RUSSIAN WORLD Russia’s Last Crusade

With the announcement of September 21, calling for mobilization for military service seven months after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia abandoned the hypocrisy of the “special military operation” to launch the last desperate campaign of war. It was after having lost -in a few weeks- most of the territories conquered in the previous months. The referendum – a farce – in those Ukrainian territories controlled by Russia will give the foot to announce the “defense of the national territory” instead of the grotesque “denazification” of the provinces in dispute.

It would be more appropriate to call the whole war thing a “crusade.” This, given the spiritual and “metaphysical” nature attributed to the entire enterprise of the Putin regime and the Church of Kirill to impose their rule over the sacred lands of Crimea, the Don region and the Black Sea coast, from where Byzantine missionaries arrived in Russia at the end of the first millennium. The day the mobilization was announced, in a new exhortation, the Patriarch of Moscow called to “restore the unity of the Russian Church and not consider the Ukrainians as enemies”, preaching from the female monastery of the Holy Conception, in Moscow .

As Kirill reiterated, “Today our homeland, historical Rus’, is going through the toughest tests… we know how our Ukrainian brothers are suffering, while trying to “reformat” them and incite them against Russia. However, in our hearts there should be no place for such feelings, we ask the Lord to give us the necessary courage and strengthen the feelings of brotherhood, which are the true pledge of peace for the vast Rus’ lands.”

The truth is that the response to the mobilization has been rather scarce among the Russians between 20 and 50 years old who could be summoned in the coming days – up to 300 thousand people, or even a million, although the exact figures have not been communicated. . There is a certain audacity in the people who go out to protest in the streets against the obligation of war, in demonstrations that have culminated in thousands of arrests; Panic spreads and desperate attempts to flee abroad multiply, leaving a lifetime behind.

In addition, the call for reservists seems like a big bluff, a desperate and hardly credible threat: there are no means or facilities to prepare a mass of citizens who do not want to fight for war. In the best case, training them would take at least two or three months, but by then sending more troops would be completely useless. Until now, the soldiers on the battlefield have come from the Asian and Caucasian regions, a band of poor lured by promises of lavish salaries and guaranteed pensions. Cannon fodder that is already running out, with tens and tens of thousands of deaths, mostly unrecognized by the State.

The contradictions of Russia’s war strategy, and the emphasis on its religious motivations, take us back a thousand years, to the time of the Crusades to reconquer the Holy Land, which largely determined the world order that we have lived in until today, between Europe and the Mediterranean. Calls for holy war evoke the fiery preaching of the First Crusade, invoked by Pope Urban II during a homily at the Council of Clermont in 1095. Western Christendom’s immense armed pilgrimage ended in 1099 with the capture of Jerusalem. , which Putin dreams of replicating with the taking of kyiv. The troops of that time shuffled around the principalities and the peripheries of the fledgling communes, but they were unable to establish themselves for long in the conquered territories. And it was Saladin, the Xi Jinping of the Middle Ages, who shattered the dreams of the Christian Kingdom.

Or one could see Putin’s war as a very late response to the greater offense that Latinos inflicted on the Orthodox world. We refer to the Fourth Crusade, which invaded Byzantium and established the Latin Empire of Constantinople, which lasted from 1204 to 1261. Pope Innocent III, Pontiff of San Francisco, had called it to recover the lands seized by the Muslims. However, the different groups of crusaders, inspired by the Venetian merchants, committed one of the worst outrages of the wars between Christians: that sack of Constantinople that made the Greeks say that “it is better to wear the turban of the Saracens, than the pope’s tiara.

The last and ninth crusade was held at the end of the 13th century, after the martyrdom of Saint Louis IX of France, the last medieval monarch who really believed in the need to liberate the Holy Land to ensure the future of the Christian faith. Edward I of England arrived in Tunis too late and failed to save it, as Putin’s reservists thrown in to defend the Donbass are likely to do. Luis’s brother, Carlos of Anjou, went to Acre to take advantage of the defeat for his own benefit, as the current Sultan Erdogan seems to want to do, who is very comfortable in the climate of the Crusades, trying to play the role of Christian and Muslim at the same time.

The last Crusade won only an eleven-year truce, which was followed by no further chivalric adventures. With this, the orders of the Templars and Saint John spread to the Mediterranean islands and the countries of Europe, with all the other stories of schisms and mutual cruelties between kingdoms that were only nominally Christian. A group of heirs to the Templars, the Teutonic Knights, tried to convert the Baltic pagans and the Rus’ Orthodox to Catholicism. They were stopped by a young warlord, Saint Alexander Nevsky, to whom post-Soviet Russians look today for inspiration. And the millennial circle closes.

What remains is the apocalyptic fear of nuclear catastrophe, conjured up by Putin and his drunken henchmen at every misstep of their armies. Last time he almost comically admitted that “it is not a bluff” – evidently referring to the malicious criticism he received earlier – but the truth is that few believed him. And he continues the rhetoric of the Crusades, inaugurated by Patriarch Kirill from the earliest days of the war and which remains practically unchanged until today.The “Holy Rus” justifies Putin’s “Russkiy Mir”, relaunching a militant Christianity.

The “religion of fire” has razed and destroyed hundreds of churches, and Kirill himself has announced a new restoration program for buildings collapsed by bombing that he himself called for and supported with his prayers. Among the various competing Orthodox jurisdictions on Ukrainian lands, the churches of the Moscow Patriarchate have suffered the most. This is confirmed by the statistics published by the sites that have surveyed the damage.

In the kyiv region, 27 buildings of the UPZ (ex-Muscovite) and 7 of the autocephalous PZU have collapsed; across the country, nearly 200 churches, including some Catholic and Protestant, need to be rebuilt. More than the Crusades against the infidels, Kirill’s wars resemble the schisms of the following centuries between the different European Churches. It seems impossible to expect a pacifist turn from the patriarchal seat, since the symbiosis with the Kremlin is already inseparable, despite the appeals of Pope Francis and the Ecumenical Council of Churches. And new recruits to the army have not only the blessing, but also the canonical obligation to stand up for the one faith.

Instead of the Antichrist being fought against in the Ukraine and the West, a new version of the medieval Antichrist excommunicated by the Pope would be needed. Emperor Frederick II of Swabia ended up leading the Sixth Crusade in the same days of the death of San Francisco, the only peaceful crusade. Avoiding military confrontations and using diplomatic channels, the reviled “Puer Apuliae” ended up becoming the “Stupor Mundi”, achieving the greatest territorial conquests of all the wars in the Holy Land, establishing himself almost as the new king of Jerusalem and guaranteeing the pilgrims access to the holy places forever. The priest-eating king, who wrote about theology in falcon-hunting manuals, could be a model for popes and patriarchs, presidents and generals, new tsars and new kings, amidst the turmoil, in this age of the indecipherable Third War. World.