Vladimir Putin has benefited from Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill’s support for the war in Ukraine. Photo via AP/Alexey Maishev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool Photo

Religion and Ukraine

BU Student Researched How Russian Religion Fuels War in Ukraine

Undergraduate project catalogued Vladimir Putin’s use of iconography to support invasion

Earlier this year, a BU student from Russia approached Isabella Ketchen (CAS’26) at the concluding symposium for the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Ketchen had presented her study of the role of Russian Orthodox iconography in weaponizing nationalism, one source of support for President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A key figure in her research was Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, which supports Putin and the war.

“‘I don’t agree with what Kirill is doing,’” Ketchen recalls the student saying. “That was very heartening to me, because BU doesn’t have a lot of scholarly resources on Orthodoxy.… I felt like I was kind of on my own a little bit, and so it was really nice to see that validation.”

Her main finding: while Orthodoxy and its icons are hardly the only gasoline fueling the war, “this religious motivation, on the domestic front, serves as justification to [average] Russians.”

UROP sponsors faculty-mentored undergraduate inquiry, and history major Ketchen says her project grew out of her long-standing interest “in the role that religion plays in people’s lives—how institutions are shaped by religion, and how institutions shape religion at the same time.” This “brain itch” was fed by media articles on the interplay between church and state after Russia’s invasion, including one from Reuters describing how Kirill morphed from pre-invasion peacenik to ardent advocate for the war. 

Her UROP research introduced Ketchen to several aspects of religion bolstering Russia’s war and military, including the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces outside Moscow. The edifice is “military green; the stained glass is infused with bullet shards and weapon shards,” she says. Completed in 2020 and dedicated to honoring previous conflicts, “it has a memorial to all the mothers of World War II who lost a son in the war against fascism,” says Ketchen. She adds that it’s full of images “that associate Russian military victories and, even more interestingly, Soviet victories, with the Russian Orthodox Church.” That’s despite the Soviet Union’s unofficial atheism and anti-religious stance.

At a service after Easter this year, Russian clergy, decked out with military ribbons and medals, blessed the troops, she says. Priests also have blessed the country’s nuclear weapons, Ketchen notes. 

Ketchen “is a very motivated student with many interests and someone who reads voraciously, which is a pleasure for a mentor,” says her UROP adviser, Micah Goodrich, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of English. “It was fascinating to see [in her project] the different scales of visual rhetoric, from the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces to the widely circulated ‘Saint Javelin’—a stylized Virgin Mary holding a javelin anti-tank missile launcher—by Ukrainians after the Russian invasion.” Ketchen also studied Putin’s move to give the church a famous, 15th-century icon of the Holy Trinity—an effort, Carnegie Politika wrote, to undergird the Ukraine invasion with “a spiritual foundation.”

Ketchen originally approached Goodrich, who teaches medieval literature, to study accounts of Byzantine saints. Her interest gradually pivoted to iconography, including that based on the Romanovs, Russia’s last imperial family, deposed in 1917 during the Russian Revolution. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the last Romanov czar, Nicholas II, and his immediate family in 2000. That transformed them “from murdered to martyred,” Ketchen says. “When you take these inherently political figures and turn them into religious figures for your national church, there is [an] inherent politicization.”

To be sure, Ketchen says religion is hardly the only impulse fueling support for the war. Putin’s stated (and untrue) justification was to “demilitarize and denazify” a Ukraine that he claimed was oppressing its Russian minority. The Russian president has also called the demise of the Soviet Union and its empire, which included Ukraine, the 20th century’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe.”

Though she’s not visited Russia, Ketchen has been to pro-Ukraine Russian Orthodox churches in her hometown of San Francisco and talked to émigrés about “how they’re interacting with this faith that has been used to justify this invasion of Ukraine.

“Just because faith can be manipulated, can be weaponized, doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who are believers in it for the sake of what it is, which is an expression of spirituality,” she says.

After studying events in Russia, Ketchen has thought plenty about the lessons for America, too.

“Even though we live in this very, I would argue, secular country,” she says, “it’s important to keep in mind that religion still plays a vital role in people’s lives and shapes how people interact with the world.”