Moscow’s Other Front: Why Ukraine’s Churches Are a Security Issue

18 Sep 2026 12:00 PM

A CIA director and the Vatican’s foreign minister were in Moscow in August. The spy chief drew the coverage; the Archbishop’s visit showed religion belongs in any analysis and resolution of Russia’s war.

On 25 August 2026, two very different representatives of Western power were doing business in Moscow. CIA Director John Ratcliffe flew in unannounced aboard a US military transport for talks with Russian intelligence officials, delivering a bleak assessment of the war and warning against any attack on the Baltic states. He did not meet President Putin and President Trump dismissed the trip as ‘semi-routine’. That same day, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s British-born Foreign Secretary, met Sergei Lavrov and declared that the war in Ukraine must end. His five-day programme also took in meeting the Moscow Patriarchate and the small Catholic community.

The visits were not coordinated. Ratcliffe embodied raw US power; Archbishop Gallagher embodied soft Vatican influence exercised through access, historical memory and communion with believers across frontiers. The timing inevitably invited a ‘Bad-cop (Ratcliffe)/Good-cop (Gallagher)’ reading. Lavrov dismissed this, saying both visitors merely wanted to ‘come and talk’.

Strategic culture shaped the two missions differently. Western institutions tend to separate intelligence, diplomacy, military power and religion; Moscow treats them as mutually reinforcing. Kremlin and Moscow Patriarchate narratives combine territorial, historical, civilisational and spiritual claims, presenting NATO enlargement and Catholic pastoral activity as two expressions of the same Western encroachment. The war is therefore being fought not only over territory, but over the spiritual inheritance of contested lands.

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