The two Russian cadets stand solemnly, crossing themselves and bowing in front of the iconostasis of a small, newly built Orthodox chapel. A choral liturgy plays in the background.
The Defense Ministry video depicting the ritual does not indicate exactly where the chapel is, only somewhere in the Siberian region of Novosibirsk. Nor does it say when the event occurred or who the men were.
What the September 8 video does highlight is that the chapel is named for a 14th century canonized warrior prince whose newly unearthed bones the Kremlin hopes will serve as a new weapon to turn the tide of battle after 4 1/2 years of all-out war on Ukraine.
Dug up from a Kremlin cathedral to great fanfare, the bones of Dmitry Donskoi — a Muscovy prince who led the first successful battle against the Mongol-Tatar forces that occupied what is now western Russia for nearly two centuries — are now on a road trip.
Officials are sending parts of the remains to various locations around Russia. Donskoi’s right hand, meanwhile, is being sent to the front lines, where soldiers are expected to venerate it for divine battlefield protection or otherwise.
The remains of the 14th-century warrior prince Dmitry Donskoi had been interred in a Kremlin cathedral for centuries.
Since being dug up in July, the fragments have received slavish coverage on Russian state television, not to mention Tsargrad TV, a conservative channel owned by billionaire ultranationalist Konstantin Malofeyev. Malofeyev, who has described the Ukraine invasion as a “holy war,” called the relics a “miracle” heralding a coming victory.
President Vladimir Putin, who has cast the war in religious or messianic terms, paid a highly publicized visit to the cathedral where Donskoi’s remains had been interred a few weeks after the digging up.
The event comes as the Kremlin has still fallen short of its original goals of the February 2022 invasion, despite suffering more casualties — dead and wounded — than all the wars fought by Moscow since 1945 combined. Those goals include ousting the government, seizing the entirety of the eastern Donbas region, and ensuring Ukraine never joins NATO.
In Russian history, “there is this idea that having the right icon is going to transform your fortunes on the battlefield,” said Lucy Ash, author of the 2024 book The Baton and the Cross: Russia’s Church from Pagans to Putin. “In a way it may smack slightly of desperation.”
“This is a language that Putin speaks. It’s historical. It’s sacred history, it’s highly symbolic, and really plays to a domestic audience,” said Amy Adams, a professor of Russian studies and world literatures at the College of Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts. “It’s that constant overlap of the sacred and the military, which is absolutely nothing new” in Russian history.
A Ukrainian soldier inspects the remains of a destroyed Russian tank.
From Kulikovo To The Donbas
Russian history is littered with examples of religious icons being brandished in battle. Events involving actual relics or fragments of saints’ bodies, however, are rare, historians said.
In 1170, when the principality of Suzdal laid siege to the city of Novgorod, the defenders took an icon called the Our Lady of the Sign from a local church and, legend has it, caused the attackers to go blind.
Another icon, Our Lady of Vladimir, purportedly protected Moscow from the 14th-century invasion from the Central Asian conqueror Tamerlane, or Timur. During the Time of Troubles, a period of internal turmoil around 1600, the Our Lady of Kazan icon was credited with helping to drive out the Polish forces that briefly occupied Moscow.
In the early 1700, when Peter the Great fought Sweden largely for control of Baltic Sea trading routes, he unearthed the remains of Aleksandr Nevsky — a warrior prince who had battled the Swedes centuries earlier — from a church in Vladimir, outside Moscow, and brought them to the newly built city of St. Petersburg.
In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the Smolensk Mother of God icon gets mention as the real-life Russian General Mikhail Kutuzov prays and kisses the icon amid the battle to repel Napoleon’s invading French Army in 1812.
Putin sparked an outcry when he ordered the sacred 600-year-old Trinity icon, pained by Andrei Rublev, transferred from the Tretyakov Museum to the Sergiyev Posad monastery.
“It’s not unlike the Catholics and the whole belief of the healing power in relics, but here, the way that relics and icons are deployed in battle, it’s on a whole other level,” said Ash, a former BBC Moscow correspondent.
Donskoi’s exploits have been taught to schoolchildren for generations.
A prince of the principality of Muscovy, Donskoi’s forces defeated a Mongol commander in 1380 in a field called Kulikovo about 200 kilometers south of Moscow. The victory was seen as a turning point in the Mongol occupation and paved the way for Muscovy to become the heart of the embryonic Russian state.
Donskoi was canonized during the final years of the Soviet Union in 1988, during the Gorbachev reforms known as glasnost, or openness.
‘A Holy War’
A former KGB officer raised under the official atheist policies of the Soviet Union, Putin has publicly embraced Russian Orthodoxy with growing fervor as he has become Russia’s longest-serving leader since Josef Stalin.
Particularly where Ukraine is concerned.
In 2014, after Russia seized the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, Putin depicted Crimea as a holy land, “the Temple Mount” for Russians. The peninsula was the site of the baptism of Kievan Rus ruler Grand Prince Volodymyr in 988, adopting Christianity as the state religion.
In July 2014, days after a Malaysian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine by a Russian surface-to-air missile, Putin joined the 700th anniversary celebration for Sergius of Radonezh. Historians say the 14th-century monk played a key role in uniting princes, including Dmitry Donskoi, to fight against the Mongols.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, meanwhile, has avidly embraced Putin and the military.
Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has given a full-throated endorsement of the war on Ukraine.
Once rare in the armed forces, Orthodox chaplains now frequently provide pastoral counseling at forward positions. Priests frequently are seen sprinkling holy water on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines, and other warfighting equipment.
Kirill has also given a full-throated endorsement of the war on Ukraine, which itself is predominantly Orthodox Christian. In March 2024, he oversaw publication of a decree that declared the invasion to be a “holy war,” which is also “protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism.”
Dozens of priests, meanwhile, have been defrocked, punished, or persecuted for voicing opposition to the war.
Donskoi’s remains in the Kremlin cathedral were not a secret. They’ve been there for centuries alongside members of the Russian royal family, whose remains were moved after St. Petersburg became the Russian capital under Peter the Great.
In July, architects were repairing the cathedral’s structure when workers reportedly discovered cracks in the sarcophagus containing Donskoi’s remains.
Officials then decided to open the sarcophagus for the first time to great fanfare and with Kirill’s blessing, not to mention applause from pro-war nationalist bloggers on Telegram.
“Before the decisive battle for the liberation of the Donbas, the patron saint of the military appears next to the army,” one blogger wrote. “Russia is once again taking to Kulikovo field. This means victory is just around the corner.”
On August 20, Putin himself visited the 16th-century Cathedral of the Archangel, and prayed in the sanctuary, an event that was broadcast widely on state TV.
On September 8 — the same day that the Defense Ministry released its video – Donskoi’s hand was reportedly brought to a war memorial in a Russia-occupied part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
The spectacle surrounding Donskoi’s fragments, underscores just how deeply intertwined the church is with government policy, said Aleksandr Zanemonets, an Orthodox priest and researcher at the University of Haifa, Israel, and Radboud University in the Netherlands.
“A state embroiled in war will try to compel all institutions, including religious ones, to participate in it,” he said.
“The Russian Orthodox Church is essentially left with no ministry but a ‘patriotic’ one, into which Prince Dmitry…fits perfectly,” he wrote in a commentary published on September 8. “People get almost nothing from the Church that they cannot get from state TV.”
