Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), said during a sermon at the Holy Trinity Seraphim-Diveyevo Convent on 1 August that the Soviet Union's creation of the nuclear bomb was the result of divine intervention.
The Russian Church under Kirill operates in close alignment with the Russian state, and critics describe it as a de facto arm of Kremlin influence abroad. Ukraine's security service, which has investigated him, counts him among Putin's inner circle. Kirill's own ties to the Russian state reach back decades: Swiss media reported in February 2023 that he worked for Soviet intelligence in 1970s Geneva under the code name "Mikhailov" while officially representing the Moscow Patriarchate at the World Council of Churches.
The patriarch delivered the sermon after the Divine Liturgy on the feast marking the uncovering of the relics of the Orthodox saint Seraphim of Sarov. The Russian Orthodox Church and its nuclear-weapons complex have long cast Seraphim as the patron saint of Russia's nuclear arsenal. Kirill credited the bomb's creation to God's mercy and, in particular, to the prayers of the saint, saying it saved the country from "terrible destruction, as a result of which neither the country nor its people could have remained."
The Soviet nuclear weapons center was built in 1946 in the closed city of Sarov, also known as Arzamas-16, on the grounds of the Dormition Monastery that the Bolsheviks shut in 1927. The Sarov-based design bureau (KB-11, later VNIIEF) developed the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb (RDS-1), its first thermonuclear bomb (RDS-6S), its first two-stage thermonuclear bomb (RDS-37), and later the AN602, better known as the Tsar Bomba. The design of the RDS-1 was largely similar to the American Fat Man bomb, which the United States dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945.
Sarov is the town where Saint Seraphim lived and prayed, the connection Kirill drew on to cast the weapon's creation as providential:
"I would like to say once again that the Lord truly works miracles. He is the Lord of history, and the life of the entire human race depends on Him. That by His mercy, through Elder Seraphim, the miracle of His presence appeared here, and that it was in this very place that the shield protecting our Motherland was created: all this is not accidental but parts of one whole," Kirill said.
Patriarch supporting aggression
As the church's leader, Kirill has been among the most consistent religious backers of Russia's full-scale invasion — a stance that led Ukraine to sanction him and seven other church figures in August 2022. That November, he justified the possible use of nuclear weapons over a threat to Russia's existence, citing the country's nuclear doctrine, and in November 2023, Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) opened a formal investigation into him over his support for the war.
The EU has been slower to act. Although Ukraine sanctioned Kirill in 2022, some member states still resist doing so: in July 2026, Italy joined Bulgaria in opposing a proposed EU visa ban on him.
