Holy Rus’ and Holy War Historical Roots and Modern Guise of Apocalyptic Thought in Present-Day Russia

Abstract In March 2024, the World Russian People’s Council unanimously adopted a declaration in which the Russian invasion of Ukraine was glorified as a “holy war” and justified as part of Russia’s eschatological mission to protect the world from the onslaught of Western Satanism and the rule of the Antichrist. What seems to be a weird and absurd idea at first sight, has in fact a long history in Russian religious thought. “is paper shows how Patriarch Kirill’s justification and sacralization of war and the idea of an eschatological mission of Holy Rus’ draws from older sources, namely from the 16th-century state ideology of Russia. “ese ideas were then revived in the 19th century and are now applied by the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Furthermore, the current support for the Kremlin’s neo-imperialist policy by the Moscow Patriarchate was prepared over the last three decades by an increasingly close alliance of Church hierarchs with Russian ultra-nationalists and ultimately culminated in the present propagation of a specific theology of war.