The Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine

The Ruskim is not something that has been articulated or pursued as a foreign policy agenda either by the Russian state or by the Russian Orthodox church in an unbroken way for hundreds of years. This is very much a creation of sort of fringe, ultra-nationalist Russian thinkers, political and philosophical that have been brought into the orbit of the Russian president over two decades effectively. So it's not a question of, you know, in 1900, the Russian Orthodox Church was necessarily using the same language and terminology; this is something that has since been adopted from the Russian state which itself has adopted very deliberately.