Ukraine: Paths for Religious Peacebuilding

As the war in Ukraine is becoming longer than everyone, including the Kremlin’s strategists, expected, there are more talks and initiatives to foster peace. Peace is something that the Ukrainians desire more than anyone else. They die for it, quite literally. However, they prefer attaching the adjectives “just” and “sustainable” to the noun “peace.” These two adjectives are complimentary to each other: only a just peace can be sustainable.

Peace is becoming also a part of the Russian rhetoric. Sometimes this noun is even garnished with the adjective “just” (but not “sustainable”). For example, the patriarch of Moscow Kirill, while meeting the Pope’s special envoy, Cardinal Matteo Zuppi, on June 29, 2023, assured him that his desire is for “the soonest establishment of just peace.”

It is needless to say that the Ukrainian and Russian interpretations of what “just peace” means are opposite to each other. For the Ukrainians, it means that the country’s territorial integrity is completely restored, the Russian troops are driven away from the Ukrainian lands, the perpetrators of the war are tried, and Russian resources are used to rebuild the country. For the Russians, “just peace” means that at least some of the goals of their “special military operation” are achieved and acknowledged by the international community. The objective difficulty with this interpretation of “just peace” is that no one, including President Vladimir Putin, can articulate a clear and consistent nomenclature of the war’s goals. In the official narratives of the Kremlin’s propaganda, these goals change dizzyingly like in a kaleidoscope.

Peacemaking requires a considerable flexibility of means in order to achieve the fixed goal — peace per se. Ukrainians understand the need for such a flexibility, for which reason they welcome various external initiatives aimed at stopping the war. These initiatives include the ones coming from the Holy See. For this reason, for example, President Zelensky found time to meet Cardinal Zuppi during the difficult period when the catastrophe at the Kakhovka Dam happened, while Putin refused to discuss the Vatican’s peacemaking initiatives with the Pope’s legate at that same time. The Russian president only condescended to allow one of his assistants to meet the cardinal. Among other officials, Zuppi met the Patriarch of Moscow Kirill and Maria Lvova-Belova – the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights. Together with Vladimir Putin, she has received arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court “for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”

Yet, the peace-related flexibility that can be tolerated by the Ukrainians has its boundaries. In other words, the Ukrainians are open to consider various formulae of peace. What they are not quite open to is what such formulae must be not. They draw some red lines that peace initiatives cannot cross. I would take the liberty of formulating some of such red lines.

For example, peace formulae acceptable for the Ukrainians cannot put the victim and the perpetrator on the same footing. The war cannot be presented as a fratricide or some sort of civil conflict, in which two brothers brawl over their common legacy, and each has some rights for his claims. For Ukraine, this is an outright and unprovoked aggression of one country against the other. Full stop.

Another premise for peacemaking that is unacceptable for the Ukrainians is a conspiracy theory that presents the war as an episode of the hidden global imperialistic agenda of the West. Although the Russians coined it first, this theory has been eloquently promoted by the leftist intellectuals like Noam Chomsky who claimed that America will fight Russia until the last Ukrainian. Paradoxically, in this point they converge with the right-wing populists, such as Tucker Carlson.

Many people in the Global South subscribe to the same theory and explain the war in Ukraine as the neo-imperialist advances of the “usual suspects” — the United States and its allies. They rightly assume that most wars fought after World War II featured some hidden imperialist agenda. Why should the war in Ukraine be different? And yet it is different. Typologically, it is much closer to WWII, when the aggressors were driven by variations of the fascist ideology. From the Ukrainian perspective, the Russian aggression in its nature is neo-imperialist. However, it is not the West but the Kremlin that is driven by hunger for domination. The Ukrainians see Putin’s intentions as a plan to re-establish a new, quasi-empire. It is not necessarily a reincarnation of Romanov’s tsarism or the Soviet Union. It is Putin’s brand-new empire, where Ukraine is its most important (but not the only one) colony.

Ironically, people like Chomsky who interpret the Russian war against Ukraine in post-colonial terms effectively apply to Ukraine the same patronising attitude that classical imperialists had regarding colonies. Indeed, according to such an attitude, Ukraine is just a pawn on the chess board of the big powers. Chomsky and his confederates fail to recognize Ukraine’s own soul and will. They cannot imagine that the Ukrainians have themselves chosen to fight for their freedom. After the Orange revolution in 2003-2004 and then the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014, Putin also believed that protesters were just marionettes in the hands of the “evil West.” Those in the West or South who believe in the conspiracy of the “deep Western imperialism,” in the same way as Putin deprive the Ukrainians of their own agency. Anyone who comes up with a formula of peace for Ukraine should begin with acknowledging the self-determining agency of the Ukrainian people. Otherwise, such formulae would be an insult for the Ukrainians and could not work.

The affirmation of the Ukrainian people’s own agency in political and military developments is also important from the religious and theological perspective. Theology puts free will at the core of any decision-making, particularly regarding the questions of death and life. Ukrainians face such questions on an everyday basis. To fight and die for their freedom is their own decision. Therefore, they must be asked in the first place when it comes to any formula of peace.

In the end, I would like to come back to the first paragraph of this paper: the Ukrainians want a sustainable peace. A cease-fire is not enough for such a peace. The war began not with the firing of arms but with the propelling of ideas. Ideas are the main motor of this war. These ideas can be called in different ways. The Russians often identify them as the “Russian world.” The Ukrainians call them “Rashism.” Seen from the perspective of political science, these ideas are quite close to classical fascism updated to its postmodernist version. I personally identify them as a violent civilisational exceptionalism. It grows from the concept of an assumed superiority of the Russian civilisation based on the perversely perceived idea of Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy means correctness of faith. Many Russians think: if our faith is the most correct one, we should fight all sorts of unorthodox Christianity and civilisations that stem from them. Catholic Christianity for many Russians is wrong, for which reason they share a conspiracy theory that the Catholic Church is the ultimate beneficiary of the war whose ultimate goal is to destroy the “Holy Rus’.” This nonsense, together with other conspiracy theories and ideologies that nourish the war, must be deconstructed. The war will end with the defeat not only of the Russian military machine, but also of the ideas that had led to this war. This is the ultimate formula of peace for Ukraine.

Cyril Hovorun is a professor of ecclesiology, international relations and ecumenism at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm, and a director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.