🔥 The Gospel According to Ivan: How Russia’s Imperial Schizophrenia Justifies Eternal War

“There is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”
— Ivan IV “the Terrible”, quoting Paul the Apostle to justify his claim to Prussia

In 1577, Czar Ivan IV of Russia — known to posterity as “the Terrible” — penned what might be the most theologically deranged territorial claim in European history. Addressed to a Lithuanian nobleman, the tsar’s letter invoked not treaties, dynastic succession, or feudal rights, but Genesis, the Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark, the Tower of Babel, and Jesus Christ himself to justify his claim on Livonia and, astonishingly, on parts of Prussia.

Five centuries later, the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine is fueled by the same deranged logic. While the stage has changed — from parchment to press briefings, from princely epistles to prime-time propaganda — the script remains the same: imperial mythology, holy entitlement, and a paranoiac belief in historical destiny.

🧬 Historical Schizophrenia as State Doctrine

Ivan’s 1577 “Letter to Alexander Polubensky” is not merely a political document. It is a manifesto of imperial theology, where Russia is portrayed as the heir not only to Byzantium and Rome, but to Adam, Abraham, and Christ himself. The tsar’s genealogical delusions stretch from Caesar Augustus (who allegedly gave his brother Prous the Baltic lands) to Rurik, to Vladimir of Kyiv, to himself — all sanctified by divine will.

This is not historical narrative. This is delusional theology masquerading as diplomacy.

Modern psychiatric definitions would classify Ivan’s letter as a systematized religious delusion:

• Messianic grandeur — the Tsar sees himself as God’s chosen ruler over all Christendom;
• Historical megalomania — fabricating a divine chain of succession to legitimize violence;
• Persecutory paranoia — characterizing all opponents as “servants of the devil”;
• Ecclesiopolitical fusion — asserting divine command as the basis of territorial sovereignty.

Yet this madness was not personal but state-forming. It became the doctrinal foundation for centuries of Russian expansionism, from Catherine’s “Third Rome” ideology to Putin’s “Russian World.”

🗺️ A Paranoid Map of the World

Fast-forward to 2024: Kremlin officials denounce the independence of Ukraine, the Baltic States, and even parts of Poland as a “historic injustice” that must be corrected. But like Ivan IV, they do not turn to legal precedent or democratic will. They appeal to civilizational mysticism.

In March 2025, Russian state television aired a five-hour “documentary” justifying the war in Ukraine as a spiritual crusade against the West’s “satanic globalism.” The film cited saints, medieval chronicles, and even the Book of Revelation. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — a self-styled realist — called the war “a defense of sacred Russian soil, betrayed by the Bolsheviks and desecrated by NATO.”

Just as Ivan claimed divine right to Prussia, the Kremlin today claims divine right to Crimea, Donbas, Odesa, and Ukraine. The enemy is no longer the Teutonic knight or Catholic heretic, but the NATO general, the gay rights activist, the Ukrainian nationalist, the AI developer.

The pattern is chillingly consistent: every imperial war becomes a holy war, every opponent a heretic.

⚖️ From Parchment to Propaganda: Continuity in Imperial Delusion

The comparison between Ivan’s epistle and Putin’s justifications for war is more than rhetorical — it is structural.

This is not geopolitics. This is eschatological warfare, disguised as foreign policy.

🕯️ Why the West Keeps Misreading Moscow: Secular Eyes, Sacred Wars

One of the most enduring failures of Western diplomacy is its persistent secularism — the inability to recognize when a state is not acting in pursuit of rational interests, but in service of a transcendental narrative.

Western analysts parse Russia’s behavior through the lens of realism, game theory, or economics. But Russia’s ruling elite often operate within a religious-civilizational cosmovision, inherited from Byzantium and mutated through centuries of paranoia and persecution mythology.

When Vladimir Putin called the fall of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” the West assumed he meant GDP loss or regional influence. But Putin meant the fall of a metaphysical empire — a body of mystical unity between Orthodoxy, autocracy, and imperial destiny. To Moscow, losing Ukraine was not just a political setback. It was an ontological wound.

Like Ivan IV mourning the “iconoclastic” conquest of Izborsk, the Kremlin mourns Kyiv as a sacred betrayal — a violation of cosmic order.

This is why the Kremlin is impervious to sanctions, logic, or compromise. Because its objectives are not material. They are eschatological.

🔄 When Law Fails, Myth Takes Over

Both Ivan’s letter and Putin’s Ukraine doctrine share a common method: the rejection of legal sovereignty in favor of mystical inheritance.

Ivan does not cite law — he cites lineage. He does not argue for justice — he invokes salvation. His map is not political; it is biblical. The same applies to modern Kremlin narratives:

• Ukraine’s sovereignty? A “mistake of history.”
• NATO? A “heresy” imposed by Western apostates.
• Human rights? A “decadent delusion” of the liberal West.

This is metapolitical warfare, where the Kremlin acts not as a state but as the executor of a prophetic mission. It frames conquest as redemption, subjugation as protection, occupation as reunion.

To counter this, the West must abandon the illusion that treaties or deterrence alone will suffice. This is not a war over borders. It is a war over the right to define history itself.

🧨 From Ivan to Iskanders: The Empire That Cannot Die

The problem is not that Russia is stuck in its past. The problem is that it sacralizes its past, refuses to move on, and treats its imperial myths as instructions for the present.

• When Putin claims he must “return” Ukraine to Russia, he is channeling Ivan’s belief that territories cannot “leave” the Empire any more than a child can leave the womb.
• When Russian propaganda calls Kyiv the “mother of Russian cities,” it echoes the belief that Moscow is owed obedience by genealogical right, not legal agreement.

This is the schizophrenia of imperial identity: the delusion that one is forever destined to reunite what history, law, and people have chosen to separate.

But just as Ivan’s war in Livonia ended in military disaster and national collapse, so too will Putin’s crusade in Ukraine. The myth may endure, but the state behind it is cracking.

🧭 Conclusion: The Kremlin’s Bible Has No End

Until the West understands that Russia’s wars are not about territory but about meaning, about the restoration of metaphysical order, it will always underestimate the stakes.

Ivan IV saw himself as God’s anointed emperor, sent to reclaim sacred lands through fire and faith. So does Putin. The difference is only in weapons and media platforms.

The West must stop treating Moscow’s imperial schizophrenia as a quirk. It is a strategic doctrine, with historical depth and apocalyptic ambitions.

And like all religions built on conquest, it can only be stopped when its scripture is discredited, its rituals exposed, and its disciples held to account.