Since February 2022, religious communities in Russia have come under increasing pressure. Clergy are being defrocked for praying for peace, ecclesiastical and secular courts are reinforcing one another, and state and church structures are jointly punishing those who refuse to justify the war.

This is the conclusion of the analytical report Religious Communities Under Pressure: Documenting Religious Persecution in Russia 2022–2026 by Russian-American journalist Sergey Chapnin, which has been published as a book, according to the outlet Christians Against War.

The author documented more than 115 cases of pressure against Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Buddhists. Among them are priests and deacons punished for their anti-war stance, a Pentecostal preacher convicted over a sermon, an Orthodox journalist sentenced for a social media post, and a lay believer carrying a “No to War” placard who died in a penal colony.

The book was written in English primarily for Western Christians who still view the Russian Orthodox Church as a “defender of traditional values.” The foreword was written by Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Endorsements were provided by Vladimir Kara-Murza, Archbishop Elpidophoros of America, and Archdeacon Ioannis Chryssavgis.

Sergey Chapnin is a Russian-American journalist, Director of Communications at the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University, and editor-in-chief of Gifts, an almanac of contemporary Christian culture. From 2009 to 2015, he served as managing editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate and deputy editor-in-chief of the Moscow Patriarchate Publishing House. In December 2015, after predicting in a public lecture at the Moscow Carnegie Center that the war in Ukraine could receive religious justification, he was dismissed from all his positions by Patriarch Kirill.