This article examines how the Russian Orthodox Church has contributed to the ideological foundation of the “One People” myth, particularly through its interpretation of the baptism of Rus’ as a unifying historical and theological event.
In September 2022, the Russian occupying forces organised a ‘referendum’ in Kherson and Zaporizhzha, two Ukrainian oblasts which were partially under their control. In preparation for this event, billboards were put up in Kherson proclaiming the Russians and the Ukrainians to be ‘One People’. This slogan was taken from an article posted by the Russian President Vladimir Putin sixteen months earlier, on 12 July 2021, on the Kremlin’s official website.
Many people who took the time and effort to read this text at the time it was published, in the western world at least, probably dismissed it as bizarre and not to be taken seriously; after all, everyone “knows” that Ukrainians and Russians are separate peoples. After the events of 24 February 2022, it is clear that the language used in this text was part of the Kremlin’s ideological preparation for the attack on Ukraine half a year later.
But where did this “one people” claim come from? In fact, it has a rather long pedigree, as an accepted (but also disputed) notion in Russian identity debates in the 19th century, and a crucial element of Tsarist nationality policy. It is also a staple component in Russian nationalist thinking after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin was simply reviving ideas that had been circulating for a long time.
Also the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has contributed its mite to the “one people” mythologization. Since 2011–12, ROC has become one of the most important providers of legitimacy and ideological orientation for the Putin regime. The two latest heads of the ROC, Patriarchs Aleksii (Ridiger) and Kirill (Gundiaev), may be regarded as two of the pioneers of the ‘One People’ ideology in post-Soviet Russia. They give it a peculiar religious twist by linking it to the fact that the Orthodox church in both Ukraine and Russia originates from the christianization of the East Slav population under Grand Prince Volodymyr/Vladimir I of Kyiv in the late 10th century. Metaphorically this is referred to as “the baptism of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples”.
In September 2004, Patriarchs Aleksii claimed that “our peoples were baptised in the same baptismal font more than a thousand years ago and still feel their inseparable spiritual community”. Four years later the Bishops’ Council of the Russian Orthodox church under the leadership of Patriarch Aleksii issued a statement saying that, the “Dnieper baptismal font became our peoples’ common source of asceticism and spiritual life, statehood and Christian culture. Here, Holy Rus’ was born.” At this stage, however, the claim was more that Ukrainians and Russians are closely related fraternal peoples rather than one and the same people. That would change with patriarch Kirill. Under his leadership the ROC has become “nationalized” in two different ways: it increasingly identifies with the Russian state and state authorities. Even if Russia constitutionally is a secular state, the church is aspiring towards a status as a “state church”, based on the Byzantine ideal of “symphonic” relations between state and church. At the same time, under Kirill it has gone from identifying equally with all ethnic groups in Russia to highlighting the role of the Russian people in the ethnic sense. A clear expression of this was patriarch Kirill’s opening speech at the World Russian People’s Congress in 2014, when he singled out “Orthodoxy” and “the Russian (russkii) people” as spiritual bonds (skrepy), holding the people of Russia together. But his understanding of the russkii people harks back to the Tsarist model of a “triune” people consisting of three subgroups: the Great Russians, the Belarusians and the Malorossians (= the Ukrainians).
For a long time when patriarch Kirill talked about one “people”, he was referring to the Ukrainians and Russians (and Belarusians) as a religious category, as “the people of God”, rather than as an ethnic category. He has desperately tried to hold on to Ukraine as the exclusive canonical territory of the Moscow Patriarchate, a struggle which eventually failed when the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was recognised as autocephalous by the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople in 2019. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has used his authority to bolster President Putin’s claims about not only a shared spiritual, but also a shared ethnic and national identity of the Ukrainian-Russian people.
Patriarch Kirill has repeated this message numerous times. On 18 March 2022, three weeks after the Russian attack on Ukraine, he said in a sermon that the Russian Church is “called upon to preserve the spiritual unity of our people” and explicitly pointed out that by “our people” he meant “the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, a single people that emerged from the Kiev Baptismal Font.” Their unity, he claimed, in the current situation of hostilities “exposed to certain dangers”. This must be regarded as an understatement.
The Patriarch reiterated the same message in a sermon two days later, taking God as his witness that he was speaking the truth:
We are truly one people who come from the Kiev Baptismal font! I know that in Ukraine the opponents of this will shout: “Again, the Patriarch is saying that we are one people”, but the Patriarch cannot say otherwise, because this is the historical truth and God’s truth. And the fact that we live today in different countries does not change this historical truth and cannot change it.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s insistence that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people” because they were baptized in the same ancient font is more than a theological claim—it’s a political act. By framing medieval Christianization as the origin of a unified national soul, Patriarch Kirill transforms a symbolic spiritual event into an argument for cultural and territorial unity. But as scholars have pointed out, baptizing entire “peoples” retroactively imposes modern ideas of nationhood on a pre-modern world. This mythologizing of history serves a clear purpose: it blurs the lines between faith and nation, church and state, history and ideology. Instead of fostering spiritual connection, it legitimizes imperial ambition. In the current war, what’s being contested is not just land, but memory—and the right to define where a people begins, and where it belongs.
