Russia has declared war against Satan as the next phase of its ‘special military operation’. However, few people believe such statements, similar to the constant threats involving nuclear weapons.
From the beginning of the conflict, Russian propaganda explained the invasion of Ukraine as a necessity to ‘denationalise and demilitarise’ our country. Later, when it became apparent that these words were too complicated and were not effective for the domestic audience, and the failure of the ‘blitzkrieg’ required additional explanations, the Russian authorities and propaganda came up with alternative justifications. Sometimes the war was justified by ‘protecting the Russian-speaking population of Donbas’, sometimes it was called ‘Russia’s response to NATO’s aggression’, and sometimes it was said that it was a pre-emptive strike - if Russia had not attacked Ukraine, the Ukrainian army would have attacked Russia itself. None of these explanations was convincing or compelling enough. It is difficult, for example, to rejoice at the news that NATO and the United States are not sending troops to Ukraine, limiting arms transfers, or even calling for negotiations while insisting that Russia is at war with NATO. It is also impossible to explain why the Russian-speaking population of eastern and southern Ukraine does not rejoice at the ‘liberators’ or why the invaders are destroying towns and villages in the regions that Russia allegedly ‘liberates’. The version of the ‘necessary pre-emptive strike’ lingered in the minds of Russians, judging by the prevalence in social media and responses to street surveys in the first months of the great war. However, the longer the war went on, the less it resembled a ‘special military operation’ and the harder it became to sell this ‘strike’ to the audience: propaganda can only pump people into a bloodthirsty ecstasy in the short term and if the army is winning. As the war dragged on and there were defeats at the front, an explanation was needed to justify everything: the decline in living standards, zinc coffins, mobilisation, censorship, and the lack of clear prospects. Something existential. Therefore, propaganda invented the ‘crusade of Holy Russia against satanic Ukraine and the West’.
First, there was ‘Azov’
From 2016 to the end of 2021, the alleged ‘neo-paganism’ of Azov soldiers was occasionally reported in Russian and pro-Russian media as a way to demonise the regiment, which was referred to in Russia as a "neo-Nazi battalion". These reports were, as is typical with propaganda, based on a mixture of fact, fiction, generalisation, and lies.
The most commonly cited pieces of evidence were: the installation of a wooden idol of Perun at the Azov regiment's training base in 2016, the fact that the civilian group known as "Azov" (which has no connection to the Azov regiment) and its leader, Andriy Biletsky, were open about their sympathies for pagan beliefs, with Biletsky even attempting to help one of the pagan communities in Kyiv to obtain official registration; and the use of attributes and rituals associated with various non-pagan cults by some Ukrainian military personnel, including those in the Azov regiment. This often involved a blend of different traditions, with some worshipping Perun and others Odin.
It is worth noting that the American Air Force Academy in Colorado built a mini-Stonehenge at the cost of $80,000 in 2011 for use in ceremonies by cadets and that the Russian Orthodox Church has expressed concern about the spread of neo-pagan beliefs among Russian security forces and prison system employees. Sociological data from various countries indicate that there are more people with such views worldwide now than there were in the last century, possibly due to the appeal of the trappings and sense of belonging that sets them apart from those who follow more common religious practices.
Russian and pro-Russian propaganda used these reports, most of which did not actually concern the Azov regiment itself but rather groups associated with Biletsky or the far right in general, as a justification for characterising all "Ukrainian neo-Nazis" as "pagans" who worshipped idols and built shrines. At the same time, these sources claimed that Ukrainians were "schismatics", citing conflicts between followers of the Moscow Patriarchate and the local church involving some right-wing organisations. The propaganda even suggested that "Ukrainian nationalists were massively converting to Islam".
Until February 2022, reports of a connection between the Azov regiment and "Satanists" were primarily found on dubious websites and were rare. However, since the start of the full-scale invasion, such claims have appeared with increasing frequency, with some sources alleging that "Satanists from America reached out to Ukraine" and that American Satanists were "supporting Ukraine". These reports have included claims of "human sacrifices" being practised by Azov fighters, and references to "temples" and "satanic and occult" practices. Some sources have even attempted to provide "evidence" for these claims, including pictures of items such as rubber green hands holding candles and "devil" masks with horns that can be easily purchased online, including in Russia.
