Russian Baptists Fail to Assume Responsibility for Their Shameful Support of Putin Invasion in Ukraine

Orthodox Metr. Hilarion addressing the forum

Relationships between Russia and the US are deteriorating rapidly because of the aggressive neo-Soviet imperialism promoted by Putin, primarily in Ukraine, but, in fact everywhere in the world where he has interests. This unavoidably affects Russia’s image in the world. Not that Putin cares very much about that – it was not care for the world that made him a KGB spy and then president of Russia. However, such image deterioration has economic consequences, and that really hurts (not so much the Russian people, who really do not count, but the interests of the oligarch’s who support the Russian dictator). Thus, the new Russian ‘tsar’ started sending around his ‘slaves’ to try saving what they can.

This is the context for the so-called ‘Russia-USA Forum of Christian Leaders’, in which a delegation of Russian Orthodox, led by Metr. Hilarion Alfeyev, in charge of foreign affairs for the Moscow Patriarchate, and of Russian Evangelical leaders, mostly Baptists and Pentecostal/charismatics (nota bene, there were no Catholic leaders involved), have met with a number of Protestant/Evangelical American leaders, in an attempt to clean up the tarnished face of ‘mother Russia’. The convenor of this religiously dubious and politically misguied meeting was the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, more precisely, its constantly embarassing president, Franklin Graham.

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