Putin turns to Muslim men of violence

Short of men and with his army stalled, Vladimir Putin, who portrays himself as a devout Orthodox Christian, is turning to Muslim men of violence to fight his war in Ukraine.

The new Mosque on Moscow’s Avenue of Peace opened in 2015. Photo courtesy of tatar-congress.org.

Vladimir Putin is sending Muslim warriors into battle against Christian Ukrainians. In this article I look at Putin’s relationship with both the Russian Orthodox Church and Islam. The Russian leader has sold his war in Ukraine, in part, as a messianic campaign to re-unite the traditional Russian Orthodox lands - Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Does the use of Muslim mercenaries bother Russians? A version of this article ran on the Spectator website.

Several thousand Muslim Chechen fighters are massing on the edge of Kyiv. Syrian volunteers, filmed this week holding assault rifles and chanting pro-Moscow slogans, are en route to the Ukrainian frontlines.

You might be forgiven for thinking that, just over three weeks into campaigning, Vladimir Putin is running out of Christians for his war machine.

The number of Russian battlefield casualties has certainly been high. According to US estimates up to 7,000 Russian infantry, support troops and tankists have been killed since the invasion began.

That would put Russian casualties at more than the entire US losses in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. As many as 14,000 Russians may have been injured.

Military experts say that once a battle group has exceeded about a 10 percent casualty rate - to include dead, wounded and captured - it is no longer fully combat effective. Russia must surely be surpassing that level of losses in some theatres.

So what can Putin hope to achieve by drafting in Muslim warriors from far-flung lands?

For one, there have been widespread reports of desertions by young Russians. Some captured prisoners report that they didn't even know they were going into Ukraine to fight, and would have balked at the idea of killing men Putin himself has said are their own ethnic and religious cousins.

The Kremlin's Muslim allies will not, presumably, be weighed down by such sensitivities.

Then there is the question of battlefield experience. Moscow has said that up to 16,000 of Assad's Syrians are on the way, each with precious time spent fighting in cities.

Reports suggest that Syrians who are pushed up to the frontline will each receive $3,000 a month from the Russian government, a princely sum. Some fighters claim to have been offered up to $7,000 a month.

But as Putin recruits Muslims to kill Orthodox Christians, how will that play with a Russian public that has been sold a war to reunite the Russian Holy lands?

Stalin, of course, never had such problems. During World War 2 he had many advantages in terms of selling the war at home. Firstly the very existence of Mother Russia was indisputably at stake.

If Hitler had had his way he would have driven the Russian Slavs into the steppes beyond the Urals and repopulated their lands with German-speaking colonists and other Aryans.

Secondly, Stalin, despite the carving up of Poland and the war on Finland, could legitimately portray the war as a defensive action.

Russians are convinced to this day, and with much justification, that their historic mission was to save the world from domination by Nazis, a feat for which they paid an enormous price.

Moreover Stalin, despite being a seminary student as a young man, was unencumbered by having hitched his horse to the cart of Russian Orthodoxy.

The two men who hung the Kremlin's flag over the German Reichstag in 1945 were both reported to be Muslims - one a Kazakh and the other a Dagestani - but it mattered little. Both were, more importantly, Soviets.

Putin, born and raised a Communist, has moved in the opposite direction to Stalin.

Religious scholars say that when the former KGB man came to power he was unburdened by belief. But since then he has apparently converted - and moved into an ever deeper embrace with the Russian Orthodox Church.

Increasingly he has also surrounded himself with Russian nationalists and spiritual advisors who believe in the historic mission of reuniting Russia, Belarus and Ukraine and creating a single Holy space.

Their influence came through loud and clear in an essay that Putin penned last year questioning Ukraine's right to exist.

Metropolitan Tikhon, thought to be Putin's confessor, has often travelled with the Russian leader and is rumoured to have an outsized influence over him.

Putin has frequently been photographed and filmed praying, crossing himself, and in the company of priests.

I worked as a newspaper correspondent in Moscow in the early 2000s during the early years of Putin's rule. Returning 15 years later I could not help but notice the plethora of new churches that had sprung up.

Among the congregations were the old and the poor, but also many young families as well as trendy urbanites in ripped jeans.

At one, the church of St Matryona in Moscow, I watched on a Sunday morning as a long line of people queued in the hot sun. One by one they each placed money in a small golden collection box.

Then they approached the icon of Matryona, a blind holy woman born in the early years of the 20th Century, crossed themselves three times, placed their hands on the icon and kissed it.

As they left they put a handwritten note with their names in a small plastic bag asking for God's favour. The names would later be read out in church. Every few minutes a lady came with a soapy cloth and wiped the icon clean.

Elsewhere in the Russian capital the increase in religious symbolism was difficult to miss.

At the studio of a television station called Tsargrad - owned by a former investment banker and monarchist named Konstantin Malofeyev -  the decor was a fusion of Byzantium and hipster-modern.

Malofeyev, who was wearing a bow tie, said: "Putin is an openly Christian leader. There are 30,000 to 40,000 new priests in Russia. In the West churches are becoming bars and discos."

