In October 2015, Russia’s newly launched military intervention in defense of embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received a clerical blessing. Patriarch Kirill, the powerful leader of the Russian Orthodox Church and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, declared the operation “a responsible decision to use military forces to protect the Syrian people from the woes brought on by the tyranny of terrorists.”Hundreds of Orthodox priests in Ukraine and elsewhere, though, are less impressed. More than 320 of his fellow clerics signed a letter last week accusing Kirill of “heresy” for his warmongering and demanding he be brought before an ecclesiastical tribunal to be deposed.
....Seven years later, Kirill and his loyal clergy now deliver sermons about their country’s role in another righteous, holy battle. It doesn’t matter that many Ukrainians weathering the brunt of the Russian war machine are Kirill’s co-congregants — there are some 12,000 parishes in Ukraine subject to the church in Moscow.
As Russia embarks on a new large-scale offensive in the east of the country, Kirill has articulated little concern about the millions of Ukrainian lives hanging in the balance.
Instead, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church has sounded the same sort of ominous and profoundly ideological rhetoric as Putin. He cast the fight as a religious and national drama, an existential battle of good and evil, a clash between Russo-Slavic tradition, values and unity and the corrupting foreign influences festering at Russia’s border.
"We have entered into a struggle that has not a physical, but a metaphysical significance,” the patriarch said in a sermon on March 6.
Kirill went on, claiming God was on Russia’s side ....
“Kirill committed moral crimes by blessing the war against Ukraine and fully supporting the aggressive actions of Russian troops on the Ukrainian territory,” they wrote. “It is impossible for us to remain in any form of canonical submission to the Patriarch of Moscow." (The political tensions between Russia and Ukraine had already led to a split within the latter’s Orthodox community, with some congregations no longer associating themselves with the Moscow patriarchate.)To the extent he is a Christian at all, Kirill is a very unChrist-like Christian. Not only is he supporting Putin's war crimes in Ukraine, he's also a former KGB agent:
And counterparts elsewhere have made Kirill aware of their disquiet, too. In a video call last month with Kirill, Pope Francis warned against the use of the Christian cross to justify an invasion and war — Kirill recently presented an icon to a Russian commander in charge of a number of divisions fighting in Ukraine.
“Once upon a time there was also talk in our churches of holy war or just war,” the pope is reported to have told Kirill last month. “Today we cannot speak like this.”
Forbes reported on February 20, 2009 that, "Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization.Moreover, he appears to be one of those super wealthy oligarchs who've profited handsomely from their support of the Putin regime. His net worth in 2006 was $4 billion. It was also revealed in 2020 that an investigation had unearthed several millions of dollars in real estate belonging to Patriarch Kirill.
Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies."
Further reporting from March 7, 2022 from The Guardian's Emma Graham-Harrison interviewed local Ukrainians for their opinions about Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The response was mostly a pessimistic view of Kirill and his motives towards Ukraine based on his past as a KGB agent:Like many Ukrainians who no longer trust the Russian-linked churches in their country, Yuir is particularly wary of the Moscow Patriarch, Kirill, who according to material from Soviet archives was a government agent before the fall of the USSR. "Kirill is a KGB guy, and he supports all aggression against Ukraine," he said, but asked not to give his last name, worried like many in the town about community tensions about the church. "He’s a bastard, not a religious leader.
In other words, like so many medieval popes, the Patriarch is a fraud, and many of his colleagues in the Russian Orthodox Church know it.
