Alex Feldman1; 1 CIS-Endicott International University, Spain
Discussion
The Russo-Ukrainian War has typically been interpreted through geopolitical and socioeconomic lenses, but it also echoes deeper historical and symbolic legacies — particularly networks claiming the inheritance of Byzantium. While Moscow has long regarded itself as the "Third Rome," Kyiv also claims spiritual legacies from Byzantium and Kievan Rus’. Ukraine’s 2018 autocephaly away from the Moscow Patriarchate and its westward realignment sharpened this Huntingtonian civilizational rift. The Kremlin’s ex-KGB networks have religiously framed the war, portraying it as a metaphysical struggle against Western decadence. Yet although these Byzantine theological layers are symbolically powerful. Ukrainians’ own agency cannot be reduced by viewing it as a simple East-vs-West conflict lest it reinforce deterministic, zero-sum fatalism. The war is as much a Byzantine revival as a 21st-century confrontation over sovereign political economies, national borders, and future international networks — where history is invoked, but raw power remains supreme. As the EU remilitarizes, its transatlantic alliances weaken and it becomes a major geopolitical force in its own right, it must recognize that to successfully integrate its Eastern Orthodox member states in its institutional networks, it must subtly combine the legacies of both Western and Eastern Romes.
