Amid an intense conflict continuing, the government of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin are in negotiations for a meeting. However, the U.S. State Department does not want Zelenskyy and Putin to negotiate an end to hostilities.
Reuters – “Ukraine and Russia are discussing a place and time for talks, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s spokesman said on social media on Friday. “Ukraine was and remains ready to talk about a ceasefire and peace,” spokesman Sergii Nykyforov added. (link)
Unfortunately for Zelenskyy an end to the fighting would be against the interests of the Biden administration. Highlighting the point, the U.S. State Department does not want Zelenskyy and Putin to meet. The Biden administration conveys a very telling message; from their perspective saying only United States is permitted to negotiate with Russia on behalf of Ukraine. Zelenskyy needs to stay out of it.
WASHINGTON: Russia’s offer for talks with Ukraine is an attempt to conduct diplomacy “at the barrel of a gun”, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Friday (Feb 25), saying Russia must stop its bombing in Ukraine if it is serious about diplomacy.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said earlier on Friday that Russia was ready to send a delegation to the Belarusian capital Minsk for talks.
Russia had attempted to engage in “a pretense of diplomacy” even as it prepared to invade Ukraine this week, Price told reporters at a news briefing. “Now we see Moscow suggesting that diplomacy take place at the barrel of a gun, or as Moscow’s rockets, mortars, artillery target the Ukrainian people,” he said. “This is not real diplomacy. Those are not the conditions for real diplomacy.”
[…] Responding to reports that the US government had ordered officials to stop most contacts with Russia, Price said the invasion of Ukraine had “fundamentally changed” Moscow’s relationship with Washington and other nations. But US officials would continue to engage with their Russian counterparts on important national security issues, including the talks to return to a 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, he said. (read more)
The arrogance and controlling attitude by the U.S. State Dept tells us all we need to know really.
The Biden administration has created this crisis between Russia and Ukraine for a convenient purpose, and the White House is not about to let Zelenskyy screw it up and create peace.
The U.S. wants President Zelenskyy to leave Ukraine so the State Department can take full control over the narrative. Zelensky is refusing to leave.
…”Listen you little shit, we’ve put a lot of time, money and effort into creating this mess – and I’ll be damned if you and your little scruffy band of tin soldiers are going to be allowed to act as if this is your war to negotiate.”…
Although it sometimes may seem as though we live in a complex world and our country is beset with crises on all fronts, it is important to recognize that some of the most effective remedies are elegantly simple. They have worked for centuries and would work again today. We only lack the will as a people to implement them with conviction, and to shun the cacophony of malcontents who would seek to complicate sensible solutions.
Such is the case with the crisis on our southern border. While there are few issues as thorny as immigration, there are some things we can do that would help mitigate the problems considerably. One of the most obvious would be to construct a fortified barrier on the border.
The Left has treated the idea of a border wall like a piñata for years because it plays into some of their favorite narratives. “A wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation,” Nancy Pelosi proclaimed. A wall has also been attacked as xenophobic, alleged evidence of Americans’ sinister instincts to keep out those who don’t look like us.
Such claims are getting harder to make in light of current events. The government of the Dominican Republic announced this month that it has started to build a wall that will cover almost half of its border with Haiti. Dominican President Luis Abinader stated that the wall would reduce organized crime, irregular migration and the smuggling of commercial goods and weapons.
The Dominican Republic and Haiti share the island of Hispaniola, dominated by a mix of ethnicities originating from Africa, Spain, and other regions. Are we to believe that this wall was motivated by xenophobia?
A more likely motivation is that the Dominican Republic has worked to become a stable, prosperous tourist destination, while decades of corrupt leadership have kept Haiti poor and underdeveloped. In a place with very different demographics from the United States, the Dominican Republic chose to build a wall because it is in the best interests of its people and their nation.
