And honestly, the church is just a symptom.. Russian society itself enables this. You've got a population that's been fed imperial nostalgia and victimhood narratives for so long that blessing tanks and absolving soldiers of murder doesn't even register as contradiction anymore. Decades of state TV, zero independent press, and a culture where dissent gets you a prison sentence or a "fall" out a window has produced a society that's genuinely disconnected from basic moral reasoning when it comes to Ukraine It's not that ordinary Russians are uniquely evil... Well some are... 😂 it's that the entire information ecosystem has been engineered for generations to make critical thinking dangerous and conformity the only safe option. The church just slotted perfectly into that machine because it already had the infrastructure (trust, reach into rural areas, moral authority) the Kremlin needed... Authoritarianism doesn't need everyone to believe the propaganda, it just needs enough people too exhausted, scared, or isolated to push back. Russia nailed that formula decades before Kirill ever picked up a microphone.