On March 27, just a few days before most Christians celebrate what Saint Paul considered to be the central element of the Christian faith — Christ’s resurrection from the dead — Kirill’s church adopted a programmatic document that indirectly though unmistakably endorses killing, death and genocide. It’s called the “Order of the 25th World Russian People’s Council, ‘The Present and Future of the Russian World’” — and it makes for terrifying reading. Part One is dedicated to the “Special Military Operation,” Putin’s euphemism for his invasion of and war against Ukraine. Kirill, clearly, rejects Jesus’ advice that the things that belong to Caesar should be given to Caesar. And why not? Russian Orthodoxy has become a central component of the Kremlin’s propaganda. “The special military operation [SMO] is a new stage in the national liberation struggle of the Russian people against the criminal Kyiv regime and the collective West behind it, waged … since 2014,” says Part One. “During the SMO, the Russian people, with arms in hand, defend their lives, freedom, statehood, civilizational, religious, national and cultural identity, as well as the right to live on their own land within the borders of a single Russian state.”.. Then Kirill shows his true face: “After the completion of the SMO, the entire territory of modern Ukraine should enter the zone of exclusive influence of Russia. The possibility of the existence in this territory of a Russophobic political regime hostile to Russia and its people, as well as a political regime controlled from an external center hostile to Russia, must be completely excluded.” The last two words are key. Complete exclusion is possible only if all Ukrainians are either killed or deported — that is, if Russia completes the genocide it’s already committing. Putin couldn’t have put the case for mass murder and war any better... Reunification is code for exterminating and/or assimilating Ukrainians and Belarusians. Their names will survive, but their languages, cultures, identities and histories will not, having been swallowed up by the “Great Russians.” Destroying the “soul” of a nation in this way is just what Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish scholar who coined the word genocide, meant by the term.