The United States, by comparison, is in dire need of leaders who act in the best interests of our people and our nation. Despite inheriting one of the safest borders in modern American history, Joe Biden moved quickly after being inaugurated to terminate the construction of the new border wall, resulting in vast fields of steel wall sections rusting in the sun, each section costing about $5,000. So agenda-driven is this White House that it paid contractorsnot to build the wall.
While such activism plays well with politicians in blue metropolitan areas, it has tragic results when employed by chief executives responsible for national security and protecting the nation from crime and drug trafficking.
The White House is months overdue in releasing its report on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity for fiscal year 2021, and a leaked version of the report explains why.
Total deportations were down 70 percent from the previous year. Of the 143,355 illegal aliens who were released into the country, more than 16,000 have convictions or charges for non-immigration related crimes. The numbers are even worse than they appear, as the first three months of the fiscal year were in the law-and-order Trump Administration.
There is little doubt that these numbers would be better had Biden not ended wall construction. A robust wall would also help with our nation’s war on fentanyl addiction, currently the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 45. Immigration officials have described how cartels will surge points of entry with their human cargo to overwhelm the border patrol, while they sneak opioids across unguarded, unwalled border areas.
Alas, the one thing that will make an activist politician change positions is self-preservation. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has begun building a state- and privately-funded wall rather than deal with our absentee federal landlord. With Biden’s approval ratings in a nosedive and midterm elections approaching, the federal government has donated $6 million worth of those unused wall sections to build the Texas wall.
As the public’s disapproval with the border crisis has intensified, Biden is donating the wall materials in an attempt to give himself a fig leaf that he is actually for border security. In typical Biden fashion, it’s another case of too little, too late—a shameless attempt to obscure the mess he created.
America doesn’t need a uniform wall from San Diego to Brownsville. There are geographical barriers and other considerations that make it unnecessary. We need to listen to our border enforcement professionals, and place walls along the border for maximum effectiveness.
Walls are not immoral and they are not xenophobic. They are indicators of a government that values its nation and its people.
Ghost of Kyiv: unconfirmed Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot credited with six kills
Twitter and social media have been hailing the
exploits of an unknown Ukrainian Fulcrum pilot who has allegedly shot
down six Russian planes.
The Ghost of Kyiv. The evocative name is trending on Twitter and other social media sites, and refers to a Ukrainian MIG-29 pilot who allegedly shot down six Russian jets in the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Accompanying many of the Ghost of Kyiv posts is footage of what
appears to be a MIG-29 - known under NATO's naming scheme as a Fulcrum -
though most posts have exactly the same short clip - the plane flying over concrete tower blocks of housing with grey skies behind.
Under generally recognised air warfare naming conventions any pilot
who manages five 'kills' (destroying or downing an enemy plane) is recognised as an 'Ace'.
With six kills in one day the Ghost of Kyiv would therefore be an Ace
after just one day of combat. (There has always been something rather
terrifying of chalking up kills in this manner, as if it were just
sport, merely scoring goals against an opposition, rather than the truth
of the opposing pilot being burnt to death in an airborne fireball, or perishing as their stricken craft smashes into the ground).
Is the Ghost of Kyiv real?
So far, there has been no confirmation that the Ghost of Kyiv truly exists. What we do know is that the Ukrainian defence forces have said seven Russian aircraft have been downed
during Thursday's conflict. Whether six of these were one by pilot of
Kyiv seems unlikely given that the fighting has taken place over a number of battle zones across the country.
What cannot be denied though is that the idea of the Ghost of Kyiv has gripped social media users,
particularly staunch supporters of Ukraine. In the replies to the posts
about the alleged ace's exploits many users express their admiration
and hope that the Ghost will carry on taking the fight to the superior
Russian air force. Maybe the Ghost of Kyiv is just a fantasy, but for the people of Ukraine, he or she is a hero they want to believe in.
Note: the photo that accompanies this article is a file photo of a MiG-29. The Russians are saying this is fake news, of course.
Since March 2020, global elites have suspended democratic rule throughout the West in the name of “science” and public health. Certainly, there have been moments of pushback, but nothing as organized or effective as what truckers in Canada have done in the last few weeks.
