Chapter 22: What Happens to Priests Who Pray for Peace?

The preceding chapters proved that Kirill's promise of automatic absolution contradicts the patristic consensus on every count, and that his "Holy War" declaration fails every Orthodox criterion for blessing military action. This chapter documents what happens when the theology becomes policy. This is not a theological argument, but evidence of institutional capture.

The Mandate

On September 25, 2022, Patriarch Kirill introduced a mandatory prayer for military victory across the entire Russian Orthodox Church:

Grant us by Your power victory.

This replaced earlier petitions for peace.

This prayer also was not approved by a synod or council of bishops. It was distributed by direct patriarchal directive, and every priest under the Patriarchate's jurisdiction was ordered to read it at every Liturgy.

In Orthodox Christianity, changes to liturgical texts require conciliar approval. Apostolic Canon 34 is explicit: the first bishop of a church may do nothing without the consent of his own bishops. The prescribed penalty for unilateral liturgical innovation is deposition (Trullo Canon 32). Carthage Canon 103 requires that liturgical texts be "approved in synod." Patriarch Kirill bypassed this process entirely.

By bypassing synodal approval, Kirill transformed a political decision into a liturgical mandate. Refusing the prayer becomes not a political choice but a breach of ecclesiastical obedience. When peace was still imaginable, the prayers asked for peace. When victory became the political goal, the prayers were rewritten to match. The prayer presupposes what has not been established: that this war is just, that victory is what God wills, and that every Orthodox Christian should petition for it.

Thus, we see our liturgy being shaped not by theology, but by military objectives.

The Peacemakers

If the Spiritual Father uses the Canons of the Church as if they were... loose military cannons, and not with discernment, in accordance with each person's needs and the repentance demonstrated, then instead of healing souls, he'll be committing a crime.

— St. Paisios the Athonite

The canons exist for healing, not for enforcing political conformity. Vladimir Kara-Murza, an Orthodox Christian who spent 300 days in solitary confinement and was sentenced to 25 years for documenting the war Kirill blessed, put it this way:

I don't think even George Orwell could have envisaged a situation when Christian priests will be defrocked and banned from service for speaking out against the war.

— Vladimir Kara-Murza

St. Theodore the Studite defied emperors who tried to coerce the Church into accepting an adulterous imperial marriage that the canons forbade. He was exiled repeatedly for his refusal to commune with the priest who blessed it. The Church glorified him.

The Moscow Patriarchate did the opposite: it punished those within its own ranks who refused to bless the war. Priests who followed their conscience and the patristic witness were treated as criminals. Priests who complied with state directives, regardless of theological content, were protected. The purpose of church discipline has been inverted: it no longer protects the faithful from heresy; it protects the state from dissent.

To suppress confession of the faith is to deny it. People must not be forced to keep silence with regard to confession, lest the salvation of people be hindered.

— St. Maximus the Confessor

On March 1, 2022, the eve of Forgiveness Sunday, nearly 300 priests, monks, and deacons signed an open appeal "for reconciliation and an immediate ceasefire," citing "Blessed are the peacemakers."

Not a single bishop signed.

The church condemned the letter as "political." The religious website Blagodatnyi Ogon (Благодатный Огонь, "Grace-giving Fire") called for all signatories to be defrocked. Many were fined, charged, or forced into exile.

Fr. Ioann Koval, an ethnic Ukrainian serving in the Moscow Diocese, changed one word in the mandatory prayer. He replaced "victory" (победу) with "peace" (мир). "With the word 'victory,'" he said, "the prayer acquired a propagandistic meaning, shaping the correct thinking among parishioners." A parishioner denounced him. Patriarch Kirill suspended him in February 2023. The Moscow Ecclesiastical Court stripped him of his priestly rank.

Archpriest Alexei Uminsky had served as rector of the Church of the Life-Giving Holy Trinity in Moscow for over thirty years. He refused to recite the Prayer for Holy Rus. On January 3, 2024, Patriarch Kirill removed him from his rectorship. Ten days later, the Moscow Diocesan Court defrocked him for "perjury" by refusing to read the prayer. He was tried in absentia.

