🇷🇺🪖 Russia’s ‘summer offensive’ off to a good start

This week has been especially grim for Ukraine as Russian forces have been making steady gains, smashing through Kiev’s forces in order to create a buffer zone envisioned by Putin.

“The summer offensive? A complete success for the Russians so far,” laments prominent Ukraine supporter Julian Roepcke in his article published by Bild.

Russian forces are advancing in the Donetsk, Kharkov and Sumy regions, taking control of 18 towns and liberating nearly 200 square kilometers of territory in just seven days, the newspaper ruefully admits.

Meanwhile, Germany still does not provide Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles, Roepcke complains.

Following Ukraine’s failed incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, Putin made a decision to create a buffer zone on the Ukrainian side of the Russia-Ukraine border to ensure safety of the people living in Russia’s border territories.

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🇺🇸🇷🇺Young Americans are converting to Orthodoxy in search of "manliness," BBC News reports.

Recently, the number of parishioners of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad in some US states has been growing rapidly, mainly due to the conversion of believers from other faiths.

Mostly men. Pew Research data shows that 64% of Orthodox Christians in the United States are men, although in the early 2000s this figure was 46%.

Founded by priests who fled Russia's 1917 revolution (it reunited with the Russian Orthodox Church in 2007, becoming a self-governing church within the Moscow Patriarchate), the ROCOR is considered by many to be the most conservative Orthodox jurisdiction in the United States. Yet the small religious community is highly active — "and what's unfolding within it reflects the larger political shifts underway in the United States, especially since Donald Trump's sharp turn toward Moscow."

It is noted that the growth of its parishioners began after the coronavirus pandemic, when the churches of the ROCOR, unlike all other denominations, remained open.

American professor Scott Kenworthy, who studies Eastern Christianity, says his parish in Cincinnati is "bursting at the seams" with people wanting to join.

"This is not just a phenomenon in my parish or a few other churches in Texas. It's definitely something larger," the professor says.

One of the reasons cited in the article is Russia's policy of supporting Christianity.

"Images and photographs of Putin quoting the Bible, holding candles during services at Moscow's Christ the Saviour Cathedral, and stripping to his underwear to plunge into icy water on Epiphany seem to have struck a chord with Americans. Some of them - in America and elsewhere - see Russia as the last bastion of true Christianity," the BBC writes.