Moscow Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev has hit yet another low by publishing a book in support of Russia’s “holy war” against Ukraine. This propaganda tract is titled War. Beyond Visible Causes and Consequences. It was published by the official publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate (Moscow, 2026, 240 pp.).

The MP publishing house notes that “the book by the First Hierarch of the Russian Church is devoted to the metaphysics of war.” In its pages, the Moscow Patriarch preaches “about the redemptive meaning and consequences of war, about Russia’s metaphysical frontiers and goal-setting, and also touches upon the racial aspect of the war.”

In the book, Kirill Gundyaev points to “the great responsibility of the Russian people not to evade the historical duty of being victors.” “Our earthly calling is to be warriors of the Lord, to resist evil,” Gundyaev writes. According to him, “the outcome of the war is determined by God, and the victor is the one who is on the side of light.”

The 240-page propaganda pamphlet contains the following sections: “Metaphysical Struggle” (p. 5), “The Spiritual Essence of Patriotism” (p. 53), “Victory on the Verge of the Impossible” (p. 71), “War Against Evil” (p. 83), “Russia’s Metaphysical Frontiers” (p. 153), “The Church and War” (p. 167), and others.

Among the illustrations in the book, page 236 features an image of an icon of the Mother of God alongside terrorists of the so-called “DPR,” including the war criminals “Givi,” “Motorola,” and others.

From the first days of Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, Moscow Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev has consistently supported Russian aggression against the Ukrainian state and its citizens. In his sermons, he has repeatedly called it a “holy war” and a “metaphysical struggle,” declaring that all Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine will automatically receive “forgiveness of sins” and enter “paradise.”

Long before the war, beginning in the early 2000s, Kirill Gundyaev was one of the co-authors, initiators, and architects of the quasi-religious ideology of the “Russian world,” which proclaimed the principle of restoring the Russian Federation as an empire and provided justification for Russia’s territorial claims to the lands of Ukraine and other independent post-Soviet states. It was precisely this ideology that was incorporated into the justification for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

In essence, Moscow Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev has become the Kremlin regime’s chief political commissar, turning the structure of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, which he heads, into a state propaganda appendage of the Kremlin.

Of course, it is difficult not to notice how markedly different the statements and pronouncements of Patriarch Gundyaev, who at every turn preaches the heresy of the “Russian world” and supports and justifies Russia’s bloody war against Ukraine, are from those of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, who has repeatedly condemned both the quasi-religious ideology of the “Russian world” and the Russian Orthodox Church’s participation in this war.

At the same time, the Moscow Patriarch’s new propaganda tract serves as yet another testimony to the involvement of Kirill Gundyaev and the structure he heads in complicity in inciting Russia’s war against Ukraine and in the crimes of the Kremlin regime and Russian occupation forces against Ukraine’s civilian population, including the mass killing of civilians, the destruction of hundreds of Ukrainian cities, and the devastation of residential buildings and Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure. Now this is yet another argument and “material evidence” both for the future International Criminal Court in The Hague and for a future ecclesiastical trial of Kirill Gundyaev.

In his book, Gundyaev writes that the war is “won by the one who is on the side of light.” It is unlikely that anyone would agree with him that the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of entire cities constitutes being “on the side of light.” In this case, the boomerang effect comes into play. Indeed, Ukraine’s heroic resistance to the aggression of Putin’s Russian Federation is acquiring significance for the entire free world as a confrontation with this evil and the frenzy of the “great gathering” “from the borders of the north” (Ezek. 39). And in this “metaphysical battle between good and evil,” Ukraine will unquestionably prevail.

Serhii Shumylo,

Candidate of Historical Sciences, Doctor of Theology,

Director of the International Institute of Athonite Heritage.