Christian Moral Tradition & the Civilizational Divide Between Ukrainians and Russians
A Western response to points raised at the Kyiv seminar and requested for wider English circulation
At Kyiv National University named after Taras Shevchenko (the Red Building), a seminar was recently held under the theme:
“Christian morality and traditionalism among Ukrainians and Russians — where exactly lies the difference between the two peoples?”
Some of the interventions from that event – including key remarks by Olena Semenyaka and other participants – were later summarized and partially quoted on the Mesoeurasia website. In the comment section below that report, several readers explicitly asked that these ideas be made available in English and that Western voices engage the issues: above all, the definition of conservatism and the question “where exactly lies the difference between the two peoples?”
This article is offered as a Western response to those publicly shared points and to that request. I am not attempting to reconstruct or judge the entire closed-door seminar. Instead, I am engaging the themes as they were presented on the Mesoeurasia page and in its comments: to clarify what genuine Christian conservatism means, to explain the deeper historical differences between Ukrainians and Russians, and to propose a constructive path of renewal rather than destruction.
Original article and discussion:
https://mesoeurasia.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-post_30.html
The Kyiv discussion made a necessary point: what the Kremlin markets today as “Christian conservatism” bears little resemblance to genuine Christian moral tradition. Participants showed how contemporary Russian imperialism and chauvinism dress themselves in the language of “values,” while in practice destroying churches and communities and subordinating ecclesial life to state objectives. Whatever authentic Christian conservatism once existed in pre-revolutionary Russia was largely shattered by the Bolshevik terror and the later Sergianist settlement; the present ideological use of religion is something different. It is important to underline that this critique concerns the modern state project, not the faith of ordinary believers or the better moments of Russia’s older Christian civilization.
Yet in rejecting hypocrisy, we must not destroy the meaning of tradition itself. Authentic Christian moral tradition cannot be replaced with mythic nationalism, civilizational metaphysics, or reconstructed post-religious narratives. The Christian inheritance either exists as lived continuity—or it is not tradition at all.
At one point in the discussion, a 19th-century Galician-Volhynian author is cited who argued that Europe was already spiritually dead and that “there is nothing left to preserve—everything must be destroyed to the roots.” His despair is understandable: he was writing after Napoleon’s destruction of the old monarchic order, amid the collapse of traditional European structures, and long before Bolshevism slaughtered more than 66 million Orthodox Christians and burned over 30,000 churches. He accurately observed decay. But he erred in believing that annihilation is cure. Renewal is not achieved by torching the orchard, but by restoring its roots.
That distinction leads directly into the central question raised in the seminar: where exactly lies the difference between the two peoples — Ukrainians and Russians — and why does it matter?
The divide is not linguistic or purely political but civilizational and ecclesial. It reaches back to the bifurcation of Rus’ between two different centers of gravity: the Western-facing Galicia–Volhynia world and the north-eastern Muscovite formation under Mongol suzerainty. The two worlds produced different kinds of social and political anthropology.
Galicia–Volhynia developed as a dynastic, monastic, and Christian-legal society embedded in Central European trade, governance, and ecclesial life. Its ruling houses integrated through the Piast network of Silesia and Oleśnica. Its monasteries and bishoprics participated in a continental Christian system. Its culture operated within literate, sacramental order, and its elites interacted constantly with other Christian monarchies and noble houses.
Muscovy, by contrast, was forged under Mongol tribute, shaped by military-bureaucratic autocracy, and developed a caesaropapist fusion of throne and altar. Instead of balancing crown and altar as co-stewards, the Muscovite model subordinated Church to state. That model later rationalized imperial expansion, imperial messianism, and finally Bolshevik destruction.
These divergent genealogies produced divergent conceptions of the human person, moral responsibility, authority, governance, community, and civilization.
Kyiv’s True Primitive: Apostolic, Gothic, Scythian, Christian
To understand what ‘primitive identity’ truly means in the lands of Rus’, one must look far earlier than either modern nationalism or post-Soviet reconstructions.
If some contemporary Ukrainian intellectual circles gesture toward a return to what they call a ‘primitive’ or pre-Christian identity, it is crucial to clarify what the actual primitive tradition of this region was. The earliest civilizational foundations of Kyiv, Crimea, and the entire Rus’ basin were not pagan but deeply and recognizably Christian—far older than Muscovy’s later formation and older still than today’s ideological reconstructions.
Long before the word “Rus’” appears in recorded history, the first fully translated Bible in any European vernacular was already circulating among the peoples of the Black Sea.
This was the Gothic Bible z Ulfilas (Wulfila), completed in the 4th century, produced for the Gothic-speaking Christians of ancient Gothia—the region centered in Crimea.
That community, under the Metropolitanate of Gothia, remained a functioning Orthodox church for over a millennium, and produced saints, martyrs, clergy, and monastic life long before either the Kievan or Muscovite metropolias took shape.
In other words: the very first “primitive Christianity” of this region was the Gothic Church, rooted in Scripture, liturgy, and monastic continuity—not a pagan substrate. This is historical bedrock, not speculation.
And the Gothic church connects directly with the broader Scythian–Celtic Christian continuum that shaped both Eastern Europe and the British Isles.
The Scythian Continuum: from the Black Sea to Ireland and Scotland
Medieval sources—Irish annals, Scottish chronicles, and continental histories—consistently trace the origins of the Gaels and Scots to Greater Scythia, the region north of the Black Sea.