But, if shiny new churches were going up in Moscow, so too were shiny new mosques.

Estimating the population of the Russian capital is notoriously difficult because so many residents are unregistered but it may be home to up to four million Muslims.

Most are from Central Asia and have travelled to Moscow for work. I met one, an Uzbek called Anvar, at a railway station in a shabby part of the city far from the centre.

"We came here to sell our labour," he said. "With the money we make we get married, build homes, have children. You know how things are: the gypsies beg, the Azeris trade and we Uzbeks work. It's in our traditions."

Anvar took me to a mosque, a few metro stops away. He wanted to pray.

I expected something modest but it turned out to be an enormous building with a golden dome and turquoise roofs.

Putin had opened the mosque in 2015, one of Europe's largest. It can accommodate 10,000 worshippers at one time and cost around 170 million dollars to build.

The mosque was a nod both to Russia's growing Muslim population - estimated at around 20 million all told - and to the Kremlin's ties to hard-line leaders in the Muslim world.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president, and Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinians, were in attendance at the opening. Much of the funding was reported to have come from Saudi Arabia.

As we approached the mosque, on Moscow's Avenue of Peace, Anvar seemed to grow in stature, shaking off the toil of the working week. He beamed with pride. "Isn't it beautiful?" he said.

I talked to a 29-year-old man from Kyrgyzstan called Nurbek. "We like it in Moscow," he said. "We are respected as Muslims."

On the other side of town I visited the Park of Victory, where there is a large museum and memorial to World War 2. Inside new recruits were being inducted in an elite regiment. Orthodox priests and Iranian government officials were among the crowds.

On the edge of the park was another mosque, smaller than its cousin on the Avenue of Peace, bit still capable of holding 3,000 worshippers.

I talked to a man there called Radik from Tatarstan, a Russian republic, who was selling copies of the Koran. He had trained for 10 years in Saudi Arabia where he had learned about Islam and studied Arabic.

"I am comfortable being a Muslim in Russia," he said. "Russia is very different from the West. Islam arrived in the West only 60 or 70 years ago but Russia is a multi-confessional country."

I asked an imam at the mosque called Assad about the fact that an estimated 1,800 Russian citizens joined ISIS.

"It is very difficult for me when Islam kills and terrorises," he said.

At the Tsargrad television station Malofeyev said there was no contradiction between promoting Islam and Orthodoxy.

"We have lived with Islam for 1,000 years," he said. "We know how to deal with them. Liberal anti-family values are a much bigger threat."

Like any successful long-serving leader, one of Putin's greatest skills has been building a coalition of support among different classes of Russians.

In his display of piety he has wooed the Orthodox. By railing against the effete and Godless values of the west he has won over social conservatives - both at home and abroad.

And by creating a semi-nationalised hydrocarbon economy that allowed for the generous disbursement of patronage he has fed the greed of the kleptocratic former Communists.

But now there are the first signs of cracks in his veneer of legitimacy. Support among key constituencies may be beginning to wear thin.

Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, is still onside and has publicly blessed the invasion of Ukraine, as he did Russian intervention in Syria.

But Kirill is a malleable man who in his youth served Soviet General Secretaries Brezhnev and Andropov and worked closely with the KGB.

The leader of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine by contrast, Metropolitan Onufrii, who leads the single biggest grouping of Orthodox Christians in that country, has come out against the invasion.

Holy Men abroad are even more scathing - both of Putin and Kirill.

Marcin Przeciszewski, director of Poland's Catholic Information Agency, told the National Catholic Reporter: "The old discourse about Catholic and Orthodox leaders sharing in the defence of traditional Christian values all looks like nonsense now. The only values Kirill is defending are those of Russian imperialism."

Some Orthodox religious scholars argue that Putin never was a real Christian, but merely draped himself in the flag of post-Soviet religiosity.

They say that under pressure Putin is now reverting to KGB type. For all his flirtations with religion, they point out, he is primarily a man of violence who is now on his fifth war. (Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, Ukraine 2014 and Ukraine 2022).

And in his hour of need, it seems, Putin has turned to men of extreme violence. The fact that they are Muslims seems to be secondary.

"He is desperate and is now calling in favours," a western official who has long studied Russia said.

And as for the Russian people, it seems likely that those who have swallowed the Kremlin's line on the war up to now, will not balk at his use of Muslim mercenaries.

A friend who lives near Odessa said: "Those who watch Russian television and believe Putin will continue to believe. A few Muslims on the frontline won't change that."

Please send in comments, questions, suggestions or corrections.

LINKS

Why? Why? Why? The Associated Press reports from inside Mariupol. This is quite simply one of the best pieces of war reporting I have ever read.

How Putin uses the Orthodox Church to boost his power. A bit of background on Putin and the Orthodox Church from the UK’s Channel 4 news in 2017.

The religious roots of Putin’s invasion. One of the reasons so many commentators failed to predict the invasion of Ukraine is that they neglected the messianic component of Putin’s thinking.