Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Church leader, said that the Soviet atomic bomb was created through “the grace and mercy of God,” calling it divine intervention that stopped enemies from “destroying and enslaving” Russia. He made the remarks in the closed nuclear city of Sarov, according to The Moscow Times.
Kirill has made similar claims before, telling nuclear scientists in Sarov in October 2023 that the bomb was built “under the protection” of St Seraphim of Sarov by “ineffable divine providence”. Sarov was the site of the saint’s monastery before it became the Soviet Union’s primary nuclear weapons laboratory.
The church’s backing for the war has taken more direct forms as well. In September 2022, Kirill said in a sermon reported by Reuters that a soldier’s death in the line of duty “washes away all sins that a person has committed,” the World Russian People’s Council he chairs issued a March 2024 decree calling the invasion of Ukraine a “Holy War,” and the church defrocked Moscow priest Alexei Uminsky after he refused to recite its prayer for the victory of the Russian army.
This fusion of altar and arsenal predates the Russian invasion of Ukraine by nearly a decade and hardened into doctrine along the way. Some Moscow Patriarchate priests were already blessing pro-Russian militants in the Donbas by 2014, according to the Swedish research institute SCEEUS, while the self-styled “Russian Orthodox Army,” formed that February under Igor Girkin’s command, abducted and killed four members of a Protestant congregation in Sloviansk months later. Separatist-held territories went on to recognize only the Moscow Patriarchate as their official faith, according to a joint report by the Centre for Civil Liberties and International Partnership for Human Rights, amid years of documented persecution of other denominations.
By the time of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, the arrangement had become institutional: CSIS, drawing on Dmitry Adamsky’s study Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy, reports that every leg of Russia’s nuclear triad has a patron saint and that infantry platoons, tank and artillery crews, bomber personnel, pilots and submariners all receive clerical blessings before combat.
SIPRI reported that nine states held some 9,745 nuclear warheads in military stockpiles as of January 2026, including the very Western powers Moscow casts as its civilizational enemies: the United States, Britain and France. The Divine Providence, on Kirill’s account, seems to have equipped both sides of the fight.
