VISIT TO TALLINN

At the invitation of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute and International Center for Defense & Security in Tallinn, Viktor Yelensky, a Chief Research Scientist of I.F. Kuras Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, participated in the discussion “Russian Orthodox Church: Faith, Power, Conquest”,. He proposed a nuanced approach to exploring the role of the ROC as a “soft power” of Russian foreign policy. The screaming disproportion between the impressive dynamics of the development of church infrastructure and, on the other hand, the state of public morality in Russia, occupies high places in the world ranking of abortions, intentional killings, abandoned children and low ones in the ratings of charity, volunteering and religious activity, led to the correction of church Kremlin policies. The Church is clearly directed by the Russian state to implement very specific projects in the foreign policy area, while limiting its domestic political activity. The analysis of the relations of the Moscow Patriarchate with the Vatican, local Orthodox churches, western evangelical centers, etc., proposed by the researcher, refutes the notion of the ROC evolution in the direction of an independent actor of the modern geopolitical landscape, quite common in some segment of the special literature.