Prior to 2014, Putin had invoked the two nations’ Orthodox Christian religion as one element of a narrative about the necessity of Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment with Moscow. The Ukraine case illustrates the trend well.
While Putin has led the way via a longstanding strategic alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church, a similar dynamic is at work in other emerging powers - including China, India and Brazil - whose current leaders have all found political utility in religion. In the case of Vladimir Putin, the soft pull of the two countries’ shared Orthodox Christian religious identity was converted into a sharp attack intended to enhance Moscow’s religious supremacy and serve Putin’s geopolitical aims. Long before Russia positioned military forces along Ukraine’s border or menaced its neighbor with cyber-attacks and economic pressure, Moscow deployed another, under-appreciated weapon increasingly used by rising global powers: the transformation of religious soft power into what is known among some scholars of authoritarianism as “sharp power.” A worshiper enters the basement of the Church of the Archangel Michael in Rivne, Ukraine, where the Moscow-led Orthodox branch holds services.
