Adrian Hilton

Kirill’s crusade against Ukraine is more jihadi than Christian

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (Credit: Getty images)

Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, has again preached to the faithful of the Russian world. He told them that if they heed their president’s call to arms, they shall be absolved of their sins and avoid any possibility of Hades.

‘The Church realises that if somebody, driven by a sense of duty and the need to fulfil their oath… goes to do what their duty calls of them, and if a person dies in the performance of this duty, then they have undoubtedly committed an act equivalent to sacrifice,’ he told his national congregation earlier this week. ‘They will have sacrificed themselves for others,’ he continued, before deploying his thermobaric bomb of salvation: ‘And therefore, we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.’

Kirill’s speech was a tactical weaponisation of spirituality designed to stem the flow of Russians fleeing to the mountains for safety, or flying out of the country to escape Putin’s zealous ‘partial mobilisation’ draft.

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