Plik Declaration of Arbroath (1320), Scotland’s national charter, states unambiguously that the Scots migrated “from Greater Scythia by way of the Tyrrhenian Sea,” a tradition repeated in the Lebor Gabála Érenn and other early Gaelic texts.
Modern population genetics has unexpectedly confirmed this cultural memory: a number of Celtic royal lines, including those associated with early medieval Scotland and Ireland, carry signals consistent with ancient Pontic–Caspian and Caucasus-region origins.
(One of several article complications of authoritative DNA studies.)
This Scythian–Celtic linkage was not only ethnic but religious.
The earliest Celtic monastic patterns—Egyptian-inspired asceticism, desert-style prayer cycles, penitential rigor, and vernacular Scripture—mirror the monastic traditions of the Christian Scythians, Goths, and Crimean communities. This continuity is visible in:
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Ulfilas’ Gothic Bible
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The Crimean cave monasteries of Mangup-Kale and Eski-Kermen
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The Irish Culdee networks that spread from St. Gall to Regensburg
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The daughter monastery founded by Irish clergy in Kyiv (12th century)
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The Athonite-derived foundation of Kyiv Pechersk Lavra by St. Anthony
All of these are strands of one civilizational rope: Scythian, Gothic, and Celtic Christianity converging in Kyiv.
The Frankish Connection: Sicambrians and the Ukrainian Horizon
Even the Continental Franks—forebears of the (French) Carolingians and later protectors of the Culdee monasteries—preserved a memory of Scythian origins.
Classical and medieval authors identify the Sicambrians, ancestral to the Franks, as migrating from regions associated with early Ukrainian and Pontic steppe zones.
This is not a nationalist reimagining—it is a recurring motif in Frankish, Burgundian, and Lombard chronicle traditions.
By the 1180s—according to surviving monastic correspondence and continental chronicles—the Irish monks of the Regensburg Schottenkloster had already established their daughter-house in Kyiv, marking the first clearly attested Western monastic presence in Rus’. Thus by the time Irish monks arrived in Kiev from Regensburg, they were interacting not with strangers but with a cousin branch of the same ancient Scythian–Celtic Christian world.
The Real Primitive of Kyiv: Apostolic, Not Neo-Pagan
Add to this the St. Andrew prophecy over the hills of Kyiv, recorded in the Primary Chronicle, foretelling the rise of Christian worship where golden cupolas later stood.
Add the Crimean Gothic martyrs.
Add the Scythian monks of John Cassian’s tradition.
Add the Irish Culdees, the Frankish monastic reforms, the Athonite lineage, the Varangian guard that linked Kyiv to Constantinople…
And one conclusion becomes unavoidable:
The true primitive identity of Ukraine and Kyiv is not neo-pagan but profoundly Christian—Gothic, Scythian, Celtic, apostolic, and continuous.
By contrast, the modern idea of a “pre-Christian Ukrainian essence” is a Soviet-era ideological construction, deliberately promoted to sever Ukrainians from their actual civilizational roots—roots that would otherwise bind them to the Christian moral conservatism the seminar sought to define.
The civilizational heart of Rus’ was not in Moscow, which did not yet exist, but in Kyiv and the southwestern corridors of Galicia–Volhynia. The Western orientation of those lands lasted centuries longer than any Eastern association. Lviv spent more of its existence under Central European Christian polities than under Moscow. The dynastic web linking Brandenburg, Piast, Pomeranian Griffin, and Brunswick houses structured a Christian noble republic of responsibility and legal accountability—not imperial absolutism.
This heritage and its evidences—dynastic, genealogical, cartographic, monastic, and ecclesial—are laid out in detail here:
The Celtic–Piast Royal Continuum: The Western Heart of Rus’ and Why It Matters Today
https://celticorthodoxy.com/2025/12/the-celtic-piast-royal-continuum/
That work outlines why Galicia–Volhynia was not a marginal borderland but a civilizational axis linking Baltic, Black Sea, and Central Europe; why rivers served as the first highways of civilization; why monastic networks shaped markets and law; and why dynastic continuity, not ideology, formed real political legitimacy.
For these reasons, the modern Kremlin claim to represent Christian traditionalism must be rejected. But equally rejected must be the temptation to respond with post-Christian invention or civilizational self-erasure disguised as progress. Ukraine must resist both imperial nostalgia and philosophical abstraction. Tradition is not myth to be rewritten; it is a living inheritance requiring restoration.
The solution is not destruction but reconstruction. The path forward is the recovery of Galicia’s Christian civilizational DNA: lawful noble governance, sacramental community, ecclesial continuity, moral responsibility, and rooted identity—rather than reactionary ideology or hollow symbolism.
Europe is not dead. She is wounded. And wounded bodies heal when the bones are set.
If Ukraine chooses this path, she may become the center of a true Christian revival for Europe—not through invention, but through remembrance.
This response is offered with respect for all scholars and participants continuing the dialogue, and in the hope that Christian civilization may yet be restored, not replaced.
Dr. Stephen M. B. Brunswick-Knott, PhD (Rel. Ed.), ThD
Christian Minister · Historian & Cultural Researcher
Publisher & Senior Columnist — Watchman News / Watchman.Report
Educator — St. Andrew’s Institute
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