Canada’s globalist puppet king, Justin Trudeau, clearly has been rattled by the Freedom Convoy. In order to protect “liberal democracy” from unwanted dissent, he has in effect declared martial law.
The measures Trudeau used to end a peaceful protest were breathtakingly authoritarian. He threatened to destroy the livelihoods of the protesters, many of whom, of course, had already been squeezed to the margins of society by Trudeau’s cruel and arbitrary vaccine mandates. He used anti-terrorism financial sanctions to freeze the bank accounts of the demonstrators and their supporters. Donors were exposed to harassment by journalists and hackers. The Ottawa police handled the protesters violently. Trudeau called the protesters racists and terrorists, and Canada’s state-run media eagerly amplified these smears. It was an all-out war on dissent, one that has thrilled more than a few gloating sadists on the faux-rebellious, bootlicking Left.
The Freedom Convoy was long overdue and, if anything, it showed remarkable restraint. The protesters certainly made a lot of noise, but the disruptions they caused were righteous and trifling inconveniences after two years of unchecked draconian rule. The protesters’ demands were entirely reasonable.
Canadians who are unvaccinated are prisoners in their own homeland. They can’t leave their own country. They can’t board trains or airplanes. Many have been fired from their jobs. Trudeau’s Canada was treating them like terrorists before they dared to assert their basic rights, simply because they refused to take a shoddy pharmaceutical product the state wants them to take.
There are millions just like them, in America and all across the West, who are voiceless. For months, they have been demonized by political leaders, the media, and civilians who have joined in an orgy of hatred. Those refusing the shot have been caricatured as a disease to be set apart from the rest of society. They have been barred from work, travel, and leisure, and in some cases, life-saving medical treatment. These are totalitarian measures, notwithstanding the harrumphing of those defending them. They are also totally unnecessary.
The vaccine has failed spectacularly at stopping transmission, which is to say, it is not working at all as advertised. But cynical liberal demagogues and their fanatical followers have ignored the data to wage a warrantless campaign of political persecution. For them, punishment isthe point of the vaccine mandates.
The egregious war on the unvaccinated has belied the moral authority of the world’s “liberal democracies,” but it is just one of many unpunished crimes in the global elite’s war on civil society and human nature. The list of their abuses is long. In the wicked society they have created, people have been left to die alone in hospital beds. A generation of children has been subjected to crippling social isolation and learning loss. Countless middle class businesses and entrepreneurs have been crushed. Those who have been harmed by the vaccine have no legal recourse. Like their communist predecessors, the tyrants have divided families for political gain, and have even presumed to interfere with the free exercise of religion.
These people are criminals. The harm they have done to society is incalculable. In other times, rulers who behaved this abusively would have faced violent resistance.
Our elites certainly know this, which is why they have worked to make Western man into a domesticated animal. Indeed, the majority of citizens in the “free world” have more or less behaved like frightened, docile cattle throughout the pandemic. The cowardice of Western “man” is what made the bravery of the Canadian truckers so startling, so surprising. Unlike the BLM rioters of 2020, who were bailed out by liberal oligarchs and the state, they have incurred heavy costs for their courageous actions. They have shown that there are still noble souls out there who love freedom enough to demand it at any price. And for that theTrudeau regime is going to make them pay.
The convoy embarrassed the elite and challenged their authority. The repressive means that have been used to silence them almost certainly will be replicated in the future by other Western leaders. Joe Biden is already painting any potential trucker protests in America as insurrectionary.
But there are encouraging signs that the bureaucrats in charge of this cruel experiment are starting to lose their nerve. Democrats are making a very cynical and obvious pivot away from COVID madness in a desperate play to save their petty offices in November. Governments in Europe are lifting restrictions.
The world that was lost in 2019 has not returned, however. Children are still being muzzled. Millions of people continue to be treated like lepers for refusing to do the bidding of a handful of liability-free pharma giants. Western governments are openly criminalizing dissent.
