” Presently, I am standing in Kyiv, at the foundation of the Desyatynna Church — the first church of Kyivan Rus. ( This is where Rus was baptized, where Kyiv was baptized. The church was destroyed in 1240 during the Mongol assault on Kyiv).
Last month, “someone” Ilya Vaskovsky, an associate professor at St. Petersburg University (only an associate professor, but, will probably, soon make an academic career, considering his “historical discovery”), published the monograph “The Papacy and the Mongol Empire.”
What is this monograph about? Its main message is that the Mongols attacked Kyivan Rus for a reason. (The Mongols attacked Russia because they were paid. And who paid them? Of course – the Vatican!)
According to the version of the pseudo-historian Vaskovsky, the Vatican shipped a ton of gold to the Mongol Empire. With this money, the then Khan Baty went on a campaign to destroy Kyiv Rus, to destroy the centre of Orthodoxy, so to speak, to destroy the “Russian Faith”. Today, this hypothesis is being seriously discussed in Russia. Moreover, they write that this new ideological concept will soon be recorded in Russian school textbooks.
This means, it radically changes the view on the Tatar-Mongol yoke, on the Mongolian expansion – it turns out that all this was organized by the West. So, the Mongols attacked China just like that. In Asia, Bukhara was taken, and the Caucasus was simply taken the same way. Of course, the Mongols were paid for the campaign in Russia. And the Pope paid, – believes Vaskovsky.
What does this say? This suggests that Russia is running out of arguments for the domestic public that would help mobilize Russians for the war in Ukraine.
This confrontation with the West, which is “trying to destroy civilization, to destroy Russia and the Russian Empire,”* is an eternal Russian ideological concept. It existed under the tsar, then continued under the Bolsheviks, and is now being cultivated under Putin. This ideology needs new arguments. The Russians came up with such an argument, that this confrontation supposedly has a thousand-year history. Therefore, it will now be actively “sold” to the Russian citizen.
However, there is one “but”. The “but” is: how exactly will they explain this to other nationalities that Russia has enslaved and subjugated, whose representatives they are sending to war in Ukraine? How do you explain it to Buryats (and Buryats are, in fact, Mongols)? How do you explain it to Tatars, Bashkirs, Kalmyks? Why should they defend “traditional Russian values” today in the eternal “struggle with the West”? Why should they die in this war? There is a problem here.
Therefore, of course, if these enslaved small nations (in fact, not so small, they are multi-millions, such as the Tatars and Bashkirs), now ask the following question: “For what values are they dying in this war?” (allegedly, for the protection of the values of the Orthodox world), the Russian authorities have no answer to such questions.
So, today we have to do everything so that these questions are raised loudly in Russia, and the Russian empire is destroyed from the inside!
P.S.: I wonder what the Vatican thinks about all this? Because Moscow, ostensibly extending its “hand of friendship” to the Pope, approving his statements about Russia, is actually inciting its citizens against Catholics, the global West, and is actually provoking further conflict between different civilizations, Orthodox Christians and Catholics. What does the Vatican think about this? Do they realize the danger of the manifestation of such pseudo-historical trends? How will the Vatican react to all this?”
*For some reason, Russians believe that Rus (Kyivan Rus) is Russia, and not Ukraine, which is what it really is.
