View this post on the web at [link removed]

A note from Garry Kasparov: We’re running another raffle and sale on premium subscriptions—Now through 12/31, premium subscribers are automatically entered to win one of five autographed chess sets. Click through [ [link removed] ] to save 30% on a premium subscription.
Just in time for the holidays, a legion of priests and other representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church descended on Capitol Hill last week. These bearded visitors might evoke old Saint Nick, but there was nothing jolly about their appearance in the middle of the Christmas season.
American lawmakers need to recognize: These unholy men were in Washington on Kremlin business.
Predictably, the Muscovite delegation told anyone who would listen that Ukraine persecutes Christians.
It is propaganda that is as well-worn as it is false.
The crux of the Kremlin allegations is that Kyiv has cracked down on the Russian Orthodox Church. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin summed up the claim earlier this month [ [link removed] ], saying that “The Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine is practically banned.”
Ukraine is actually one of the most religious countries to come out of the former Soviet Union. More Ukrainians than Russians [ [link removed] ] identify as Orthodox Christians.
Before February 2022, church attendance in Ukraine was already five times higher than in Russia [ [link removed] ]. Since the full-scale invasion, that religiosity has only intensified, with more and more Ukrainians showing up [ [link removed] ] for services. It really is hard to find an atheist on the frontlines.
More from The Next Move:
Now, while Ukraine respects Orthodox Christians, the Ukrainian government did ban [ [link removed] ] the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2024. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church split from its Russian counterpart five years earlier.
Calling those Ukrainian actions “persecution” is deliberate misdirection on Moscow’s part. Russia is exploiting Americans’—especially American conservatives’ and Christians’—commitment to religious liberty by telling an incomplete story.
Here in America, church and state are blessedly separate. But the Russian Orthodox priesthood is an extension of the Russian government.
Under the Russian Empire, the Tsar was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and in communist times, it became a wholly-owned subsidiary of the KGB. It remains so today.
In fact, Patriarch Kirill, the current leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, started working for the KGB in the 1970s [ [link removed] ]—around the same time Vladimir Putin did. Kirill is not some apolitical monk. He is a billionaire supporter of Putin [ [link removed] ] who’s fond of luxury watches and fancy cars. The patriarch even sanctioned the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a “holy war.” [ [link removed] ] Russian Orthodox priests have supplied information to Russian forces about Ukrainian troop movements. This is an institution with a lot of blood on its hands and an indispensable part of Putin’s regime, which is actively at war with Ukraine.
Kyiv clamping down on the activities of a Kremlin-backed church is no more anti-Christian than America’s war with al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists was anti-Muslim.
Put simply: Ukraine doesn’t persecute Christians. It fights back against Russian operatives. Putin tries to portray himself as a defender of Christendom, but the Russian tyrant and his loyal Orthodox clergy are just taking advantage of a pliant American audience to shift the focus off of their own record of wanton destruction in Ukraine. Russia’s invasion has already claimed hundreds of thousands of Christian lives. As of June 2025, Russian troops had destroyed or damaged 670 churches [ [link removed] ] and other places of worship in Ukraine.
Back in Russia, Vladimir Putin’s regime regularly goes after non-Orthodox Christian denominations. Protestants, Baptists, and others [ [link removed] ] face arrests, fines, and general abuse. Russian authorities spent years pressuring Yevgeniy Peresvetov, an Evangelical pastor, [ [link removed] ] to become an intelligence agent; after repeated refusals, Peresvetov was deported. His story is sadly not unique.
The claim that majority-Orthodox Ukraine abuses Orthodox Christians belongs to the same family of obvious untruths as the notion that Ukraine (with its Jewish president) is a neo-Nazi state. Meanwhile, with Putin’s overt persecution of non-Orthodox Christians, we see that every Russian allegation is in fact an admission.
Still, some members of Congress [ [link removed] ]—namely Anna Paulina Luna, Eli Crane, and Derrick Van Orden—are eagerly amplifying these Russian lies. They join other Kremlin-aligned actors like Tucker Carlson, who have taken up the cause of “persecuted” Ukrainian Christians.
Yet there are others—including prominent Republicans—who have called out the Russian government’s Church-run influence campaign.
Last week, Iowa’s Chuck Grassley affirmed unambiguously on the Senate floor that “The Russian Orthodox Church is a leading perpetrator of the persecution [ [link removed] ] of fellow Orthodox believers, as well as Catholics, Evangelicals and others.”
Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina has even suggested a federal investigation to determine whether Moscow is using Russian Orthodox churches in the US for malign purposes. Such an inquiry would be a welcome and important step in rolling back Kremlin influence operations.
Anyone with doubts about the situation of religious freedom in Russia and Ukraine should look to conservative stalwarts like Grassley and Wilson for moral clarity on this issue.
The Russian government will always cry religious persecution when its black-robed agents are subjected to scrutiny.
But the ones abusing religious freedom are not leaders in Kyiv who go after agents of a dangerous aggressor or members of Congress who call for exposing their US-based enablers. They are the leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church itself, appropriating the trappings of the faith in order to advance a campaign of genocidal war against their Ukrainian neighbors and ostensible co-religionists. I cannot think of more un-Christian behavior.
One of the most renowned Soviet dissident rockers, the late Igor Talkov, took aim at Russia’s historic perversion of religion in his song “Globus” [ [link removed] ]:
“Show me the kind of country where the temples are boarded up,” Talkov quips, “Where a priest hides a KGB officer’s epaulettes under his robes.”
Show me such a country, indeed. That country is Russia, and it must be stopped.
On the fence about becoming a paid subscriber? We have a special offer to make the decision easier for you: $49 for an annual subscription—a 30% discount [ [link removed] ]—now through December 31. Anyone signed up as a premium subscriber, including existing supporters, will be automatically entered to win one of five chess sets signed by Garry Kasparov. Paid subscribers get exclusive benefits like interactive Zoom calls with Garry Kasparov.1
More from The Next Move:
1. Please see full rules and regulations [ [link removed] ] for The Next Move December 2025 raffle.

Unsubscribe [link removed]?