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These sources have also cited the discovery of an "altar of stickers" for Satanists and a calendar on which Azov fighters were supposedly marking "dates of the cult" (shown above is a calendar bearing the Azov logo). Russian state media ran numerous such reports in the spring and early summer of 2022, leading one to conclude that the public was being prepared for the idea of "Holy Russia going to war against Satanists". Strangely, however, this topic seemed to dissipate over the summer, along with the issue of the tribunal for the defenders of Mariupol, some of whom were eventually exchanged at the end of September amid accusations of "betrayal" from Russian z-channels.
’Holy War’
Along with the campaign about the ‘satanic’ Azov, albeit more slowly, Russian propaganda was promoting another viewpoint: that Russia is not fighting specific ‘Satanists’ in Ukraine, but rather the Evil One itself.
It cannot be said that the topic arose suddenly: almost from the first days of the war, the Russian authorities and religious leaders have been calling the war ‘metaphysical’ or 'sacred’ in a number of ways. Thus, on March 6, during the service on Forgiveness Sunday, Patriarch Kirill called the war a ‘metaphysical’ one against ‘the values imposed by the West.’ To leave no doubt, he clarified: first of all, the war began because the residents of Donbas were against ‘gay pride parades’. And a week later, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, declared the need to ‘deshaitanise’ Ukraine. He coined this term, which his henchmen repeated throughout the entire full-scale invasion: they wanted to 'deshaitanise' Azovstal or fight against 'Nazis and Shaitans' in Hostomel, et cetera, et cetera.
A little later, in April, ‘Orthodox oligarch’ Konstantin Malofeev, who owns the Tsargrad TV channel, joined the battle for the faith and attention of Putin, to whom propaganda continually offers different explanations for his actions. Malofeev said that Russia is waging war against ‘the Freemasons, the neoliberal Washington swamp, the globalists — all of them Satanists.’ ‘This is a holy war,’ he concluded. There has been no shortage of promotion of these ideas by Tsargrad before: it has a bunch of speakers like Prokhanov and Dugin, who were too marginal to be featured on state propaganda media before the full-scale invasion. They proved useful when a new ideological basis for the war, which nobody even called a war, was required.
’Eurasian Jihad’
As far as we can conclude from open sources, the decision to promote the idea of a ‘holy war’ as the main explanation for the aggression against Ukraine was made in late August — early September. This was influenced by many factors: the unexpected defeat of the Russian army in the Kharkiv region, the growing criticism of the Russian leadership by ultra-conservatives and ‘nuclear patriots’, the obvious need for mobilisation and signs, albeit insignificant, of declining support for the war by Russians. Even the death of Dugin’s daughter Darya could also influence whether the ideas of Russia as the katechon, i.e. the last ‘stronghold of the Christian struggle against the Antichrist’, previously only popular among ultra-rightists, will be promoted. According to Russian media, after Dugina’s death, her father, together with Prokhanov and other preachers of the ‘Russian world’, again, after many years of hiatus, began to cooperate with the Kremlin to propose a new Russian ideology. At least on September 30, when Putin made another speech on the occasion of the annexation of Ukrainian territories, he spoke about the structure of the world in the words of Dugin: he blamed the Anglo-Saxons for everything and insisted that ‘the United States occupied Japan and Germany’. These are almost direct quotes from various articles by Dugin. Putin also directly called Western values Satanism. A few days before, Patriarch Kirill explicitly stated that Russia is at war against the Antichrist, and called for ‘spiritual mobilisation’ simultaneously with the announcement of the actual war mobilisation of the Russian people. He also stressed that Russians killed in the war would be forgiven all their sins. It is the same promise that popes made to Crusaders centuries ago.
After September 30, the ‘fight against Satanism’ in Ukraine was officially allowed. In October, this resulted in a bunch of news that would have been comic if they were not so tragic. But they clearly demonstrate the degree of readiness to adopt any ideas for the sake of maintaining power. The largest propaganda Telegram and TV channels began saying that ‘Azov members worship the devil’, and ‘Ukraine bears the mark of Cain’ because of fratricide, and it is necessary to drive the devil out of ‘mad Russians’, i.e., Ukrainians.
