is ironically a pacific Russia that threatens the very existence of NATO! So NATO’s survival depended on serving up a new Russian military threat to the Western World, and the Ukraine was identified as the perfect place to prepare this delicacy, and NATO is now licking its chops as it prepares to slow-roast the Russian bear in Hell’s kitchen. The West is now under the leadership of exactly what the S viet Union leadership referred to in its glory days as “war mongers.” This somewhat quaint but entirely accurate epithet means that for the West, the commerce of war serves as economic flywheel. We only need look at current US and NATO-allied military expenditure, at a time when no nation presents an active military threat, for all the proof we need.
3. The Bolshevik Era: the brutality of Soviet domination of Ukraine after the Russian Revolution
By and large, the American public is woefully ignorant of the history of Eastern Europe prior to WWII. Not so Europeans, however, and if we want to understand the profound sympathy western Europeans exhibit for Ukraine in the current conflict, it pays to revisit the long, sad history of Ukraine-Russian relations. The reason is that in many respects, we are witnessing a replay of this history even as we speak. The Tsarist regime fell, Ukraine struggled for national independence, the Bolsheviks crushed it. The Soviet Communist regime fell, Ukraine struggles to revive its national sovereignty, and wouldn’t you know it, who appears to challenge its sovereignty but that same Russia now wearing constitutional-republican garb – new package, same bitter taste. That the Russian invasion was baited and provoked by the covert instigation of the West is beside the point; from the mindset of Ukrainians and western Europeans unaware of NATO’s covert fomentation of this conflict, history just seems to be repeating itself.
In a nutshell, the Bolsheviks sought to subjugate the Ukraine almost as soon as their revolution began. Trotsky considered it a high priority. The Brest-Litovsk treaty provided an opening for Ukraine to launch an independence movement, but the Bolsheviks soon renounced it, and began infiltrating the Ukraine with their agents. A bloody warensued between the forces supporting Ukrainian independence and the Bolsheviks, but eventually the Bolsheviks prevailed. Soviet domination led to the great national trauma that still haunts the Ukrainian (and western European) psyche: the Holodomor. This man-made famine decimated the Ukrainian population, and left a scar on the national conscience that has not healed until this day. It really makes no difference if this famine resulted from a deliberate punitive act by the Stalinist regime, as some think, or callous bureaucratic incompetence….the fact is that it had deadly consequences for the people of Ukraine, taking millions of civilians to early graves, and more to the point, left some regions of the Ukraine rather depopulated. Adding insult to injury, from the Ukrainian point of view, Soviet Russia than sent Russian-speakers from its own inner reaches to repopulate some of these areas, particularly the coal-rich regions in Eastern Ukraine.2
World War II saw a similar scenario: Fighting was intense in Ukraine between the Red Army and the Nazi Wehrmacht, again leaving key areas of Ukraine relatively depopulated. And again Russia sent trainloads of Russian-speaking migrants to repopulate. 3 From the Ukrainian standpoint, it is is not hard to see why these Soviet Russian migrants might be regarded as interlopers, and why there might be a kind of lasting historical resentment against them, much as Palestinian Arabs who were depopulated by the terrorist Nakba naturally resent the European Jews who trepopulated their own villages in their forced absence. Indeed, the comparison is not all that far-fetched: Palestinians are perhaps the only ethnic group whose nationalist aspirations have been more brutally repressed than Ukraine’s (though we ought not exclude the benighted Kurds from this conversation). Never mind that latent revanchist sentiment was inflamed to fever pitch by NATO propagandists to foment the current war – its historical roots are real enough! Both the latent irredentist sentiment of some Russians and the latent revanchist tendencies of the Ukrainians might have been sleeping dogs left to lie, and a peaceful stalemate between the two have eventuated, but the warmongers of the West would have none of it, and provoked the Ukrainian side by empowering its most odious, neo-Nazi partisans to support the 2012 coup d’etat in Kyiv which set the war train between the two into fatal motion, with both sides declaring an existential threat. The CIA, the covert arm of the US war industry, must be feeling very pleaased with itself, but the world is now on the brink of a nuclear catastrophe thanks to their instigatory machinations .
NATO’s treachery with respect to Russia set the stage for the current crisis. When the Soviet Union introduced glasnost (openness and transparency) and perestroika ( political and economic restructuring) the West had a moral obligation to respond in kind. We did not. And thereby it is the moral failure of the West to respond to Russian goodwill and peaceful intent with our own that truly laid the groundwork for the current conflict. Our failure to dismantle our own Cold War apparatus when the Russians undid theirs left us with the onerous burden of an increasingly secretive and repressive “Deep State” which has undermined our own traditional democratic-republican way of life. What goes around comes around.
