‘Unorthodox’ Threats from Within: Is NATO Prepared to Counter Russia’s Religious Proxies?

Executive Summary

Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, NATO has recognized “hybrid warfare” as a defining feature of Russian aggression, combining military, intelligence, and civilian instruments to destabilize adversaries (NATO 2014). This poses a significant threat to the alliance’s security, as Russian information campaigns “prepare the ground for future Russian action” (Giles 2015, 5), such as a potential military takeover of a predominantly Russian-speaking city in the Baltics.

While substantial attention has been given to online disinformation, a crucial yet underexamined component of Russia’s influence architecture is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), whose Patriarch Kirill labelled the invasion of Ukraine a “holy war” aimed at extinguishing its independence (Atlantic Council 2024). This is particularly relevant in light of Moscow’s use of the ROC preceding and during the Ukraine invasion (Konovalchuk 2020; Nedzelsky 2021). Functioning as both a cultural and political actor, the ROC has increasingly been utilized by the Kremlin to advance its strategic interests within NATO states through intelligence-adjacent subversion.

This policy paper contends that the ROC represents one of the last, legally operating Russian instruments within NATO territory, which culturally influences host nations and functions as an intelligence-gathering tool. Based on the cases of Finland, Germany, and the United States, it demonstrates how religious institutions legitimize Russian influence, subsequently proposing policy solutions to address such covert threats. In this context, this policy proposal stringently attempts to respect religious freedoms concomitant to the bedrock of NATO: democratic values.

Key recommendations include:

• Enhancing counterintelligence coordination among NATO members to monitor, investigate, and potentially provide evidence needed to prohibit ROC-linked networks.

• Enforcing financial transparency and due diligence for religious institutions receiving foreign funding to ensure compliance with sanctions and identify influence operations.

• Introducing registration and reporting requirements for foreign-affiliated religious organizations to obtain access to structural and financial data.

• Strengthening legal mechanisms providing a pathway for more transparency and enabling our democracies to be ‘defensible’, while balancing religious freedoms.
  
  

Critique of Current Policy

1. NATO’s Conceptual Blind Spots

NATO’s evolving understanding of hybrid warfare - codified in the 2014 Wales and 2016 Warsaw Summit declarations - has largely centered on cyber, information, and military threats; neglecting human intelligence (NATO 2014; NATO 2016). However, this fails to bring attention to Russia’s use of religious institutions as tools of influence, a practice that, ironically, started during the ‘atheist’ era of the Soviet Union. During this time, the ROC was discovered by Stalin in 1943 as a legitimizing force for communist ideology across Eastern Europe (Urban, Liflyandchick, and Kennedy 2024). The Kremlin’s more recent adaptation of this model - using the ROC to extend influence and intelligence reach inside NATO states - therefore represents continuity rather than a ‘novel hybrid threat’.

Western interpretations of hybrid warfare, particularly those inspired by Frank Hoffman’s (2007) theory of “blurring of modes of war,” tend to frame hybrid operations as primarily non-kinetic phenomena, meaning actions that do not use physical force to disrupt an adversary’s capabilities, such as cyberattacks. Yet, as Ofer Fridman (2018) notes, “Russian hybrid warfare” is a Western construct, which, if applied stringently, presupposes military measures as seen in Georgia in 2008 or in Ukraine since 2014. This distinction matters, for its absence renders NATO’s counter-hybrid strategies reactive and fragmented, emphasizing cyber defense and communications resilience but neglecting intelligence-centric, socio-religious subversion that preceded military escalation, visible in the cases of Georgia and Ukraine (Hudson 2019).

2. Intelligence and Religion      

Research by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) referred to Russia’s unconventional warfare as centered around its intelligence agencies, namely the FSB (domestic), GRU (military), and SVR (foreign), often using diplomatic cover (Watling, Danylyuk, and Reynolds 2024). Religious institutions, notably the ROC, are increasingly integrated into this architecture. Besides providing cultural legitimacy, the ROC also provides additional physical spaces near crucial infrastructure.