The West is no longer free. The actual “free world” is now decentralized. It is not represented by the pretenders in power who claim the moral authority of “democracy” for their designs.
Freedom today exists only among dissidents, among ordinary people who perhaps do not even know yet that they are dissidents: moms, dads, truckers, business owners. They have spirit and righteous rage, but they are disorganized, and the repression they face is highly coordinated. They are fighting an undeclared war with tyrants who want to take everything they have, who are seeking to demolish civil society and replace it with the state. This is the fight of our lives, and we cannot speak of “democracy” again until there is an unconditional victory, and the tyrants are chastened, humiliated, chased out of power, and punished for their crimes.
Vladimir Putin never mandated that I submit to nonconsensual medical treatment to keep my livelihood. Putin didn’t ban me from social media for criticizing the regime. It wasn’t Putin who eviscerated my years of saving with skyrocketing inflation.
Joe Biden did.
Kiev is 5,000 miles away from where I sit in southeastern Michigan. I pray the conflict ends swiftly and with minimal loss of life, but that should be the extent of my involvement. The war between Ukraine and Russia is not my fight. Putin’s rule in Russia is not my problem.
Joe Biden’s reign is.
Contrary to the claims of historian Jon Meacham, the conflict between Ukraine and Russia is not a battle between autocracy and democracy. Instead, it is a conflict between dictators on all sides. Joe Biden, no less than Vladimir Putin, governs through edict and fiat. In the past two years, the entire nation has been governed under a persistent state of emergency. No legislature anywhere in America ever voted for lockdowns or mask mandates. Congress has never voted to require COVID vaccines for either public or private employees.
Over and over again, Americans have been subjected to draconian regulations of their private lives by unelected bureaucrats and executive officials who claim unlimited emergency powers. In Michigan in 2020, there were no churches open for Easter service—by the order of the governor.
Twitter bluechecks and liberals can spare me their righteous indignation in the name of freedom. Mindless blatherers, all. Their “liberal democracy” is neither liberal nor democratic.
As an American, I hold to the founding tradition of noninterference in the affairs of other countries. The Declaration of Independence says that the nations of the earth occupy a “separate and equal station” in relation to each other. No nation, or group of nations, constitutes a common judge for the others.
The consent of the governed is the only just ground for rule. Ukrainians and Russians have not consented to unilateral American rule over their affairs. And the American people have not consented to govern them. Therefore, the affairs of those powers are their own. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. We are not bound by any treaty obligations to protect that country.
Claims that Russia has engaged in “aggression” are irrelevant. Aggression according to whom? Foreign policy “experts” with Georgetown master’s degrees? Who died and put them in charge?
The aggression standard heardled by liberals implies that every conflict has a “good” guy and a “bad” guy. It is a recipe for turning every war into a righteous crusade with which every nation on earth must align itself. This standard is a recipe for total war. Every enemy is an absolute enemy and every war is a total war. Every aggressor is Hitler and the fate of the West is always in the balance.
Neutrality, in this formulation, is impossible. America must side with freedom and democracy, so called, no matter the cost. As Jen Psaki told Fox News’ Peter Doocy, Americans must accept $5 a gallon gas and a lower standard of living because defending Ukraine means defending American values. American values which, apparently, have no relevance to the actual interests or liberties of Americans.
This perpetual reference to abstractions and overwrought historical examples (this is just like Poland in 1939 or Munich in 1938!) prevents clear-sighted thinking about foreign policy. The liberal reliance on World War II as the justification for the goodness of the post-1945 world order is likewise suspect. American involvement in World War II, remember, consisted of an alliance with brutal tyrant and murderous dictator Josef Stalin. If that conflict really was a war against aggression and tyranny why did it involve such close cooperation with such a vicious regime?
Ideology prevents the asking of such a relevant question, to say nothing of answering it honestly!
