Fighting a ‘holy war’: Why a sacralised war resists western strategy
For more than four years, Western strategy towards Russia’s war against Ukraine has rested on a familiar architecture: military support for Kyiv, deterrence, economic sanctions, diplomacy, and the promise of security guarantees. These instruments assume a rational adversary: one who weighs costs against benefits and can, at some threshold, be brought to the negotiating table. That assumption is not wrong. But it is incomplete, and the gap it leaves open is not tactical but theological.
Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev in the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in the Odintsovo urban district of the Moscow Oblast, the Russian FederationFrom Kremlin to Altar: Sacralising the Invasion
Since 2022, the Russian state and the Russian Orthodox Church have jointly reframed the invasion of Ukraine as something no sanctions regime was designed to counter: an eschatological struggle against metaphysical evil. This is not decorative rhetoric layered onto a conventional war. It is a structuring logic, and it changes what “victory”, “defeat” and “negotiation” mean for the party that holds it.
The clearest single statement of that logic comes from the ideologue Alexander Dugin. He has described the “operation against Ukraine” as an “exorcism” – a division of humanity into “the people of God and the people of the devil.” Dugin does not decide how the war is waged; he is an ideologue, not a commander, and the argument here does not rest on his words. His value is illustrative: he states plainly a logic whose real weight is institutional.
Patriarch Kirill has pushed this sacralisation to its limit. Preaching at Sarov in August 2026, he told the faithful that the Soviet Union‘s first atomic bomb had been created “by the prayers” of St Seraphim, that Russia had “once again become Holy Rus,” and called for prayers for President Putin, sanctifying weapon, ruler, and imperial identity. Days earlier, he had published a book devoted to the “metaphysics of war.”
President Putin deploys the same sacral vocabulary at the highest level of the state. After a Christmas service in January 2026, standing among service members in the “special operation” and their children, he declared that Russia’s soldiers act “as if on the Lord’s command” in fulfilling “this sacred mission” of defending the homeland, with the soldier cast as a bulwark against evil.
Around these two figures operates a dense field of state-media personalities, clergy, and legislators who circulate and sharpen the same eschatological narrative across Russia’s principal platforms. This is not a patchwork of opinions; it is a coordinated, state-backed narrative with a single metaphysical structure.
It does not stop at speech. The wartime criminal statutes adopted since 2022 criminalise “discrediting” the armed forces and recast the invasion as the defence of peace itself. They translate the eschatological narrative into enforceable repression, with sentences reaching up to fifteen years. When a narrative is written into the criminal code, it is no longer mere talk. None of this is historically unprecedented; states have sacralised war before. But it is precisely what Western strategy has not fully reckoned with.
The limits of bargaining
Why should a security analyst care about theology? Because sacralisation removes the very levers on which Western strategy depends. The first casualty is the negotiability of the conflict. Deterrence and diplomacy assume that the adversary’s aims are divisible – that territory, security arrangements, or sanctions relief can be traded. But a struggle defined as an exorcism has no divisible object; it ends only in the complete expulsion of evil or in failure, never in compromise. When the enemy is not a state with legitimate interests but the embodiment of evil itself, seeking a negotiated settlement is not merely difficult; it is a category error. To bargain with the devil is to betray God.
This is not merely a Russian peculiarity. Peace-and-conflict research has documented that conflicts with a religious dimension are, on average, deadlier, longer and harder to settle than comparable secular ones. Monica Duffy Toft has shown how disputes framed around sacred or indivisible stakes resist the bargaining logic on which settlement depends. Michael Horowitz’s study of the Crusades found that entrenched religious ideas resist changes in material conditions – even very powerful ones. The Crusades persisted for centuries despite plague and mounting losses, receding only when competing ideas emerged. Much of this literature was drawn from studies of civil wars and the Crusades, not on a modern interstate war, so the transfer is not automatic. What carries over is not the historical setting but the structural mechanisms: the indivisibility of sacralised stakes and the immunity of sacral frames to material bargaining, and the Russian case maps closely onto those mechanisms.
The second casualty is the meaning of defeat. Western strategy assumes that battlefield reversals will eventually force a recalculation in Moscow. But a sacralised narrative is remarkably elastic, and this elasticity is not an ideological failure but a technique of rule. Even a major battlefield defeat can be reinterpreted as a temporary trial in the eternal struggle against a “Satanist West.” It is important to be precise here: this allows the regime to justify the Russian army’s failures without conceding the war itself. A lost battle need not become a lost cause and therefore need not produce the pressure to stop that a rationalist theory of coercion expects. This does not make the frame infinitely flexible; reinterpreting defeat carries real domestic costs and cannot be repeated without limit. But within those limits, a narrative that absorbs setbacks into the same eschatological pattern is strengthened rather than broken by them. This is the sacralisation lock-in – a mechanism of regime survival that a ceasefire does not dismantle and may even reinforce.
What Western policy must do differently
None of this means Western instruments are worthless; the distinction is crucial and easy to get wrong. Military support for Ukraine, deterrence, sanctions, and diplomacy remain necessary; they impose real costs and constrain Russian options. The point is not that these tools fail, but that they are not enough on their own. They work on a cost-benefit logic that the sacralised frame is built to neutralise. A strategy that treats the religious dimension as noise, rather than as a core variable, is measuring the conflict with the wrong instrument.
What follows for policy is uncomfortable, because it points toward a domain where Western leverage is weakest. If sacralised legitimation makes the war structurally non-negotiable, durable de-escalation ultimately depends on the erosion of that legitimation inside Russia. Such desacralisation cannot be imposed from outside or achieved quickly. This is not a counsel of despair; it is a correction of expectations. The realistic goal, in Horowitz’s terms, is threat reduction rather than threat elimination – containing the danger over the long term, rather than expecting a decisive settlement that the adversary’s own worldview forecloses.
Two implications follow. First, the religious dimension must be integrated into strategic analysis rather than left at its margins: it shapes when Russia fights, how it fights, and whether it can stop. Second, planning horizons must lengthen – a frame built to absorb defeat will not collapse on the timeline that sanctions or battlefield pressure assumes.
Russia’s war against Ukraine is often described as a test of Western resolve, industrial capacity, and unity. It is all of those. But it is also a test of strategic imagination – of whether analysts trained to think in terms of interests, costs, and bargaining can take seriously an adversary that has defined the conflict in terms of salvation and damnation. When one side is fighting the devil, the other had better understand what that means. Otherwise, it will keep offering deals to an enemy for whom a deal is the one unthinkable outcome.
Olena Shevchyk, M.A. in Political Science; independent researcher. Co-author of a book chapter “De-facto-Regime: Nichts hält länger als ein Provisorium” in: Lehren aus dem Ukrainekonflikt: Krisen vorbeugen, Gewalt verhindern, 2021
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