They have a State Church and have been known to be less than friendly to those outside of it. Even under the USSR, they were “prudish” in many ways on the moral and social front internally, while funding western front organizations to undermine morals and social standards in the west.
So, they’ve changed and yet they haven’t. It’s hard not to at least grudgingly admire Putin, patriot supporting his own people and nation as he is, but that does not mean he’s any friend of our own nation and people.
He isn’t. Where our interests coincide, working together is a positive development. But, slipping back into one of the lunacies of past leftist foreign policy, a blinkered “detente” that sees no evil, would be very foolish.
I’m torn on the matter.
Russia is foremost a northern European nation, nominally Christian, under attack by leftists and Islam. Why, excluding long-dead cold war rivalry, would they not be friends to our nation and people?
I, keeping an optimistic view, am praying with hope (and yet feeling the sad burden of the present sin) that Christ will lift the Orthodox free of state shackles; that Christ will in fact foment a kind of spiritual rebellion against the worldly when it conflicts against the heavenly.
Just because a church became a state church doesn’t mean it has to accept that forever.