George Washington in his Farewell Address presents a far more sober and measured take on America’s role in the world than the bleating of our current chattering class and its childish World War II metaphors. America, he argued, should avoid “habitual hatred or habitual fondness” toward other regimes in order to avoid enslaving itself to foreign interests. Slavery to animosity or affection clouds our understanding of our real interests.
Washington was entirely correct. The Left’s vicious and crazed hatred of Putin, an offshoot of their boiling resentment of Donald Trump, prevents them from seeing clearly how little connection the United States has to eastern European politics. Ukraine’s border security and the squabbles between its ethnic groups is not America’s business. Our business is to defend our own rights.
Without a declaration of war by Congress, Joe Biden has no right to conduct acts of war against the Russian regime. It is absurd and unconstitutional that the president can lay down sanctions against a foreign power without legislative approval. A sanction is an act of war—the equivalent of a blockade. The American people deserve a say in such actions. But the deep-seated antipathy and ideological crusading of the D.C. chattering classes obviates all such restrictions on America’s warmaking power.
Joe Biden promises to go ahead with his desire to hold Russia “accountable.” John Quincy Adams said it best when he argued that America “should not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Adams saw clearly that “for centuries to come, all the contests of . . . the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right” that would be extraordinarily bloody for all involved. America, he argued, should avoid such wars. America should be the “champion and vindicator” only of her own rights. Other powers should defend themselves.
Adams and Washington were far wiser than the shrieking liberals on Twitter. Were they here today they would argue that Americans should fight against dictatorship at home before going abroad to lecture others about democracy and liberty. The war in the Ukraine is none of America’s business. Censorship and administrative edicts here at home are. Let us pull the log out of our own eye before demanding that others pull the splinter from theirs.
THIS video from the White House briefing today, you absolutely must watch to gain a fulsome understanding of how the modern political left views the world of geopolitical contests in 2022.
Deputy National Security Advisor and Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, Daleep Singh, was presented at the podium today to explain the strategic policy of the Biden administration toward Russia.
Singh’s remarks outlining the view of the ‘west’ toward defeating Russia are eloquent yet batshit crazy in their ideological context. Daleep Singh sounds like the senior head of a Google Human Resources operation telling the department heads how they need to convey their feelings in order to hire the talent for continued growth in the industry. This is a direct quote:
…”Ultimately, the goal of our sanctions is to make this a strategic failure for Russia; and let’s define a little bit of what that means. Strategic success in the 21st century is not about a physical land grab of territory; that’s what Putin has done. In this century, strategic power is increasingly measured and exercised by economic strength, by technological sophistication and your story – who you are, what your values are; can you attract ideas and talent and goodwill? And on each of those measures, this will be a failure for Russia.”
WATCH (14:31, prompted):
Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh boils down geopolitical power to a cultural issue of social likeability.
Let this sink in.
Realize that what he is saying is the strategy leading our foreign policy.
Even if what he was saying is reasonable, and it’s not, I’m thinking strong Russians with hot chicks, nice cars, fast boats and a culture of polite strength, loyalty and fierce protection are winning the “story” side of the argument.
In essence, he is saying the quiet part out loud…. which explains why Obama, Clinton and now Biden are using social media to advance geopolitical strategies.
Pop icons are used as influencers and ambassadors. Hollywood is the quintessential State Department. What Singh is saying is really the true way the modern political left view politics in general, but they rarely say this stuff so openly.
TAIWAN—Citizens of Taiwan reported today they were grateful to receive a free preview of the kind of thing that was going to happen to them in just a few short weeks thanks to America's weakness on the world stage under President Biden.
People across the country tuned in for the exciting, free sneak preview of what China was going to do to them any day now, now that President Xi is sure that Biden has no backbone whatsoever.
"Welp—I guess we'd better prepare," local man Huang Zhìháo said as he watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine on TV this morning. "This is gonna be bad."
"At least we got this nice little teaser trailer though," he added. "A lot of countries don't get the privilege of seeing their future like this."
