A private boarding school at the Nikolo-Shartomsky Monastery in the Ivanovo region announced the enrollment of children for the new academic year, assuring parents that it would educate students as "warriors of Christ", sacrificial to the fatherland. The school administration posted "information for parents" on its website.
The statement clarifies that the school is suitable for those who want to see their child "strong, courageous, strong, healthy, loving God and our Fatherland, ready to sacrificially serve them."
The boarding school at the monastery educates “real young men, future warriors of Christ, defenders of the earthly and heavenly Fatherland, fighting both on the spiritual battlefield and in the earthly field,” the announcement says. Now, for pupils of 5-11 grades, military-sports camps are being held, to which children are encouraged to join.
The site also states that the goal of the school is to educate “the whole personality of a person with an Orthodox worldview, who loves his neighbors and his Fatherland, and is ready to sacrificially serve them.” To achieve this goal, children are taught discipline, work and obedience from an early age, the directorate specified.
While “warriors of Christ” are being recruited into one school, other Russian schools are being closed because of the war in Ukraine. In five districts of the Belgorod region, located in a five-kilometer border zone, schools and kindergartens will be temporarily closed; on September 1, children will be forced to go to institutions in other districts. The governor of the region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said that the issue of life and health safety of every child and every adult is “an absolute priority.”
The war in Ukraine is justified by Patriarch Kirill (Vladimir Gundyaev), as Pope Francis spoke about. According to him, the patriarch, during a conversation with him, read from a piece of paper for twenty minutes and gave arguments justifying Russia's war against Ukraine. Later, the Russian Orthodox Church published a speech by Gundyaev, in which he, addressing the Pope, spoke about the "flying time of missiles" and the expansion of NATO. In April, 190 priests of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of the Moscow Patriarchate demanded that Patriarch Kirill be brought before a church tribunal for supporting Russia's war against Ukraine.