The Nightmare Before (Russian Orthodox) Christmas
An unholy Kremlin influence campaign in DC.
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Just in time for the holidays, a legion of priests and other representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church descended on Capitol Hill last week. These bearded visitors might evoke old Saint Nick, but there was nothing jolly about their appearance in the middle of the Christmas season.
American lawmakers need to recognize: These unholy men were in Washington on Kremlin business.
Predictably, the Muscovite delegation told anyone who would listen that Ukraine persecutes Christians.
It is propaganda that is as well-worn as it is false.
The crux of the Kremlin allegations is that Kyiv has cracked down on the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin summed up the claim earlier this month, saying that “The Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine is practically banned.”
Ukraine is actually one of the most religious countries to come out of the former Soviet Union. More Ukrainians than Russians identify as Orthodox Christians.
Before February 2022, church attendance in Ukraine was already five times higher than in Russia. Since the full-scale invasion, that religiosity has only intensified, with more and more Ukrainians showing up for services. It really is hard to find an atheist on the frontlines.
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Now, while Ukraine respects Orthodox Christians, the Ukrainian government did ban the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2024. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church split from its Russian counterpart five years earlier.
Calling those Ukrainian actions “persecution” is deliberate misdirection on Moscow’s part. Russia is exploiting Americans’—especially American conservatives’ and Christians’—commitment to religious liberty by telling an incomplete story.
Here in America, church and state are blessedly separate. But the Russian Orthodox priesthood is an extension of the Russian government.
Under the Russian Empire, the Tsar was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and in communist times, it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the KGB. It remains so today.
In fact, Patriarch Kirill, the current leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, started working for the KGB in the 1970s—around the same time Vladimir Putin did. Kirill is not some apolitical monk. He is a billionaire supporter of Putin who’s fond of luxury watches and fancy cars. The patriarch even sanctioned the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war.” Russian Orthodox priests have supplied information to Russian forces about Ukrainian troop movements. This is an institution with a lot of blood on its hands and an indispensable part of Putin’s regime, which is actively at war with Ukraine.
Kyiv clamping down on the activities of a Kremlin-backed church is no more anti-Christian than America’s war with al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists was anti-Muslim.
Put simply: Ukraine doesn’t persecute Christians. It fights back against Russian operatives. Putin tries to portray himself as a defender of Christendom, but the Russian tyrant and his loyal Orthodox clergy are just taking advantage of a pliant American audience to shift the focus off of their own record of wanton destruction in Ukraine. Russia’s invasion has already claimed hundreds of thousands of Christian lives. As of June 2025, Russian troops had destroyed or damaged 670 churches and other places of worship in Ukraine.
Back in Russia, Vladimir Putin’s regime regularly goes after non-Orthodox Christian denominations. Protestants, Baptists, and others face arrests, fines, and general abuse. Russian authorities spent years pressuring Yevgeniy Peresvetov, an Evangelical pastor, to become an intelligence agent; after repeated refusals, Peresvetov was deported. His story is sadly not unique.
The claim that majority-Orthodox Ukraine abuses Orthodox Christians belongs to the same family of obvious untruths as the notion that Ukraine (with its Jewish president) is a neo-Nazi state. Meanwhile, with Putin’s overt persecution of non-Orthodox Christians, we see that every Russian allegation is in fact an admission.
Still, some members of Congress—namely Anna Paulina Luna, Eli Crane, and Derrick Van Orden—are eagerly amplifying these Russian lies. They join other Kremlin-aligned actors like Tucker Carlson, who have taken up the cause of “persecuted” Ukrainian Christians.
Yet there are others—including prominent Republicans—who have called out the Russian government’s Church-run influence campaign.
Last week, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley affirmed unambiguously on the Senate floor that “The Russian Orthodox Church is a leading perpetrator of the persecution of fellow Orthodox believers, as well as Catholics, Evangelicals and others.”
Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina has even suggested a federal investigation to determine whether Moscow is using Russian Orthodox churches in the US for malign purposes. Such an inquiry would be a welcome and important step in rolling back Kremlin influence operations.
Anyone with doubts about the situation of religious freedom in Russia and Ukraine should look to conservative stalwarts like Grassley and Wilson for moral clarity on this issue.
The Russian government will always cry religious persecution when its black-robed agents are subjected to scrutiny.
But the ones abusing religious freedom are not leaders in Kyiv who go after agents of a dangerous aggressor or members of Congress who call for exposing their US-based enablers. They are the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church itself, appropriating the trappings of the faith in order to advance a campaign of genocidal war against their Ukrainian neighbors and ostensible co-religionists. I cannot think of more un-Christian behavior.
One of the most renowned Soviet dissident rockers, the late Igor Talkov, took aim at Russia’s historic perversion of religion in his song “Globus”:
“Show me the kind of country where the temples are boarded up,” Talkov quips, “Where a priest hides a KGB officer’s epaulettes under his robes.”
Show me such a country, indeed. That country is Russia, and it must be stopped.
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Excellent newsletter. I read about the Churches support of the invasion, as well as the other atrocities like child kidnappings. These people are despicable and just shows you what people will do for wealth and power.
The Russian Orthodox Church reminds me of America’s evangelicals; in both cases, they wouldn’t know Jesus if he were living on earth, preaching in the streets, and staring them in the face.
In fact, I’d posit, they’d probably have him crucified: Again, as a left-wing radical Jew…:)
Sharp piece. The Kremlin’s “defender of faith” act masks missile strikes, abducted children, and a captured church network. The moral line between Moscow’s performative Orthodoxy and Ukrainian faith in bombed-out basements is exactly what “peace now” proponents keep dodging.