According to sources, the Taiwanese were hopeful that Biden's declarations that "America is back" and that he would go toe-to-toe with the world's toughest leaders meant that Xi Jinping would be held back for another four years. But as soon as he botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan, they began to have their doubts. Finally, once they saw him take a long nap while Putin invaded Russia, they realized they were "completely and totally screwed."
At publishing time, sources had confirmed that President Xi was also watching the footage with a sly smile on his face.
John Mearsheimer, 2014's most important Cassandra, warning at the time that the West is leading Ukraine to disaster
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
Mearsheimer Told Us So — In 2014
Take a look at this newly relevant 2014 lecture by Prof. John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, the legendary foreign policy
realist. He was talking about the Euromaidan situation, and explaining
how the West was pushing Ukraine to the point of a serious crisis with
Russia:
Don’t have time to watch the whole thing? Here:
Analysis & prediction on Ukraine from 6 years ago:
“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path & the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked.”
-John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the U. of Chicago, pic.twitter.com/kPQNH58o7G
I'm getting a lot of blowback in the comments section from people who are
appalled that I’m not spending all my time lambasting Putin, but
instead complaining about how we in the West helped bring about this
situation, or bitching about our own decadence. Fine, complain all you
want. As I said, ultimately this war is Putin’s fault. He should not be
doing this, and I hope he comes to grief because of it.
However,
as uncomfortable as it is for some of you to hear it, you had better
stop and think about how we got to this dangerous situation with Russia,
and what things we in the West had under our control, that we failed to
do right. That Hitler was responsible for World War II doesn’t obviate
the role the victorious WWI allies played through the ruinous Versailles
Treaty. If our goal in the post Cold War era was to rub Russia’s nose
in the dirt, well, we gave it a go. We ought to have instead tried to
create peace and stability. There is no possible scenario under which
offering to bring Ukraine (and Georgia) into NATO, as President G.W.
Bush did in 2008, could have led to anything other than what happened
today.
What’s more, I know it is unpleasant for some of you to
consider the decadence in the US and in the West in general in this
context (e.g., “Bombs are falling in Ukraine, and you’re obsessing over
trannies?!?”), but you should think twice about this. If we are now
facing a renewal of the long struggle with Russia, and probably even a
struggle against China too, allied with Putin’s Russia, then the leaders
of Western countries had better think about how they are going to meet
the demands of this struggle. They have no hope of doing so with a
country in which they have abused and alienated a huge number of people
for the crime of being white, heterosexual, culturally conservative, or
clinging bitterly to their bigoted churches. We saw just the other day
that Justin Trudeau actually seized the bank accounts of people
supporting the trucker protests, under the guise of fighting domestic
terrorism. I have absolutely no doubt that Washington will try the same.
The woke left, having marched through the institutions, are weaponizing
them against parents, children, families, church people, conservatives,
and other deplorables.
You tell many of us that we are racist,
fascist, deplorable scum who deserve to be fired, or at least to worry
about our livelihoods because we don’t agree with you, and then you
expect us to be all on board to risk our kids’ lives to serve a
political and social order that despises us? Really, explain how that
works.
Who on earth do they think are going to fight their damn
wars? Better get Ibram X. Kendi, immigration lobbyists, and that
sadomasochist trans freak at the Department of Energy to suit up,
because it’s not going to be my sons. They’re not going to be sent out
under the command of Pentagon generals who were never held accountable
by Congress for their Afghanistan lies (see the Afghanistan Papers)
to fight for a declining Empire whose power-holders hate people like
us. If you want to be a great power, you had better start treating
actual Americans better. The Pentagon’s propaganda (see this recent piece, for example)
claims that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is a “force multiplier”.
Maybe it’s not that the generals want to show their future corporate
employers that they get woke capitalist culture, and can be trusted once
they retire; maybe they actually believe this. Once all the
conservatives drop out of the military or fail to sign up because they
do not want to defend an order that treats them like villains, the
Pentagon is going to need all the industrial-grade copium it can get its
hands on.
