Putin’s religiosity is a little noted but powerful part of his personality. Putin’s mother, Maria, was a “deeply religious” woman, according to biographer Steven Lee Myers, who survived the siege of Leningrad in World War II after moaning for help amid a pile of corpses. When her son Vladimir was born in 1952, she “secretly baptized the boy,” Myers writes.

Putin is said to wear a small aluminum cross that was given to him by his mother, according to a 2012 biography by Chris Hutchins and Alexander Korobko. He didn’t display it while serving in the KGB, but when he went to Israel in 1993, according to their account, Putin claimed he “put the cross around my neck. I have never taken it off since.”

Putin’s passion for the Russian Orthodox church underlies the sense of “oneness” between Russia and Ukraine that he expressed in a rambling essay he wrote in July 2021, which was a precursor of the violent assault to come. Putin noted that the roots of his faith were in Kyiv, where St. Vladimir in 988 converted from paganism to Orthodoxy. The Orthodox faithful were often repressed over subsequent centuries but they persisted in Russia and Ukraine, Putin wrote. “We are one people,” he proclaimed.