4. Ukraine under the Tsars
As we widen our historical lens still further, we may argue that the complex interrelationship between Russians and Ukrainians essentially begins with the declaration by Kievan Rus leader Vladimir the Great in 988, on the occasion of his acceptance of Orthodox Christianity as the national religion, that Russians and Ukrainians were one people. This hasn’t quite worked out according to his dictate, but put a pin in the Orthodox aspect for the moment, as we will come back to that in our final dilation of our historical lens, and consider this potential source of ultimate reconciliation between Russia and Ukraine: both are branches of the same stream….both trace the origin of their nationhood to this same fountainhead: Kievan Rus. Ukrainians first became separated from their Russian confreres during the Mongol invasion, which left their western land occupied for centuries. Then the Ottomans took their turn, then the Polish-Lithuanian alliance, and finally Imperial Russia reabsorbed much of it through conquest. In my reading, however, the Russian Tsars regarded the Ukraine as something of a satrapy. The development of Odessa by regal trollop Catherine the Great is a case in point...it was something of a playground and investment opportunity for the rich and famous. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to compare isarist Russia’s attitude towards Odessa and Ukraine to the situation in Havanna and Cuba in the post WWII era, America’s backyard getaway for those with large disposable incomes (and mafiosos). Modern Russia is at a crossroads. Its more ignorant critics accuse it of trying to restore the Soviet Union but this is obvious nonsense. More credible is the claim that it is taking up the mantle of old Imperial Russia which, to repeat, regarded Ukraine as its “backyard.” Old habits die hard, and it is perhaps no more likelythat we will see Russia come to regard Ukraine as an equal and sovereign entity as that the United States will come to regard modern Cuba as a free and independent equal in the family of nations, but I suggest that the road to lasting peace ultimately requires such transformations of attitude. Domination and national chauvinism do not get on well with peace.
5. Religiously Sanctioned War: the Lasting Legacy of the Constantinian Compromise
We complete our survey of the fault lines beneath the current conflict by opening our lens to its widest angle, back through the mists of antiquity for a serious look at the origins of Orthodox Christianity and the relation of the Orthodox Church (and “official” Christianity in general) to national military endeavor. First, the relevant ecclesiastical history:
A number of excellent studies could be adduced that all reached the same conclusion: Christianity prior to the Age of Constantine was a pacifist religion. But as that is not our main subject here, I am going to limit my excursus to a single excellent work on the subject, which I cannot recommend too highly, especially for readers new to this subject who would like to see the historical documentation on which its author relies for these few summary sentences cited for the sake of brevity. Its title is Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace – A Historical Survey and Critical Reevaluation, and its illustrious author is Roland H. Bainton:
p.53 “War .. was repudiated until the time of Constantine, for until then no extant christian writing countenanced Christian participation in warfare.”
p.73 “Thus all of the outstanding writers of the East and the West repudiated participation in warfare for Christians.”
p.85 “The accession of Constantine terminated the pacifist period in church history.”
p.89 “Curiously the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate [an anomalous successor of Constantine] continued to regard Christianity as inculcating pacifism and partly for that reason rejected it.”4
This last citation demonstrates that pacifism (nonresistance) was so ingrained in primitive Christianity that even Constantine’s subversion of it failed to fully eradicate it. It survives even today in some of the so-called “peace churches” of Western Christianity, minority sects which have little influence over organized Christianity or, to be sure, the foreign policy of host nations. The on again – off again persecution of early Christianity only led to its proliferation, but Constantine accomplished the unthinkable: he weaponized this religion of peace, and this historic psychological contradiction underlies the tragic religiously sanctioned militarism which has sporadically characterized “Christendom” ever since.
This interweaving of state violence with Christian values, this mutual accommodation between church and state, this fatal Constantinian Compromise, has tainted Christian doctrine ever since, and lastingly inhibited the ability of the established church to promulgate the pure gospel of Jesus Christ, and its radical evolutionary humanitarian challenge. It is a gospel of peace, but Constantine cleverly converted it to a weapon in his arsenal, going so far as to emblazon its iconography on his soldiers’ shields, it is reported.
