In May 1993, the “World Russian People’s Council,” a “meeting place” for those “concerned about the present and future of Russia,” was created at the instigation of Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk (now Patriarch of Moscow and head of the Russian Orthodox Church). Kirill is now the presiding officer of the Council, which met on March 27 in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, built to replace an earlier church dynamited in 1931 on orders of the Soviet Politburo. The March 27 Council meeting did its own dynamiting, however. In this instance, the truth was destroyed. So was any claim that Kirill is committed to Christian orthodoxy.

In a document entitled “The Present and Future of the Russian World” (a notion already condemned as heretical by hundreds of Orthodox theologians), the Kirill-led Council described the war in Ukraine in these Orwellian terms, which combined lies—of a magnitude that might have made Nazi mouthpiece Joseph Goebbels blush—with heresy.