I read an interesting article on cnn by Delia Gallagher, sorry can’t do the linky thing!
Basically she says recent words from high ups indicate keeping the Russian Orthodox faith intact and pure, especially as regards how homosexuality is viewed, may be at the core of this. More and more RO churches outside Russia have become independent of the Russian Pope (?), and often over changing attitudes on this issue. In places like Spain I guess it’s to be expected, but for Ukraine it’s a step too far or too close I suppose. It was an interesting read, I’m wondering if anyone here has any views to share.
@elbows Here’s the article. To do the linky thing, copy/paste the URL from the browser, remove everything in between the brackets (including the brackets), and remove the parentheses.
No - this is based on something real, but it is most unlikely to be the cause of anything. Putin is not that beholden to the patriarch of Moscow and has his own geopolitical agenda.
The struggle between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox church heated up in a big way in 2018 when the patriarch of Constantinople (considered first among equals) granted autocephalous status to Ukraine. It’s a big and thorny issue in Eastern Orthodox circles. So I have no doubt the patriarch of Moscow is fully backing Putin on this one. He regards that separation as illegitimate. But the tail does not wag the dog - it is not a cause, just more justification.
I don’t think wanting to suppress gay pride parades is Russia’s motivation for invading Ukraine, but I do agree with Richard Hanania that Western liberals’ hatred of Russia is driven by LGBT issues:
Besides being an anti-gay diatribe, the screech was written on January 26. You know, back when Tucker Carlson was saying he supported Russia and how could anyone hate Putin?
That world is dead and gone, blasted into rubble like Ukrainian cities.
Considering how laughably wrong that article’s predictions of the military results in Ukraine were, one wonders why anyone would give the tiniest benefit of the doubt to anything else in the article.
True, it’s not Ukrainian insurgency - because the Ukrainian military is still fighting, in spite of his prediction that Russia will get whatever it wants because of its great army.
Since he got all this wrong, why should we beleive anything else he said?
Plus, anyone who uses a US tv show as the starting point for his political analysis, whether that’s House of Cards or The West Wing, isn’t really worth listening to.
I was likewise amused that he’s so steeped in his own bullshit that he could not even imagine a situation where the Ukranian military is still operating, and went straight to assuming there’d only be an insurgency left.
There are more gems on his main page, such as:
Yes, foreign policy elites are worse than Putin
He apparently appeared on Tucker Carlson. Which probably tells you all you need to know.
To the OP: In the sense that Trumpism is about bullying transgender kids.
In other words, not really, but it’s a good distraction for rich motherfuckers to try to screw the rest of us over even more so than they already do.
I have no doubt that Putin hates the fact that being gay isn’t illegal in Ukraine, but that’s not the real cause for the war any more than disputes between Orthodox bishops are.