Do Western and Orthodox established churches equally carry on this legacy? In the larger sense, yes they do. But in a narrower sense, Constantine enjoys a higher place in Orthodox hagiography than he does in the Roman Western tradition, and this means that there is even stronger psychological groundwork laid for subordination of church to state. The rabid antagonism of the Bolsheviks to the Russian Orthodox Church is explained in part by their recognition that it served as a handmaiden to Tsarism. It was not Russian serfs and workers, but Russian princes who are entombed in extravagantly appointed sepulchers in the crypts of Orthodox cathedrals.
The Constantinian Compromise soon evolved the so-called Just War Theory, famously articulated by Augustine of Hippo. We haven’t the space to examine it in detail here, but suffice it to say that it represents an attempt to limit warfare according to certain “humane” parameters. That it has been honored much more in the breach than in practice is only too historically evident. My point in bringing it up here is that Vladimir Putin, for the most part, has honored it in practice in the execution of Russia’s “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine. He presented his just demands prior to the military conflict (an pan-European indivisible security arrangement in the face of NATO’s aggressive expansion), sought to minimize civilian casualties and, unlike his Ukrainian counterparts, has respected international law regarding humane treatment of prisoners of war, has been slow to escalate and has done so only in response to escalation by his foes, etc. He’s going by the book, despite the fact that his Ukrainian enemies are not. But before we go too far in acknowledging this Russian president, let’s remember that in exchange for his honoring Just War Theory in the conduct of this war, he receives the blessing of the Russian Orthodox church for his military effort, that ecclesial moral support which even Joseph Stalin sadly discovered he could not do without during the Great Patriotic War (WWII)!
It is for this reason that I part company with my fellow critics of the Zelenskiy regime and refuse to condemn his repression of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. In time of peace, of course, such policy would appear unconsciionable, but all’s fair in love and war (and this is definitely not love). This clown president ultimately lacks military prowess or democratic values, but he is not the true instigator of this current war, the US Deep State, State Department, spooks and NATO operatives bear that onus, and we must not forget that. As feckless a commander in chief as he is, he has demonstrated astuteness in recognizing the Russian Orthodox Church as a fifth column in Ukraine. Propaganda aside, he is NOT attacking the church in general, nor even “Orthodoxy,” with these latest repressive measures. It is the Russian Orthodox Church in the Ukraine that is his target (as opposed to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church which we’ll touch on momentarily). How many readers, I wonder, are aware that Russian Orthodox priests have been seen blessing Russian weapons in the battlefields of the Donbas? Have they not thereby demonstrated that, true to their Constantinian legacy, they are themselves psychological weapons in this war? Why shouldn’t the Zelenskiy regime so regard them, and engage with them as such? As a belligerent, he is well within his rights. The Russian Orthodox Church has shown itself to be a vector of Russian nationalism on territory Ukraine regards as its own...the Ukrainian “immune system” must naturally seek to counteract it!5
When we appreciate the caesaro-papist character of the post-Constantine established church in general, and of Eastern Orthodoxy in particular, the development of an independent (autocephalous) Ukrainian Orthodox Church stands to reason….how can Ukraine stand truly independent if her church is bound to the Russian state? In 2019 the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was granted autocephaly (having its own, independent head) by many Eastern patriarchates, yet shortly following this arose a tremendous internal controversy, the so-called Filaret-Epiphaniaus controversy. Study this matter as I may, I cannot understand it...it’s all very….Byzantine! But the fact that this confusion of ecclesiastic authority exists in its midst on the very eve of the current war strikes me as ominous, but that is simply my impression. I claim no expertise in this area.
6. Conclusion
No party in the Ukrainian conflict is entirely blameless. For its part, Mother Russia may be more reluctant than she admits to let her “Little Russians” (a traditional Russian epithet for Ukrainians) grow up into full independence, and may secretly wish to keep them tied to her apron strings. This remains to be seen. The historically traumatized people of Ukraine are stuck with a feckless leader who, despite his own evident corruption, is no more than a puppet of the real culprit here: NATO and the Western establishment, with its coterie of warmongers. How much of the multi-billion dollar gravy train is sidetracked into Zelenskiy’s own pockets we may never know, as congressional Democrats have blocked a Republican-led effort to audit the endless money trail. Biden, Nuland and the Neocons are unlikely to ever open the door to a just peace...they have too much at stake. But even if (and this is my prayer) an objective third party could mediate a peaceful resolution to the conflict, listening carefully to the legitimate historic grievances of both sides,we can be sure that some new threat to world peace will be engendered by the powers that be somewhere else. There’s no business like war business.
