A good seven thousand Russian scientists protested against the attack on Ukraine ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticized their country as a "military aggressor" and "rogue state".

They have accused the political leadership in Moscow of “historiosophical fantasies”.

In doing so, they not only vilified what they saw as the imperial behavior of an autocrat who believes he is fulfilling a national mission, but also the sacralization of Russian politics over the past two decades.

Heike Schmoll

Political correspondent in Berlin, responsible for “Bildungswelten”.

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Putin sees himself in the service of a national mission and wants to regain lost territory.

This is a narrative that served the tsars as well as Catherine II, who used it to justify the partition of Poland.

Putin justified the annexation of Crimea in 2014 with its religious importance for Russia - an argument that was supposed to legitimize Russian claims after the first annexation in 1783.

A good seven years ago, Putin emphasized the "extraordinary civilizational and sacred importance of the peninsula" and compared it to the importance of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for Jews and Muslims.

On the "spiritual soil" of Crimea "our ancestors understood themselves for the first time and forever as a united people," Putin said at the time.

And that's how Russia will behave, "today and forever".

In the Ukrainian city of Cherson, which has been under the control of the Russian military since Thursday, the baptism of Grand Duke Vladimir took place, "which was the basis for the Christianization of Kievan Rus," Putin said in December 2014. Christianity had become a strong unifying force, "through which a unified Russian nation and state arose - from the diverse tribes of the East Slavic world".

However, historians dispute that the baptism actually took place there.

The Crimea did not belong to the Russian Empire for a long time and was only conquered under Catherine the Great in the 18th century.

The cradle of Russian culture and the Russian Orthodox Church is Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.

The Christianization of the old empire, the so-called Kievan Rus, was carried out in 988 by Prince Vladimir on the occasion of his marriage to Princess Anna of Byzantium, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Romanos II.

At the celebration of the thousandth anniversary of Vladimir's death in 2015, Putin said: "The adoption of Christianity was based on Prince Vladimir's deep love for his fatherland, on his serious spiritual reflections, on the search for a unified basis to unite the people and the shattered lands a.

By ending internal unrest and destroying external adversaries, Prince Vladimir laid the foundations for a united Russian nation.

He paved the way for a strong, centralized state.” In 2016, a year late, Putin unveiled a 12-meter statue of Prince Vladimir in front of the Kremlin.

Today, around 70 percent of Ukraine's 44 million people are Orthodox Christians.

Since 1991 there have been three churches in Ukraine that follow an Orthodox-Byzantine rite.

The smallest is the Greek Catholic, loyal to the Pope but closer to the Byzantine Rite.

Their area of ​​activity is primarily the west of Ukraine.

Its leader Shevchuk had said on the day of the Russian attack that it was "our personal responsibility and sacred duty as citizens of Ukraine, our homeland, our memory and our hope to protect our God-given right to exist."

The defense of “our homeland is our natural right and our civic duty”.