A video of a bearded man wearing headphones and repeatedly firing a pistol at a shooting range recently triggered a frenzy on social media. The man in question is Metropolitan Hilarion, at one time the second-ranking cleric in the Russian Orthodox Church. According to the Hungarian and Czech journalists who published the clip, the shooting gallery is inside the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the FSB. They claim the footage points to the bishop’s ties to Russia’s secret services. While I can’t confirm the location, it is arguably not a great look for a senior Russian cleric to be seen firing a gun— even for fun — nearly four years into a war in which people are dying every day. But, as the world now knows, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Church, did not call for peace when Moscow launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Early on, he blamed the conflict on Europe’s gay pride parades, suggesting that the pro-Russian Donbas was paying the price for its “fundamental rejection” of such degenerate Western values. His position has not wavered since.
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