But war business is antithetical to authentic Christianity. We need look back no farther than the Crusades to see the wanton damage weaponized Christianity is capable of inflicting on the world. What would Jesus say to all of this? There can be no ultimate resolution to the problem of war but for Christians to revisit the fatal compromise made with Constantine and to repudiate it once and for all. There is no easy Christianity...it is a hard discipline that requires constant effort to replace our vengeful tendencies with unconditional love, and like our earliest Christian forebears, to be willing to die for our faith if needed, but never to kill for it. It’s a tall order, but as our Master said, the burden is light. How so? Because it alone offers freedom from moral burden...all harmful intent is strictly prohibited, so there can never be any sanctioned violence. No harm, no foul. Americans , for our part, have a special responsibility to dismantle our Deep State, that vile vestige of the Cold War that threatens to bring the world to nuclear war and as it subverts our constitutional republic. We are, as a nation, seriously delinquent in this respect, and the fiscal hemorrhage of support for the Ukraine war is only the latest of the price we pay for our foot-dragging.
These are the deeper fault lines that crisscross and undermine our entire geopolitical landscape, not only in Ukraine,but unless we have the courage to confront them, and conquer militaristic spirit with Christian love, we can be reasonably certain to be swallowed up by the devastating earthquake they inevitably will visit upon us. Lest we founder on the shores of cynicism, let’s begin this new year by recalling the revealing words of a Russian, no less, whose quintessentially Christian understanding of history resonates with our own, Alexsandr Solzhenistyn:
1https://bitterwinter.org/donbass-did-ukraine-kill-14000-pro-russians/ In general Russian propaganda tends to be far more accurate than Ukrainian propaganda, especially when it comes to reports of outcomes on the battlefield. This 14,000 figure, so often bandied about by pro-Russian commentators as a civilian death toll , is thus a notable exception. According to this report, the figure is actually a slight understatement of the UN estimate of between 14,200 to 14,400 deaths, horrifying had these victims all been civilians but, according to this article, 10,900 of these were armed combatants on both sides of this civil war: comprising 4,400 pro-Ukranian and 6,500 pro-Russian combatants. Of course, this still leaves over 4,000 civilian casualties which is unconscionable enough, and the Ukrainian practice of shelling urban areas of the Donbas is reported to this day, so this civilian death toll has likely increased substantially since the initial UN report.
2 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/russia-and-ukraine-the-tangled-history-that-connects-and-divides-them
3 Op cit. We recoil when we read that the Ukrainians made efforts to prohibit the use of the Russian language in Eastern Ukraine in recent years, but consider this: “He [Stalin] tried to strengthen this position with a new wave of immigrant workers sent from Russia to settle in Donbass, and—as demonstrated by Lenore Ann Grenoble in her book “Language Policy in the Former Soviet Union” (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003)—by greatly restricting the use of Ukrainian language in the two oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, where most schooling was in Russian only. As a result of these policies, the last Soviet Census, of 1989 reported the population of the two oblasts as 55% Ukrainian and 45% Russian.” (emphasis added) With respect to Russian irredentism, this treaty consideration bears careful reading: “After Ukrainian independence, there were almost immediately Russian voices that claimed that Donbass (as well as Crimea) was in fact part of Russia. The matter became part of the negotiations leading to the Memorandum of Budapest of 1994, a treaty that settled the question of the large quantity of Soviet nuclear weapons left in Ukraine by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. By that treaty, Ukraine agreed to give these nuclear weapons to Russia (which it did), and Russia agreed to respect “the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine,” thus abandoning its claims on Donbass (and Crimea).”
4 Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, A Historical Survey and Critical Reevaluation, Roland H. Bainton, 1960, Abingdon Press, New York, Nashville
Note that in the final citation here we should compare the Putin Administration’s repression of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia...as they are essentially pacifist in practice a frank appraisal of their military inutility may equally have been applied to this policy, history repeating itself once again...
5 Lest Western Christians become too self-righteously horrified by this blessing of weapons by priests on the Ukrainian battlefield, let’s recall that it was not that long ago that our Western pope blessed the battleships of Mussolini as they set off to conquer Ethiopia.
For discussion: Russia has radically reconstituted itself twice in the 20th century: does each iteration bear any responsibility for the preceding regime’s behavior? What is the responsibility of the average American for the warmongering of the NATO alliance? What should the relationship look like between the US and Russia?
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