Early in June,  Euronews announced Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), was added to a new round of proposed sanctions by the EU targeting Russia. The sanction of an individual entails the barring of traveling to sanctioning countries and the freezing of their assets. For some, this is bizarre. For others, it’s a sign the EU is stepping up efforts to curtail one of the most significant “soft” powers of the Kremlin, the Russian Orthodox Church.

What does a centuries-old church have to do with the Kremlin’s power? To understand, we must travel back in time.

The beginnings of the state-church relationship between the Kremlin and the ROC began in the 18th century when Peter the Great transformed the church into an imperial bureaucracy. Sermons were monitored, bishops went from representing the church to becoming state officials, and the clergy went from serving their congregants to surveilling them for hints of any political dissension. Any opposition was driven underground, setting the precedent for the dominance of a church hierarchy dependent on state favor for later regimes. The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 presented faint hope of church self-governance but was immediately squashed by the introduction of the Soviet regime. In the 1920s, Ob’edinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye (OGPU), the Soviet secret police, transformed ROC into an institution submissive to the state. The sealing of this seismic shift manifested in Metropolitan Sergius, a bishop who found himself the head of the Church due to the imprisonment of other senior bishops in 1925, issuing his infamous Declaration of Loyalty to the Soviet Union:

“We want to be Orthodox and at the same time to be conscious of the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes and whose failures, failures. Any blow directed at the Union, be it a war, a boycott, some kind of public calamity or just a treacherous murder, like one in Warsaw, is recognized as a blow aimed at us. (Romans XIII, 5).”

Not mincing words, Sergius dissolved any idea of separation of State and Church. There was to be no mistake who the real power was. Throughout the twentieth century, as the OGPU gave way to its successor, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnotsi (KGB), the tying of the ROC and the Soviet State deepened. Church leadership doubled as agents of the state security service and were utilized abroad as instruments of Soviet diplomacy and intelligence. Among these representatives was a young cleric named Vladimir Gundyaev, known today as Patriarch Kirill, the head of the ROC. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 further saw the Church institutionalized. When Kirill was appointed as Patriarch in 2009, The Church’s mission was integrated within the ideological framework of the Russkiy Mir (“Russian World”), a doctrine fusing Orthodoxy, patriotism, and empire. This enabled Russia to repackage their geopolitical ambitions as a civilizational mission.

In today’s world, we see this play out no clearer than in the Ukrainian war. In 2022, Patriarch Kirill painted the invasion of Ukraine as a “holy struggle” against a morally corrupt West. It is a “Holy War” that seeks to integrate Ukraine into Russia to defend “the single spiritual space of Holy Russia.” In January 2025, he blessed crosses engraved with President Vladimir Putin’s initials distributed to “war heroes,” further illuminating the Church’s role of morally legitimizing the war. The justification? Preventing the West’s moral decadence from permeating the Russian motherland.

The weaponization of the Church isn’t only domestic, but also abroad. From establishing hundreds of parishes throughout Africa to pre-existing ones in the U.S and Western Europe, the Kremlin wields large influence throughout them. Promoting Russian values along with acting as their eyes and ears has made ROC an effective Kremlin weapon disguised as religious fervor.

The weaponization of Russian Orthodoxy has had predictably dire consequences for religious freedom. In its 2026 annual report, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), recommended redesignating Russia as a “country of particular concern,” reserved for those who commit the most egregious religious freedom violations due to ongoing, systematic violations of religious freedom targeting groups such as Muslims, Protestants, and Jehovah’s Witnesses within its borders and annexed territories in Ukraine. Any religious groups who do not align with their political agenda are treated as a national security threat. For example, in the Kherson region of Ukraine prior to occupation, there existed more than 38 faiths represented by 990 religious organizations. Today, there are just 175, with 86% belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. Last year, the Kremlin passed legislation making it easier for authorities to prosecute religious leaders for being against the war under their “foreign agents” laws by broadening the definition of what a foreign agent is, making any action contrary to Russian interests a basis for criminal indictments.

Religion itself isn’t the problem, but rather the favoring of one over the other by the state. The result? A state where true religious freedom doesn’t exist and religious diversity and dynamism are treated as threats. The reality of such dynamics in Russia makes it all the more important that covenantal pluralism is allowed to flourish.

The weaponization of religion occurs when a state seeks to protect and preserve political stability by controlling an area of the society that impacts the individual at a deeply personal level. This assures political and ideological compliance. The weaponization of religion is especially prevalent in states like Russia and Iran where cultural and national identities are interwoven with a select religion or against. It’s no coincidence that countries with high to severe religious freedom restrictions are mostly dominated by one religion. This is because religious freedom for all would be perceived as a challenge to cultural identity and a threat to political stability. As a result, minority faiths often suffer at the hands of the majority.

Covenantal pluralism, by contrast, allows for the peaceful co-existence of different religions within the same society without impediment or favoritism from the state, making it a neutral actor in this arena. The benefit? Not only greater freedoms and peace in society, but also prevention of the weaponization of religion and of domination by one religion. When multiple voices have an equal voice, it is harder for one voice to drown out the others. The ability for faith members across the spectrum to express and act upon their beliefs acts as a restraint on a particular group from attempting to control or dominate. It forces state actors to balance the needs and concerns of all religious groups, negating their ability to weaponize one over the rest.

In Russia, the task of creating covenantal pluralism is a daunting one, with Putin wielding an iron fist over the Kremlin. Hope is not lost though. Given the existing political structure, the need for resilience and interfaith dialogue built within Russia’s faith communities is vital to withstand the oppression of the government and plant seeds for future flowering of covenantal pluralism.

In a world that has seen a rise in persecution of faith believers, all religious groups’ voices must be heard and treated with respect and dignity. The wellbeing of faith believers is an important indicator of the wellbeing of a society—and today’s Russia has critically undermined the wellbeing of its own society by its addiction to the opiate of religious nationalism.

In the age of discord, the world desperately needs societies that embody covenantal pluralism. The task for Russians of good will and for all of us is to protect with vigor where it’s threatened, and preserve with diligence where it may be found.