Fr. Ioann Burdin, a priest in the village of Karabanovo, Kostroma Diocese, told his congregation of ten people that he was praying for peace in Ukraine. His metropolitan informed him that politics is "the prerogative of the Patriarch, not the prerogative of the village priest." Police arrived two hours after the sermon. He became the first Russian clergyman fined under the wartime censorship law. He was banned from ministry in March 2023. In June 2023, the ecclesiastical court that tried his case formally declared pacifism to be heresy incompatible with Orthodox teaching.

Pacifism in various epochs of church history has been present in heretical doctrines: among the Gnostics, Paulicians, Bogomils, Albigensians, and Tolstoyans, revealing, like other utopian ideologies, a connection with ancient chiliasm.

— Moscow Patriarchate Ecclesiastical Court

(Pacifism is, of course, a strawman. The Orthodox position on war is not pacifism but discernment: what our holy saints and fathers permit through consensus patrum and what our canons allow. The preceding chapters established this standard in detail.)

Fr. Petr Ustinov, a priest in Chelyabinsk, was banned from ministry on September 2, 2024, by Metropolitan Alexiy for refusing to read the victory prayer. He was charged under the 25th Apostolic Canon (perjury) and the 39th Apostolic Canon (acting without the bishop's will). The 39th Canon, as Theodore Balsamon's commentary makes clear, concerns church property management, not liturgical obedience.

Thus we see a willingness to invoke our Holy Canons and tradition to punish others, but calling for love when these same Holy Canons speak against us. This is the example set forth by Patriarch Kirill.

Fr. Andrei Kudrin, a Moscow priest, was defrocked on August 23, 2024, for praying for "reconciliation" between Russians and Ukrainians instead of reading the mandatory victory prayer. Patriarch Kirill personally confirmed the defrocking.

Fr. Yakov Vorontsov, a hieromonk in Kazakhstan's Astana and Almaty Diocese who publicly condemned the war, was defrocked in July 2023. After he founded an independent Orthodox parish in November 2025, OMON riot police with dogs raided his home on February 13, 2026. He was charged with maintaining a drug den and possessing psychotropic substances.

As cited in previous chapters, it is a common pattern that dissidents of the war are often conveniently found guilty of other scrupulous charges. Fr. Yakov Vorontsov’s lawyer, Galym Nurpeisov, confirmed this, calling the case "a frame-up." Released after ten days of administrative detention, he was immediately re-arrested on February 23 and ordered held for two months pre-trial. Forum 18 documented extensive procedural irregularities, including closed hearings.

Hieromonk Ioann Kurmoyarov, a Doctor of Theology and associate professor at Novosibirsk Seminary, was defrocked by decree of Patriarch Kirill on April 1, 2022, for criticizing the invasion. On June 7 he was arrested after posting a video titled "Who will be in hell and who will be in heaven?" in which he said Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine would go to hell, not heaven. He was sentenced to three years in a general regime penal colony. The Human Rights Center Memorial recognized him as a political prisoner. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom listed him in its database of religious prisoners of conscience. He was released on August 1, 2024.

Sister Vassa Larin, an American-born Orthodox nun and professor of liturgical studies at the University of Vienna, served under ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia), a Moscow Patriarchate jurisdiction, for decades. ROCOR had tolerated her controversial public positions on ecumenism and pastoral advice regarding homosexuality for years without taking action. Only when she used her YouTube platform to denounce clergy who blessed the invasion did they act: in May 2025, the ROCOR Synod revoked her monastic status and forbade her from wearing monastic attire or using her monastic name. The theological objections that had never warranted discipline became urgent only when she crossed a political line.

As of late 2025, a Fordham University report prepared for the UN Special Rapporteur on Russia documented over 100 religious leaders and activists persecuted for opposing the war. Thirty-eight Orthodox clergy faced ecclesiastical trials: seventeen were defrocked, fourteen suspended, seven forced into retirement. Patriarchia.ru, the Moscow Patriarchate's official news outlet, publishes no coverage of these defrockings, even as it extensively reports ecclesiastical discipline for other matters. The defrockings of Koval, Uminsky, Kudrin, Burdin, and others have been scrubbed from the institutional record.

Yet enforcement does not fully suppress conscience. Fr. Valerian Dunin-Barkovsky, co-founder of an organization supporting persecuted clergy, described one case:

A young man was going to sign a military contract. His priest said "you can go, it's no sin." They found a suspended priest who talked to him. The guy understood... and he did not go to the war.

A priest who had already been suspended for opposing the war, at personal risk, spoke the truth to one young man. That conversation may have saved his life.

