Images of participants in the “special military operation”, meaning the invasion of Ukraine, have appeared in one of the churches of the Russian Orthodox Church.

This is reported in an article by Sever.Realii.

Recently the governor of Russia’s Pskov Region, Mikhail Vedernikov, promoted new icons on his Telegram channel featuring participants in the “SMO”. They are not collective or symbolic figures but specific paratroopers from the 76th Guards Air Assault Division of the Russian Airborne Forces who were killed in Ukraine in 2023.

The icons are located in the Church of the Holy Unmercenary Saints Kosmy and Damiana s Primostya in the city of Pskov. They were painted at the request of Denis Ivanov, an entrepreneur and a deputy of the Pskov City Duma. He paid for the work and conceived the idea itself.

According to Orthodox priest and theologian Andrei Kordochkin, depicting soldiers in a church does not make them saints, but their presence on an icon fits into a narrative in which the death of soldiers in war is equated with martyrdom. In this sense their deaths are effectively sacralized.

In the new Pskov icons he sees a continuation of the tone set by mosaics depicting soldiers in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Moscow, though there are also fundamental differences.

“In that church soldiers are mostly depicted collectively as participants in the Great Patriotic War or as internationalist warriors, without names and without reference to specific people. At the same time we know that they tried to depict Putin, Shoigu and others on a mosaic about the ‘annexation of Crimea’, and after a public scandal they decided to backtrack. Here, however, there is something fundamentally new, the depiction of specific participants in this war within the sacred space of a church,” the priest emphasized.

At the same time he допускает that the Pskov icons with paratroopers may not remain forever. They will disappear when trials of war criminals begin.

Earlier we wrote about how the Russian Orthodox Church provides churches for training by military youth clubs.

As LF reported, the annual 34th Christmas Readings took place in Moscow at the House of the Russian Army, with military priests of the Russian Orthodox Church as the main audience. Russian journalists who follow the Christmas Readings have called them church staff exercises and write about the constant militarization of this Russian Orthodox Church forum.