Unholy war

On the night of June 15, a Russian drone struck the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. By the time the fire crews arrived, some 800 square metres of the cathedral’s roof were on fire. Bishop Avraamiy carried the icons out himself, into the smoke. Rain was falling on the city as though the sky was trying to put out what men had set alight.

This grim event captures, like a drop of water, not only the essence of the war between Russia and Ukraine but a thousand years of struggle between the two nations.

The Lavra is not an ordinary church. Founded in the eleventh century, it is the cradle of Eastern Slavic Christianity, a UNESCO site, a labyrinth of caves holding the relics of saints venerated by Russians and Ukrainians alike. It is, in other words, the place where the faith that Moscow claims as its own began — and this is the place that Moscow set it on fire.

As usual in such cases, Russia’s Defence Ministry denied striking the cathedral and suggested, without evidence, that it had been hit by a stray American Patriot — Ukraine’s own air defence, in other words, burning down Ukraine’s holiest shrine. It is worth pausing on this, because the denial tells us something the strike alone does not. A state that bombs a civilian object by accident repents yet a state that bombs one and lies does not — and a faith without repentance is no faith at all. Is Christianity possible without repentance?

There is a particular irony here — if the word irony is not too mild. Vladimir Putin has built two decades of legitimacy on the claim to be the defender of traditional, Christian, civilisational values against a decadent West. He appears in church on every feast day, candle in hand, face composed into devotion. He invokes the baptism of Rus’ as the founding act of a thousand-year Russian story. But the baptism of Rus’ did not happen in Moscow, which did not yet exist. It happened in Kyiv, in 988, under Prince Vladimir — the very Vladimir whose monument now stands in the Russian capital, whose name the Russian president carries, and whose first great sanctuary the Russian president has just put to the torch.

One Vladimir made Kyiv the mother of cities and the other is doing his determined best to render it down to ash.

One may ask how this is possible — to claim a faith and burn its cradle in the same breath. The answer is that it is not a contradiction at all, but the logic of the thing. You can only set fire to what you were never holding as sacred. For Moscow, the Lavra was never a shrine but a title deed — and a title deed, unlike a holy place, can always be destroyed once it has served its purpose.

For years, Russia has insisted that Ukrainians are not a separate people but a branch of the Russian one — brothers, one nation, divided only by foreign manipulation. Putin wrote an entire essay to this effect. His “special military operation”, if we’re to believe him, is not a conquest but a family reunion, conducted, regrettably, by force.

Let us take the claim seriously for a moment, on the Kremlin’s own terms, and see where it leads. If Ukrainians truly are Russia’s brothers, then for four years Russia has been killing its brothers — burning their schools, crushing their hospitals, burying them under the rubble of residential buildings, transforming their lands into a lunar landscape.

There is a word for the killing of a brother, and it is older than Russia, older than Kyiv, older than the faith both peoples share. It is the first crime recorded after the expulsion from Eden. Am I my brother’s keeper? asked Cain, having already made sure he would never have to be. This is the trap the Kremlin’s own language has built around it. 

When the Dormition Cathedral burned the first time, in 1941, it was the retreating Soviet army that destroyed it — the same imperial reflex that had dynamited St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery a few years before. The cathedral was rebuilt only after Ukraine became independent, in the 1990s, restored stone by stone. It took Russia a single night to set it ablaze again.

A Ukrainian serviceman wrote, the morning after, that for Russia religion has never been a value but an instrument — an instrument, that is, of control, of propaganda, of fear. He is right, and the cathedral roof is the evidence.

Cain, too, denied everything but the ground was not fooled

The smoke over the Lavra will clear. The icons Bishop Avraamiy carried out will go back on their walls, in a building that can, like the last time, be rebuilt. What cannot be rebuilt is the story Russia tells about itself — the one in which it is the keeper of the faith, the elder brother, the guardian of a sacred civilisation. That story died in the fires that it has been lighting.

Cain, too, denied everything but the ground was not fooled.