Putin Targets Ukraine’s Sacred Sites in Strikes Echoing Nazi Tactics

As airstrikes intensify against historic cathedrals, synagogues and other places of worship across Ukraine, and as reports continue of religious leaders being targeted, one American scholar argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin is echoing some of the darkest strategies of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi war machine. The scholar has been monitoring alleged war crimes tied to Kremlin commanders during Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine.

The warning came only days after Moscow sent bomber aircraft against a roughly thousand-year-old monastery complex in Kyiv, one of the most important spiritual centers in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. According to the expert studying Russia’s expanding record of alleged human rights abuses during missile and drone attacks, the Kremlin’s approach resembles the Nazi Party’s campaign against religious leaders and worshippers, first in Germany and later across occupied Europe.

From the early stages of Moscow’s attempt to force Ukraine into submission, churches, temples, mosques and the people entrusted with protecting them have repeatedly found themselves in danger, said Mercedes Sapuppo, who documents atrocities and possible war crimes linked to Russia’s effort to seize and absorb Ukrainian territory.

Sapuppo frames Putin’s campaign as an imperial project, likening his effort to rebuild Russian dominance beginning with Ukraine to Hitler’s bid to construct a Greater German Reich by subduing neighboring countries.

Russia’s strikes on hundreds of religious sites, along with the killing of spiritual figures across Ukraine, bear disturbing similarities to Nazi tactics aimed at destroying central symbols of Christian and Jewish life, Sapuppo said in an interview.

Echoing the battle moves of the Third Reich, she says, “Targeting religion and cultural heritage is a part of Russia’s strategy to demoralize and destroy communities.”

“Russia’s killing of priests and other religious leaders in its contemporary war of aggression in Ukraine, its attacks on religious spaces … and incarceration and torture of faith leaders such as Muslim leaders and activists in Crimea are just some examples of how Russia carries out this tactic.”

Sapuppo is a scholar at the Atlantic Council, one of the top American think tanks on defense and diplomacy in Washington, D.C., and a onetime researcher at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Moscow has been stepping up its aerial assaults, via remotely piloted exploding drones and long-range missiles, on religious and cultural targets across the breadth of Ukraine this year, she says, as part of a long-standing campaign to extinguish its spiritual and artistic life.

The Kremlin’s tanks, missiles and compact bombers have already struck more than 500 irreplaceable cultural and religious sites, not counting the latest targeting of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery complex, a fantastical time tunnel back to the architecture and mosaics, frescos and icons of the 11^th century, according to scholars at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO.

“For centuries, the Kyiv-Pechersk Monastery, with relics of saints buried in caves, has been one of the most important Christian pilgrimage centers in the world,” UNESCO experts said on adding the sacred site to the UN’s World Heritage List.

“The architectural ensemble of Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra,” they added, “comprises unique surface and underground churches from the 11^th to the 19^th centuries, in a complex of labyrinthine caves.”

Russia’s new blitz on the Kyiv beacon is a surreal case of history repeating itself.

The site was initially bombed 85 years ago, when the city was under Nazi occupation.

World leaders across the West have been shell-shocked by this latest bombing, Sapuppo says. She points to the condemnation issued by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, who said the strike would be the equivalent of an enemy attack on the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, another globally venerated holy site.

“In Ukraine, once again last night, Vladimir Putin’s Russia showed the extent of its cruelty by massively striking the capital, Kyiv, causing extremely severe damage to the Dormition Cathedral within the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, a UNESCO World Heritage site, which for us, the French, is the equivalent of bombing Notre-Dame,” Barrot said.

In Washington, leading champions of protecting democracies and human rights worldwide across the U.S. House of Representatives are co-sponsoring a bill, “Countering Russia’s War on Faith Act,” that calls on the Secretary of State to closely monitor Russia’s assaults on Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Ukraine, and its destruction of religious citadels, and for the president to speedily impose sanctions on all Russian officials commanding these attacks.

“Russia has killed more than 50 Ukrainian priests, pastors, and other religious leaders during Russia’s invasion,” American legislators charged in the bill, “and many others have been abducted, detained, tortured, or forcibly disappeared in occupied territories.”

“The Russian Orthodox Church, led by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, has publicly framed the invasion in theological terms, describing the war as a ‘holy war,’” they added.

“As with the Nazi strikes on religious beacons across Europe, to attack Ukraine’s cultural and religious heritage,” Mercedes Sapuppo says, “is a deliberate and escalating attempt by Russia and its military to erase Ukraine.”

“This maps on to Russia’s attacks on other civilian infrastructure in Ukraine,” she told me. “I would also connect this strategy of war to Russia’s forced deportation, kidnapping, and reeducation and indoctrination of Ukrainian children.”

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court, based in the Netherlands, have already prepared an arrest warrant for Putin for orchestrating the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children, a practice that is specifically prohibited as a form of genocide under the founding legislation, the Rome Statute, setting up the Court.

Moscow’s barrage of airstrikes on spiritual citadels Ukraine-wide could add to the war crimes charges that Putin and his top commanders of the invasion face when they are finally arrested and extradited to the ICC in The Hague.

The Rome Statute prohibits “Intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected.”

“The attack on the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, which under the Rome Statute does constitute a war crime,” Sapuppo says, could provide additional grounds for the ICC to try Putin and his top commanders for a wider array of war crimes.

During a roundtable with journalists, diplomats and scholars at the Atlantic Council’s headquarters just days ago, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte condemned the Kremlin’s use of kamikaze drones to hit “a historic monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage site,” and called the strikes “the brutal acts of a weakened Russia.”

After presiding over a recent meeting of the NATO Ukraine Council in Kyiv, in defiance of the expanding bombing campaigns against the city, Secretary General Rutte visited the Saint Sophia Cathedral, another World Heritage wonder, with golden domes and a treasure trove of icons, that was bombed earlier this year.

Rutte said during the meet-up with reporters in Washington that more American PATRIOT interceptors “are essential to counter the ballistic missiles that Russia uses to target Ukraine cities and civilian infrastructure.”

Mercedes Sapuppo says that with its increasing brazen explosive assaults on Ukraine’s religious wonders, and drone incursions to buzz the airspace of nearby NATO nations, “Russia is testing the NATO alliance.”

“Since Russia’s tactics of war clearly include aggression directed against cultural heritage and religious spaces,” she warns, “NATO should be aware and prepared that that is part of Russia’s toolbox of warfare.”