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Desatanization

Tagswar justificationdehumanizationcivilizational claimdisinformation tactic

EquivalentsRUДесатанизация

Definition

Section titled “Definition”

Desatanization (desatanizatsiya) is a Russian state propaganda narrative that frames geopolitical conflict — above all the invasion of Ukraine — as a literal, metaphysical holy war against demonic or Satanic forces. Emerging as a rhetorical escalation when earlier, secular pretexts failed to mobilise the public, the term recasts state aggression as a divine mandate. By categorising the targeted nation, its government, and its Western allies as manifestations of absolute evil, the narrative seeks to delegitimise their existence, identity, and religious diversity. It works both as a mechanism of profound dehumanisation and as a theological licence for unrestricted warfare.

Origin and history

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The term “desatanization” entered the official Russian propaganda lexicon in late 2022. It marked a deliberate pivot by the Kremlin after a series of military setbacks and the failure of the initial Denazification narrative to resonate at home or abroad. “Denazification” had proven historically confusing and conceptually hollow; state media and officials shifted to a framework that required no historical or political literacy, relying instead on a binary of good against evil.

The concept was crystallised in the state-aligned weekly Argumenty i Fakty in late October 2022, when Alexei Pavlov, assistant secretary of the Russian Security Council, published an article explicitly calling for the “desatanization” of Ukraine. Pavlov claimed the country had become a “totalitarian hypersect” hostile to traditional Orthodox values, and listed the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement among “hundreds of neo-pagan cults” supposedly operating there. The article drew international condemnation for this antisemitic claim, prompting a rare statement from the Security Council secretary, Nikolai Patrushev, distancing the body from it and apologising to followers of Chabad — but the broader theological framing was rapidly adopted by the state apparatus.1

While the terminology is recent, the underlying narrative draws on an entrenched imperial and Orthodox-fundamentalist tradition. It is heavily influenced by the Tsarist-era idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome” — the last bastion of pure Christianity defending the world against moral collapse. Over the past decade this has been weaponised by figures such as Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church and ultranationalist ideologues like Alexander Dugin, who cultivated the idea of a morally pure Russian World locked in an existential clash with a degraded, demonic Collective West. Long before the full-scale invasion, Kirill framed shifting Western social norms — particularly on LGBT rights — as the metaphysical dividing line between civilisation and Satanic forces (see Gayropa).

Function in propaganda

Section titled “Function in propaganda”

The primary function of the desatanization narrative is to provide an unassailable, absolute justification for state violence that transcends political logic or international law.

The frame is used to:

  • set open-ended, unquantifiable war aims: by defining the enemy as abstract metaphysical evil rather than a conventional military or political force, the Kremlin removes any measurable criteria for victory, negotiation, or de-escalation, allowing the conflict to continue indefinitely;
  • license extreme violence and atrocities: casting adversaries as literal agents of Satan strips them of human rights, dignity, and moral consideration, implicitly justifying war crimes, torture, and the deliberate targeting of civilians as righteous measures against the demonic;
  • collapse diverse identities into a single threat: the narrative conflates Ukrainian Orthodox communities, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims who reject Moscow’s authority into a monolithic “Satanic” entity;
  • transfer historical and religious legitimacy: it borrows the visceral resonance of medieval crusades and holy wars to clothe a modern war of aggression in the righteousness of a divine mandate;
  • weaponise domestic cultural anxieties: it leverages homophobia, xenophobia, and unease over shifting global norms, equating Western liberalism, secularism, and human rights with literal Satanism (see Traditional Values).

The claim that the Russian state is waging a holy war to protect Orthodox Christianity from Satanic forces is counterfactual. The factual record shows Russian forces frequently targeting and destroying Orthodox Christian heritage. Since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, the Russian military has damaged, looted, or destroyed hundreds of religious sites in Ukraine, the majority of them Orthodox.2

The pattern long predates 2022. During the wars in Abkhazia and the Tskhinvali region in the 1990s, Russian military forces, allied Apsuan proxy militias, and North Caucasian militants (such as Shamil Basayev and his Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus) waged a campaign against ethnic Georgians that Georgia recognises as genocide. This alliance systematically desecrated and destroyed historic Georgian Orthodox churches and killed Georgian Orthodox clergy and believers. Rather than protecting the faith, Russian intervention was marked by the violent erasure of an ancient Christian presence in the service of imperial territorial aims.3

Key examples

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  • Late October 2022: Alexei Pavlov, assistant secretary of the Russian Security Council, wrote that “with the continuation of the special military operation, it becomes more and more urgent to carry out the desatanization of Ukraine,” asserting that the state must eliminate hundreds of dangerous cults supposedly acting at the behest of Western powers.1
  • 30 September 2022: in his address announcing the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Vladimir Putin accused Western elites of abandoning religion and family and embracing what he called “outright Satanism.”4
  • October 2022: Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov branded the war a “jihad” against “Satanism,” telling followers that “Satanic democracy” is an affront to the Almighty that must be eradicated by force.5
  • March 2022 onward: Patriarch Kirill has repeatedly framed the invasion as a metaphysical struggle, casting it as a defence against global forces seeking to impose “gay parades” and alien moral standards on the canonical territory of the Russian church — and Ukrainian resistance as alignment with the demonic.2
  • Ongoing state-media broadcasts: hosts such as Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan routinely invoke a “holy war” (svyashchennaya voyna), telling audiences that Russian soldiers are fighting demons, witches, and the Antichrist in Ukraine.5

The domestic record

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The “desatanization” narrative relies on projecting Russia as the global vanguard of traditional Christian morality against a degraded, secular West. Russia’s own sociological and demographic figures sharply contradict that projection.

