Why Russia is sending dead princes and saints into battle

As Russian troops on the front lines of eastern Ukraine are digging in for another winter, they are receiving an unusual form of support: the remains of a warrior prince who fought for Moscow more than six centuries ago.

A fragment of the remains of Dmitry Donskoy, a prince celebrated in Russia for his victory at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, was sent to the front lines in early September and is now being sent around military bases in Russian-occupied Ukraine.

The military department of the Moscow Patriarchate, the Russian Orthodox Church’s clerical leadership, said the “saint commander” would invisibly stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Russian soldiers. The church added that the relic, a fragment of his right hand, was the same hand with which he wielded his sword at Kulikovo.

Sending a religious relic into battle may seem peculiar but since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has sought to use every avenue in what has become a grinding and bloody war of attrition, including invoking religious symbolism to portray its cause as “righteous” and divinely sanctioned. As a result, the relationship between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church has grown closer than ever.

“The church has practically merged with the state to the point of being indistinguishable,” said Sergei Chapnin, a religious scholar and director of communications at Fordham University’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

“From my point of view, the maximum (closeness) has been reached.”

Dispatching sacred relics to troops is a longstanding practice in Orthodox Christianity.

“This combination of the sacred and the material attracts attention,” said Chapnin, who used to work in the publishing house of the Moscow Patriarchate. “Of course, propaganda uses this.”

The remains of Donskoy also carry a contemporary message, experts say.

“He was not himself an aggressor, but a defender of the fatherland,” the scholar told CNN. From the government’s perspective, “it is very important to show that Russia is not the aggressor, that we are defending our territory.”

Chapnin called it “a mobilizing myth.”

“These myths, which connect different times and eras, can act quite powerfully on mass consciousness,” he said, adding that the relics are presented as “a magical artifact.”

Metropolitan Vladimir, the Russian-installed Orthodox leader in Donetsk and Mariupol, said the relic would help soldiers and civilians “mobilize both their spiritual and physical strength” and “triumph over the enemy.”

Donskoy is not the first warrior saint Russia has invoked during its war in Ukraine. Relics of Prince Alexander Nevsky, another medieval ruler-turned-symbol of Russian military glory, were also taken to troops earlier this year.

The timing of sending Donskoy’s remains into battle was also handy. The prince’s remains were uncovered during restoration work at the Kremlin’s Archangel Cathedral in August, weeks after unverified reports that the Nevsky relics had been lost.

Russian President Vladimir Putin called the recovery of the remains – whose location had been known since their burial – an “absolutely unique” and “marvelous discovery.” The pro-Kremlin leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, described it as “a special sign of God’s providence.

But for the Rev. Alexander Zanemonets, an Orthodox priest and historian born in Moscow who lived abroad for years before leaving Russia permanently after its invasion of Ukraine, the discovery “has nothing to do with Christianity.”

“It is undoubtedly the exploitation of Christianity and the exploitation of the church for ‘patriotic’ purposes.” In a church with relatively few active worshippers but strong state backing, incentives tend to align with the state, he said, calling the use of the remains a “cynical calculation.”

From 2022 to 2024, Zanemonets ministered to Ukrainian war refugees in the Orthodox Church of Finland. His service ended amid questions about his Ukrainian-language proficiency and ties to Russia, allegations he rejected in a Facebook post.

While it may appear cynical to some, many of those at the front have found themselves turning to God.

“Not all of us talk to God when things are going well, but everyone talks to God when things are bad,” one former Russian serviceman who previously fought in Ukraine told CNN.

He described makeshift churches built from whatever was available, soldiers praying before every mission and priests regularly visiting military units and hospitals.

“Like a field kitchen, there should be a priest everywhere,” he said, quoting a popular Russian expression: “We are Russians. God is with us.”

A Russian soldier currently serving in the Zaporizhzhia region also described the opportunity to speak to a priest, pray or touch a holy object as “serious moral support.”

As the war drags into its fifth year with no end in sight, the troops say the strain is growing. “The situation is tense overall and is only getting worse as the time goes on,” a Russian commander in Donbas told CNN.

The soldiers discussed their faith at the front on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Away from the front lines, the Russian Orthodox Church’s religious reach appears far more limited than its demonstrated political influence. A 2026 telephone survey by the state-run pollster VСIOM found about two-thirds of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians, down from roughly 80% 15 years ago.

But several priests and religious scholars told CNN that only about 2% of baptized Orthodox believers in Russia regularly practice their faith, a figure supported by Russian Interior Ministry data on attendance at Orthodox Christmas services.

Yet an annual religious procession promoted by far-right and nationalist groups in four Russian cities drew huge crowds in September, with more than 100,000 participants in Moscow alone, according to official figures. In the capital, worshippers carried a fragment of Donskoy’s relics through the streets in a procession led by Kirill.

According to Zanemonets, who now works at the Orthodox Church in America, such events primarily serve to demonstrate to the state how the church “can organize large numbers of people.”

Still, religious scholar and historian Konstantin Mikhailov called the turnout “a drop in the ocean” in a country of more than 145 million people, arguing that Russian society, contrary to the wishes of the state and the church, remains very secular.

To help expand its own influence, the church receives money and political backing from the Kremlin, while the Kremlin gains legitimacy because the church supports state narratives, Mikhailov argued, calling it a “mutually reinforcing” cycle.

The historian also said the cycle has fueled the growth of military chaplains on the front lines. For critics inside the church, however, that raises a difficult question about the kind of assistance priests should offer soldiers.

“We need to support people, including those in military uniform,” said the Rev. Grigory Mikhnov-Vaytenko, a Russian priest of the Apostolic Orthodox Church who helps Ukrainian refugees displaced by the war. “But the question is how we support them.”

“On the one hand, (you must) not deny people spiritual help, and on the other, not lead them into an illusion,” the priest told CNN.

The Russian Orthodox Church has taken a different view. Just days after Putin announced a partial mobilization in September 2022, Patriarch Kirill told worshippers that a soldier who dies while carrying out his military duty has made a sacrifice that “washes away all the sins.”

Ukraine has painstakingly sought to break away from the Russian Orthodox Church, formally splitting from it in 2019. Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the head of the global Orthodox church, recognized the establishment of an independent Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

Mikhnov-Vaytenko noted that Orthodox Christians make up a majority of the population in both Russia and Ukraine. The priest, who left the Russian Orthodox Church after Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, said the church as an institution “blesses its children to kill one another.”

Fordham University’s Chapnin called it a departure from how martyrdom has been understood in the Orthodox tradition for thousands of years. “The Gospel has a subordinate significance in relation to the tasks of state propaganda,” he said.

Meanwhile on the front lines, not every soldier who CNN spoke to saw the relics as meaningful support. One serviceman in the Donbas region, in occupied eastern Ukraine, called it “a very unconventional solution to our problems in the 21st century.”

“My view is that they are needed more by the mothers of the guys who died in this military operation,” he added.