FoRB Podcast: The Russian World Narrative and the Russian Aggression in Ukraine

In Episode 3 of The FoRB Podcast, Dmytro Vovk and Merilin Kiviorg invite Catherine Wanner and Thomas Bremer to discuss the Russian world (Russky mir)—a narrative utilized by the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church to justify Russia’s aggressive war in Ukraine and to portray Russia as an “anti-Western civilization.” They touch on the ideological origins and content of the Russia world, the Russian Church’s involvement in the war, political and legal responses to the Russky mir narrative by Russia’s neighboring states (Ukraine and Estonia), and debates over these issue in the United States and Europe. 

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Human Dignity, Human Rights, and the Image and Likeness of God

Nathaniel Wood is the associate director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University, where he serves as managing editor of The Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies and the blog Public Orthodoxy.

The Vatican declaration Dignitas Infinita bears witness to the somewhat ambiguous relationship between human dignity and human rights. The text itself affirms what became the prevailing understanding in the latter part of the twentieth century, enshrined in seminal documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: namely, that rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.” Although this treatment of dignity as the basis of rights bears Catholic influence through the contributions of figures like Jacques Maritain, the documents themselves tend to employ a minimalist concept of dignity. By strategically avoiding philosophical or religious specificity, the documents gain broad support from those who hold to various conceptions of dignity, allowing signatories to affirm human rights based on their own culturally specific conceptions.

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The Global Pretensions of the Russian Orthodox Church

Jerry G. Pankhurst is professor emeritus of sociology and of Russian and Central Eurasian studies at Wittenberg University.

In global affairs, Patriarch Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church operate in several arenas of action, and their actions are carried out on interrelated moral, normative, canonical, legal, political, and economic dimensions. We might imagine a globe with the headquarters of the Moscow Patriarchate at the center of a worldwide system of converging vectors of action on all these dimensions. (Imagine a huge spider sitting in Moscow with its many legs stretching around the world in all directions.) The vectors originate at the point of convergence, which is His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus’, surrounded by his most faithful assistants in ROC leadership. The vectors stretch out to points around the globe where the ROC has significant interests and attempts to exert influence on others.

One might imagine such a global vectored arrangement for many global organizations from businesses to international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), but the multiplicity of arenas of action in which the ROC acts is noteworthy; indeed, the ROC must worry about a large number of arenas of action that grow from its particular nature and global position.

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