Again, I know a lot of you don’t want to hear it, but
as you are planning out how the West is going to respond to the monster
Putin over the long term, you had better start thinking about those
things. The crusading liberals and warmongering, corporate-lackey
Republicans have made sure that the America in 2022 is not as strong as
America when the Cold War ended. That is a big problem, as we will all
discover soon. We cannot control what Putin does to Ukraine, but we can
control our ability to respond to it in the long term. Better start
thinking hard right now about the national security implications of the
culture war the ruling class in America is waging on its own people.
Maybe, just maybe, we will start listening to the Mearsheimers among us.
UPDATE: And
think about all the leftist young people who have been educated to
think of themselves as inheritors of an evil civilization, one tainted
indefensibly by racism, homophobia, and all the rest. When you call on
them to defend us, what are they going to do? If what the elites say is
true, why should they lift a finger?
UPDATE.2: In his just-published Substack newsletter,
John Schindler, former National Security Agency analyst and professor
at the Naval War College, explains why Putin’s war on Ukraine is
ultimately a religious war. As an Orthodox Christian, I urge you
strongly to pay attention to this analysis.
As
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the ROC, explained in early
2019, “Ukraine is not on the periphery of our church. We call Kiev ‘the
mother of all Russian cities.’ For us Kiev is what Jerusalem is for
many. Russian Orthodoxy began there, so under no circumstances can we
abandon this historical and spiritual relationship. The whole unity of
our Local Church is based on these spiritual ties.”
What spurred
Patriarch Kirill to make that statement was the separation of much of
the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from Russia in early 2019 with the
creation of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, with go-ahead from the
Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (i.e., Istanbul: who is the
not-a-pope of world Orthodoxy, where national churches are
self-governing). This involved the transfer of thousands of parishes and
millions of believers from the long-existing Ukrainian Orthodox Church
of the Moscow Patriarchate, which has been under the ROC since the
seventeenth century, to the brand-new OCU. The UOC-MP is self-governing
under Moscow and there wasn’t much spiritual demand in Ukraine for
independence from Russia, what Orthodox term autocephaly.
However,
the pressures of the not-quite-frozen conflict with Russia after 2015
made church issues a political football, and Ukraine’s then-President
Petro Poroshenko made autocephaly his pet project, with backing from
Ukrainian nationalists, who found it offensive that the UOC remained
under Moscow, where the church is a vehicle for Putinism, Russian
nationalism, and anti-Ukrainian aggression. Advocates of the new OCU had
a valid point there, and they were also correct that, since autocephaly
is the norm in the Orthodox world, why didn’t Ukraine have its own,
fully independent national church?
The answer there, that
Orthodoxy tends to move on “Orthodox time” which appears glacially slow
to secular minds, thinking more in terms of centuries than years or even
decades, was unedifying to advocates of the OCU, who got their wish in
early January 2019, when the Ecumenical Patriarch granted autocephaly to
Ukraine’s new national church. What followed was predictably messy and
politicized, with fights across Ukraine over parishes and clergy. This
issue is neither simple nor clear-cut: the OCU is considered broadly
nationalist (with exceptions) while the UOC, despite its Russian
connections, has many laypeople who are Ukrainian patriots who don’t
feel they belong to a “foreign” church. Moreover, this issue birthed a
schism in global Orthodoxy that has reverberated on several continents,
most recently in Africa. The OCU-UOC split has even caused heartburn
among American Orthodox believers.
Above all, the schism rendered
Moscow white-hot with rage. The ROC viewed this as a direct attack on
its “canonical territory” and on world Orthodoxy itself. The Kremlin,
too, made no effort to conceal its outrage here. Russian Foreign
Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly denounced the Ecumenical Patriarch as
Washington’s puppet: “His mission, obviously, is being prepared by the
Americans and they do not hide that they are actively cooperating with
him, using the slogan of ‘freedom of religion and belief’…Bartholomew’s
mission, obviously, is to bury the influence of Orthodoxy in the modern
world.” A few weeks later, Lavrov added fuel to the fire by castigating
the OCU as “this travesty of history, and pursuing the objective of
sowing discord between Russia and Ukraine in addition to preventing our
peoples from being friends are essentially a crime [by the current
Ukrainian regime] against their citizens.” A few months after that,
Lavrov reiterated that this tragedy was all America’s fault: the ROC “is
currently under tremendous pressure from a number of Western countries,
primarily the United States, which set itself the goal of destroying
the unity of world Orthodox Christianity.”