Kirill's "Full Freedom"

While his own courts defrocked priests for praying for peace, Patriarch Kirill stood before the XXVII World Russian People's Council on November 19, 2025, and declared:

Today we live in a new country. Indeed, we have full freedom: freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, and everything else connected with free expression of will.

— Patriarch Kirill

At that exact moment, Fr. Kostiantyn Maksimov, a Moscow Patriarchate priest, was serving 14 years in a Saratov labor camp. His crime: refusing to transfer his parish to Russian-created dioceses on occupied Ukrainian territory. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom lists him as a Religious Prisoner of Conscience. Both men are clergy of the same church.

In December 2023, Kirill went further, claiming there was "no greater violation of human rights and religious freedom than what is happening now in Ukraine on the European continent, nor has there likely been, even in the late Soviet period." He said this while Mission Eurasia and Ukraine's Institute for Religious Freedom documented over 600 religious buildings destroyed by Russia and every non-MP denomination banned in occupied territories.

The patriarch who defrocks priests for praying for peace claims full religious freedom exists in Russia. The patriarch whose military destroyed over 600 churches claims that Ukraine is the one persecuting believers. The contradiction is not implicit. It is published on his own website.

The Institution Restructured

The punishment of individual priests was not enough. The Moscow Patriarchate is restructuring its institutions to ensure future clergy never become peace priests in the first place.

Seminaries for Combat

On April 16, 2024, the Supreme Church Council, with Patriarch Kirill's participation, mandated a new course for all ROC theological schools: "Fundamentals of Preparing Clergy for Service in Combat Zones." The order applied to every seminary in the Russian Orthodox Church, effective September 2024.

The Don Theological Seminary in Rostov-on-Don launched Russia's first military chaplaincy master's program in 2023, with Patriarch Kirill's blessing. By 2025, it enrolled 107 students from over 20 dioceses. The curriculum includes "Spiritual Rehabilitation," "Church in Information Wars," and "Fundamentals of Geopolitics." In May 2025, the Holy Synod approved a second military master's program at Yekaterinburg Seminary.

Metropolitan Kirill (Pokrovsky), chairman of the Synodal Department for Interaction with the Armed Forces, announced the scale of the project:

We will need to increase the number of military clergy five to six times... Today there are 300 people; there should be one-and-a-half to two thousand.

— Metropolitan Kirill (Pokrovsky)

Seminaries that once trained priests to administer the Holy Mysteries now train them for combat zones. "Church in Information Wars" does not appear in the curriculum of any other Orthodox seminary in the world. The Russian Orthodox Church is not merely blessing a war: it is restructuring its institutions to sustain one.

Exporting the War Theology

The enforcement is not limited to Russia's borders. On September 12, 2025, Konstantin Malofeev, deputy head of the World Russian People's Council, organized the founding conference of the "International Sovereigntist League 'Paladins'" in St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Palace. Twenty far-right organizations from three continents sent representatives.

On the same day, congress delegates joined a religious procession along Nevsky Prospect commemorating the translation of the relics of St. Alexander Nevsky. Fr. Vladislav Malyshev, an Orthodox priest, sat beside Alexander Dugin at the conference proceedings. United Russia lawmakers welcomed the delegates. The religious procession and the political congress were one program. The institution that declared a Holy War now recruits for it internationally.

What This Means for the Faithful

The mandatory prayer, the defrockings, the seminary restructuring, and the international network documented above go beyond theological error. They create a pastoral crisis for every Orthodox Christian under Moscow's jurisdiction.

If you are a layperson in a Russian Orthodox parish, you now face a situation the early Christians would have recognized. The state, acting through compliant church authorities, demands that you participate in prayers that bless a war of aggression against your fellow Orthodox Christians. If you remain silent and participate, you become complicit. If you object, you risk being labeled a traitor, both to the state and to the church.

This is not how the Orthodox Church is supposed to function. The Liturgy is not a tool of state propaganda. The canons are not weapons against conscientious clergy. The faithful are not (properly) required to choose between their faith and their citizenship.

This chapter documented what Kirill's war theology looks like when it becomes institutional policy: a mandatory prayer that bypasses synodal authority, priests defrocked for their conscience, seminaries restructured for war, and an international far-right network recruiting under the banner of Holy Russia. The next chapter shows what the blessed war produced.