Already on October 1, State Duma deputy Alexey Chepa appealed to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Russia with a demand to ban the ‘ideology of Satanism’ and ‘satanic organisations’ in Russia. Zakhar Prilepin and Ivan Okhlobystin joined in and began to call the ‘special military operation’ a ‘holy war’. Moreover, these self-described ‘Orthodox’ activists strangely referred not only to Patriarch Kirill but also to Ramzan Kadyrov, who on October 25 said that the war in Ukraine is a ‘jihad’. ‘The war is a direct deadly clash with the atheistic globalist liberal West and its liberal Nazi tentacles embodied by the obsessed Little Russians. And this time, the satanic character of the main enemy of Holy Russia is no longer metaphorical. It is unmistakably and explicitly the hordes of the Antichrist,’ said Dugin, having finally been allowed to participate in Solovyov's broadcasts.
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It was not just the Ukrainian military and Ukrainians in general that Vladimir Solovyov compared to Satanists, but also Russian independent journalists, the opposition and, of course, gays. And the Solovyov Live channel claimed that Zelenskyy was a Satanist because he was... Jewish. And, of course, Zaluzhnyi was also a Satanist because he ‘wears a bracelet with pagan symbols’. The imagination of propagandists gave birth to ‘political Satanism’, ‘Orthodox jihad’, as well as ‘the great Western Babylonian harlot dressed in an armoured bra’, which encroaches on Holy Russia (as you can see here). Finally, Satanism, ‘centred around sodomy’ and against which Russians are fighting in Ukraine, was discussed in the State Duma. The circle is complete: in March, as we remember, the Russian patriarch justified the war by preventing ‘gay parades in Donetsk’.
The culmination of the anti-Satanic hysteria was the publication by Alexey Pavlov, the assistant secretary of the Russian Security Council Patrushev, who finally translated ‘deshaitanisation’ into Russian and called for the ‘desatanization’ of Ukraine. This country, he said, has turned into a ‘totalitarian hypersect’. Pavlov even gave examples of those who lead this sect of ‘Satanists’: Ihor Kolomoiskyi (and the Hasidic community overall), Victor Pinchuk, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and Oleksandr Turchynov. Of course, no one stood up for the Baptists, to which Turchynov belongs, and the Greek Catholics, to which Yatsenyuk belongs, but with the Hasidic community, it was awkward: the chief rabbi of Russia is Hasidic, and therefore after Pavlov’s statements, Hasidic Jews wrote statements to the prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee of Russia. Patrushev was forced to accept responsibility for his ‘exorcist’. The article's main point remained unchanged: ‘desatanisation of Ukraine’ is a new course of Russian propaganda and ‘the next stage of the special military operation’.
On October 25, when Kadyrov declared jihad, and Pavlov announced the ‘desatanization’ of Ukraine, the plenary session of the XXIV World Russian People’s Council was being held in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. It was attended by people who led the ‘ideological war with Satan’.
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Alexander Dugin and David Duke
That is, the imperialist Alexander Dugin, who actually favoured the occult practices of the Nazis, considered fascism the only correct form of right-wing nationalism and collaborated with the head of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. Patriarch Kirill. Former liberal, deputy head of the presidential administration Sergey Kiriyenko who oversees the Russian Internet and the occupied territories and is responsible for the ‘image of Russia’s future’. Chairman of the Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov, who now also fights against Satanism and Western imperialists in Ukraine. The oligarch Malofeev. The leader of the ‘DNR’ Denis Pushilin, and other bizarre people who are trying to hastily create an ideology that would appeal to both Putin and ordinary Russians. Only Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev was absent at the meeting, so he had to give a separate speech about the ‘war with Satan’. On November 4, the day of ‘national unity’, he finally caught up with his political rivals who had noticed the ‘smell of sulphur from Ukraine’ earlier and organised faster. On this day, he wrote an epic post which implied that Russia was at war:
— crazy Nazi drug addicts;
— a large pack of barking dogs from the Western kennel;
— grunting pigs and stupid philistines.
And Russia itself, having ‘received sacred power’, is fighting against the progenitor of all evil: ‘We have the opportunity to send all enemies to hell, but this is not our task. We listen to the words of the Creator in our hearts and obey them. These words give us a sacred goal. The goal is to stop the supreme ruler of hell, no matter what name he uses — Satan, Lucifer or Iblis.’
At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, many experts wrote that Putin was the most avid consumer of his own propaganda. He believed that the ‘Ukrainians and Russians are a single people’ and ‘liberators who will be greeted with flowers’. But after Medvedev’s post, it becomes clear that he became the victim of his own propaganda, succumbing to its toxic influence. And the Iblis, as was aptly written on social media, sneaked up on him unaware.