It’s an article of
faith in the Kremlin that the creation of the OCU is an American project
designed to destroy world Orthodoxy and harm Russia. It’s painful for
me to state this but the Russians have good reason to think this. Unlike
absurd Kremlin propaganda lines about “Ukrainian Nazis” perpetrating
“genocide” against Russians, the idea that Washington wanted the split
of Orthodoxy in Ukraine is a reasonable inference upon examination of
recent U.S. Government conduct. What’s the evidence?
Our Kyiv
embassy congratulated the OCU for its birth and the selection of its
first primate, then the State Department in Washington amplified the
same. Celebrating Constantinople’s grant of autocephaly, then-Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo hailed it as a “historic achievement for Ukraine”
which represented America’s “strong support for religious freedom.”
Pompeo’s statement left no doubt about America’s backing the OCU against
the UOC. Pompeo’s position in the worldwide Orthodox schism was made
clear by his subsequent meeting with the Ecumenical Patriarch, whom the
Secretary of State hailed as “a key partner as we continue to champion
religious freedom around the globe.” Neither was this a partisan
project, since the position of the Biden administration on this issue is
identical to its predecessor’s. Four months ago, Secretary of State
Anthony Blinken also met with the Ecumenical Patriarch, reaffirming U.S.
commitment to religious freedom, which in Moscow unsurprisingly looked
like support for the OCU.
Since very few Americans, and
functionally no non-Orthodox ones, noticed any of this, it’s worth
asking why the State Department felt compelled to take a public position
on any of this. Does Foggy Bottom side with Sunni or Shia? What about
Lutheranism versus Methodism? Who in Washington thought it was a good
idea to throw its weight behind the OCU, since anybody who knew anything
about Putinism and its religious-civilizational mission had to be aware
that such statements were guaranteed to raise Moscow’s ire.
That
ire has now taken the form of air strikes, missile barrages, and
advancing tank battalions. Just last month, Lavrov restated his
government’s position that the United States stands behind the “current
crisis in Orthodoxy.” As he explained without any word-mincing,
Washington caused “the most serious dispute in the entire Orthodox
world,” adding, “The United States of America had an immediate hand in
the current crisis in Orthodoxy. They created a special mechanism, a
special agency for the freedom of religious confession, which actually
is not dealing with freedom but most actively set up and financed
Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew so that he conducted a device
for schism, particularly in Ukraine, in the first place, for creating
there the schismatic, uncanonical Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”
We
should not indulge Muscovite conspiracy theories nor countenance Russian
aggression. However, the facts are plain enough. Simply put, by
recognizing the OCU and hailing its creation, Washington changed the
Kremlin’s game in Ukraine, making Putin’s long-term plans for his
neighbor untenable. Without a united Orthodox Church across the former
lands of Rus, answering to Moscow, the “Russian World” concept falls
apart. Every secular geostrategic challenge cited as a reason for
Putin’s aggression – NATO expansion, Western military moves, oil and gas
politics – existed in 2014, yet Putin then chose to limit his attacks
on Ukraine to Crimea and the Southeast. What’s changed since then that
makes his effort to subdue all Ukraine seem like a good idea in the
Kremlin? The creation of an autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine in
2019, with official American backing, is the difference, and Moscow
believes this was all a nefarious U.S. plot to divide world Orthodoxy at
Russia’s expense. Clearly Putin has decided that reclaiming Ukraine and
its capital, “the mother of Russian cities,” for Russian Orthodoxy is
worth a major war. Make no mistake, this is a religious war, even if
almost nobody in the West realizes it.
