Russia’s claim to be a defender of traditional and Christian values is a calculated instrument of political influence rather than a reflection of the Kremlin’s own conduct, speakers warned at an ECR Group conference in the European Parliament on Wednesday.

Hosted by ECR MEPs Mariusz Kamiński and Rihards Kols, the conference “Russia as a false defender of traditional values” brought together politicians, security experts, researchers and former intelligence officials to examine how Moscow adapts ideological narratives to different audiences in order to exploit divisions, weaken democratic societies and advance Russian interests.

Mariusz Kamiński MEP, co-host of the conference opened the conference, saying:

“Putin would like Russia to be seen as a defender of traditional, conservative values. But what he calls patriotism is simply imperialism, which we see every day in Ukraine. And for a former officer of the communist KGB, religion and the Church are merely useful tools serving the interests of the regime.”

Rihards Kols MEP, co-host of the conference, argued that this flexibility is precisely what makes the Kremlin’s narrative so effective:

“Russia is not a false defender of traditional values. It is not a defender of any values at all. It has no fixed values, only instruments. It picks up and discards whatever narrative sells fastest in whichever market it is targeting.”

Alexandr Vondra MEP, former member of the anti-communist opposition and former Czech Minister of Defence, pointed to the contradiction between Russia’s claim to defend Christianity and the conduct of the Russian state and religious hierarchy:

“One of the most fundamental Christian commandments is ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Yet senior figures in the Russian Orthodox Church have supported Russia’s war effort and portrayed the deaths of Russian soldiers in religious and sacrificial terms. The problem is therefore not simply that the Church supports the state. The deeper problem is that Christian morality is being subordinated to state ideology.”

Tomasz Szatkowski, ECR Group Secretary-General, former Polish Ambassador to NATO and moderator of the conference, placed these narratives in the wider context of Russian cognitive and reflexive warfare:

“Russia’s cognitive warfare exploits the vacuum that emerges when we fail to defend the authentic meaning of traditional values with sufficient determination. The Kremlin uses what is known as reflexive warfare, targeting both pseudo-conservative circles and parts of the liberal and left-wing spectrum in order to deepen divisions and weaken our societies. We therefore need to challenge Russia not only by exposing its true aims and the consequences of its actions, but also by defending the proper meaning of the concepts and values it seeks to appropriate.”

Maciej Materka, Brig. Gen. (Res.), former head of Poland’s military counterintelligence service and representative of the Frontline Foundation, highlighted the particular challenge this poses for open democratic societies:

“The battle waged by hybrid weapons against an imperialist country such as Russia is an unequal one, as democracies struggle with their openness and the right to free speech – and even more so when it comes to combating fake news and hostile narratives.”

Lech Wojciechowski, former deputy head of Poland’s internal security agency and representative of the Frontline Foundation, recalled that Moscow’s hostility towards genuine conservatism has deep historical roots:

“The Soviets were particularly relentless in attacking those leaders of the free world who had not fallen for this: Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II. They had staunch allies in the European left, which was by then rooted in 1968 and hostile to conservatism.”

Stanisław Żaryn of the National Security Institute Foundation warned that such narratives are part of a wider effort to weaken Western societies from within:

“Russian propaganda readily invokes values, but uses them cynically to manipulate society, manage fear and build hostility towards the West. The Kremlin also uses the claim that Russia is a defender of traditional values for these purposes. We must not accept this image of Russia. It is a falsehood spread in the service of Russian imperialism.”

Kateryna Nastoiashcha of the Institute for National Resilience and Security showed how this broader influence strategy can operate through religious structures in Europe, with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) providing Moscow with an established network through which narratives, loyalties and influence can be sustained:

“The Russian Orthodox Church sustains Russian influence in the EU behind the cover of freedom of conscience stand national-security risks. Two audiences share one space of influence: refugees and the Russian-speaking diaspora are fields of long-term influence on political attitudes and democratic resilience.”

Andis Kudors, Lecturer at the University of Latvia, drew attention to the way in which the war against Ukraine has been given an explicitly religious justification:

“World Russian People’s Council lead by Kiril defined the invasion of Ukraine as a holy war. Those people are saying that the Holy War is what? When Russian Orthodox soldiers are killing Ukrainian Orthodox soldiers – this is their Jihad. This is not spiritual, this is not Christian, this is the moral degradation of the Moscow leadership.”

Sergei Chapnin, author of the report Faith under Pressure, argued that this inversion goes to the heart of the contradiction between the Kremlin’s rhetoric and Christian teaching:

“The martyr is a witness, holy because he would rather die than kill. Kirill’s formula makes the opposite man holy: the one who kills. The martyr is replaced by the killer. So the cult of life ends up producing a theology of dying. Russia, as the self-proclaimed defender of Christianity, ends up producing an anti-Christianity. This isn’t a stricter kind of faith. It’s a different religion, wearing Christian clothes.”

Avital Sahar, Cognitive Warfare & OSINT Expert, warned that Russia’s strategy goes beyond attacking individual Western values and seeks instead to alter their very meaning:

“We are behaving as if Russia is attacking our values. They are not. They stole the dictionary and are rewriting what our values mean. Once you own the dictionary, you don’t need an army you just won the war. They’ve made everything radioactive especially the values that you need to defend your own country.”

Batu Kutelia, former head of Georgia’s foreign intelligence and former Ambassador of Georgia to the United States, said that the same imperial logic can operate through institutions as well as through territorial conquest:

“Russian imperialism does not always need to capture land. It can capture the institutions through which a society exercises sovereignty. Land capture and state capture are different instruments of the same strategic logic. As Reagan said, ‘this is a test of wills and ideas.’

“Our task is to ensure that, when this Russian imperial experiment reaches yet another historic failure in Ukraine, Europe has not lost the will to defend the civilisation that made freedom possible in the first place. Not because Europe is anti-Russian, but because free Ukraine and free Georgia disprove the Kremlin’s central civilisational claim.”

Peter Doran of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, former President of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), summed up the wider confrontation in stark terms:

“We are in a battle between the culture of life and Russia’s culture of death. Russia’s culture of death is killing its own society and exporting death to its neighbours.”