  • Religious practice: although roughly two-thirds of Russians identify as Orthodox, actual practice is among the lowest of any Orthodox-majority country. A 2017 Pew study found only about 6 percent of Russian Orthodox adults attend services weekly, and just 15 percent call religion “very important” in their lives.6
  • Divorce and family structure: Russia has one of the highest divorce rates in the world — roughly 3.9–4.7 per 1,000 people in recent years, with well over half of marriages ending in dissolution — undercutting its claim to be the ultimate defender of the traditional family.7
  • Abortion: Russia long recorded among the world’s highest abortion rates, and the figure remains high by European standards; official statistics counted roughly 400,000 abortions in 2021, and because Rosstat data often exclude private clinics the true number is likely higher.8
  • Domestic violence: in 2017 Russia partially decriminalised domestic violence (the so-called “slapping law”), downgrading a first offence of battery against a family member that causes no serious medical injury from a criminal to an administrative matter.9
  • HIV: Russia has one of the world’s fastest-growing HIV epidemics, with more than a million citizens living with the virus and the highest rate of new diagnoses in the European region — a crisis worsened by the state’s rejection of evidence-based prevention in favour of “traditional values” rhetoric.10

The state’s geopolitical record further exposes its claim to be the protector of Orthodoxy. In the early 1990s Russian intelligence and military forces armed, trained, and fought alongside militants — most notably Shamil Basayev, who would later orchestrate mass-casualty terrorist attacks inside Russia — in a campaign that drove Orthodox Georgians from Abkhazia and that Georgia recognises as genocide. Russian-backed forces killed Georgian Orthodox clergy, among them the 29-year-old hieromonk Andria (Kurashvili), murdered when the village of Kamani fell in July 1993.3 After the war the cultural erasure continued: at the 11th-century Ilori Church of St George in Abkhazia, the Russian-backed occupation authorities whitewashed ancient Georgian frescoes and inscriptions during a 2010–2011 “restoration” and capped the church with a Russian-style onion dome, effacing its Georgian identity.11

Why it matters

Section titled “Why it matters”

The shift to “desatanization” is a severe escalation in the Kremlin’s approach to domestic control and international conflict. By raising geopolitical aggression from a secular dispute over territory into an existential battle between God and Satan, the state builds a closed ideological system in which diplomatic compromise, negotiation, or territorial concession is framed as apostasy and surrender to absolute evil.

This narrative supplies the psychological infrastructure to radicalise the population and the military. When state media and religious authorities convince soldiers they are fighting literal demons rather than people defending their homeland, the moral barriers against war crimes — the execution of civilians, sexual violence, the targeted destruction of civilian infrastructure — are systematically dismantled.

The framework also provides sweeping cover for repression. Within Russia and in the occupied territories of Ukraine, Abkhazia, and the Tskhinvali region, religious groups that refuse to subordinate themselves to the Moscow Patriarchate or the Kremlin’s directives are increasingly criminalised and dismantled under vague “extremism” and “terrorism” statutes — all under the guise of cleansing society of demonic influence.

See also

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Sources

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Mentioned in

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Footnotes

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  1. Pavlov’s “desatanization” op-ed appeared in Argumenty i Fakty in late October 2022; on the Chabad-Lubavitch controversy and Nikolai Patrushev’s distancing statement and apology, see “Russian official apologizes for op-ed that country’s Jewish leaders called ‘vulgar antisemitism’,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 30 October 2022. ↩ ↩2

  2. USCIRF, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Implications for Religious Freedom (2023): on Patriarch Kirill’s framing of the war and the documented destruction of hundreds of religious sites in Ukraine, most of them Orthodox. ↩ ↩2

  3. On the genocide of Georgians in Abkhazia (1992–1993), recognised in the OSCE summit declarations of Budapest (1994), Lisbon (1996), and Istanbul (1999) and by the Georgian Parliament; and on the Kamani massacre (July 1993), in which the hieromonk Andria (Kurashvili) was killed. ↩ ↩2

  4. Address by the President of the Russian Federation on the accession of the DPR, LPR, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions, 30 September 2022 (kremlin.ru): Putin’s reference to Western “outright Satanism.” ↩

  5. “The ‘desatanization’ of Ukraine: Orthodox Christianity as a weapon in the Kremlin’s hybrid war,” Factcheck.bg, 2023 — on Kadyrov’s “jihad against Satanism” rhetoric and the “holy war” framing on Russian state television. ↩ ↩2

  6. Pew Research Center, Religious Belief and National Belonging in Central and Eastern Europe (2017): about 6% of Russian Orthodox adults attend weekly; corroborated by Levada Center surveys showing Russia among the least religiously observant Orthodox-majority countries. ↩

  7. Rosstat (Federal State Statistics Service), Demographic Yearbook of Russia: a crude divorce rate of roughly 3.9–4.7 per 1,000, among the highest in the world, with more than half of marriages ending in divorce. ↩

  8. Rosstat, Healthcare in Russia: roughly 400,000 abortions recorded in 2021; figures often exclude private clinics and likely understate the total. ↩

  9. “Russia: Bill to Decriminalize Domestic Violence,” Human Rights Watch, 2017; first-offence family battery causing no serious injury was downgraded from a criminal to an administrative offence (signed into law 7 February 2017). ↩

  10. UNAIDS, Country Factsheets: Russian Federation, and WHO European Region data: more than a million people living with HIV and the highest rate of new diagnoses in the European region. ↩

  11. “Georgian Monuments Under Threat,” Institute for War and Peace Reporting, 2011: on the 2010–2011 “restoration” of the 11th-century Ilori Church of St George, which whitewashed Georgian inscriptions and frescoes and added a Russian-style onion dome. ↩