In Sweden, a Moscow Patriarchate church near the strategically crucial Västerås Airport - containing Sweden’s third-longest runway - was found to have received funding from Rosatom, and its priest reportedly held a service medal from the foreign intelligence agency SVR, exemplifying this trend (France 24, 2025). This led the Swedish Defense Research Institute (FOI) to conclude that Russia uses churches for military purposes (FOI 2024). Similar activities have been reported in Finland, where authorities swiftly closed a Russian church in Turku due to its proximity to naval installations based on “security threats” in light of the Ukraine invasion in 2022 (Vakulina 2025).

Despite this, NATO and its members lack both coherent legal and strategic frameworks supporting monitoring or constraining religious institutions linked to hostile foreign powers. Current counterintelligence priorities focus on cyber espionage and political interference, rendering the ‘religious sphere’ largely underprotected.

3. National Vulnerabilities

The level of exposure varies across NATO states. This can be seen when assessing three allies with varying geographic locations, historical exposure, and legal frameworks: Finland, a direct neighbor of Russia; Germany, a country historically strongly integrated with Russia; and the United States, geographically protected from Russian aggression.

• Finland, having newly joined NATO and sharing a 1,340 km border with Russia, has adopted a pragmatic approach, granting municipal authorities the discretion to close religious sites based on security concerns. This authority was used by the city of Turku in 2022 due to the proximity of the Church of the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God to Finland’s coastal fleet at Pansio naval base (Nordic Defense Review 2025).

• Germany, following its post-WWII constitutional tradition, prioritizes constitutional protections of religious freedom, requiring a high burden of proof to demonstrate that unconstitutional activities are taking place to permit closure. With the primary focus on Russian intelligence activity targeting parliament members in Europe, cyber activities, and threats to NATO’s airspace, the ROC has continued its operations, often under the radar (Lansing Institute 2025).

• The United States, protected from Russian military threats geographically and with a generally higher societal trust in religious institutions, acknowledges the risk of “recruitment” while not explicitly viewing the ‘religiously conservative’ family values of the ROC as information warfare or intelligence hubs (Odarchenko 2025).

This disparity produces asymmetric resilience across NATO: while some states choose and can act swiftly, others remain constrained by domestic legal frameworks and political hesitation. Without harmonized standards across the alliance, the ROC can continue to exploit such inconsistencies in its operations.

4. Religion as a Strategic Blind Spot

NATO’s hybrid defense doctrine prioritizes hybrid threats derived from the use of “rapid technological change” over socio-cultural infiltration (NATO 2024). Nonetheless, Russia’s exploitation of religion underscores a crucial asymmetry facing NATO: democracies face difficulties policing religious spaces, which the Kremlin soundly takes advantage of for subversion. As such, religious influence operations can arguably be called the legal ‘soft front’ of the Kremlin’s infiltration strategies, cultivating local legitimacy and access to strategic locations for potential military escalations.

Policy Recommendations

1. Strengthen Counterintelligence Coordination

NATO should establish a Joint Task Force on Religious Subversion (JTF-RS) under the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre. This body would facilitate intelligence-sharing among national intelligence agencies such as Finland’s SUPO, Germany’s BfV, and the U.S. FBI on ROC-linked activities. Regular situational reports could be integrated into NATO’s Hybrid Analysis Branch assessments. Member states should expand HUMINT capabilities deployed ‘within’ to monitor religious institutions suspected of acting as Kremlin proxies.

2. Enforce Financial Transparency

Governments should also conduct stricter financial analysis of all religious organizations receiving foreign funding, particularly scrutinizing those affiliated with adversarial nations and groups. Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and justice ministries should cooperate to track funding sources, especially those linked to Russian state-owned enterprises such as Rosatom or other sanctioned companies. Transparent registers of religious institutions receiving foreign funding, similar to the EU Transparency Register, would help detect and prevent clandestine financial flows.

3. Introduce Legal Registration and Oversight Mechanisms

Following models such as the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), NATO states should adopt Foreign Religious Influence Acts, requiring religious communities with affiliations to hostile foreign governments to register for permission. This would provide NATO with the democratic version of the legal tools Russia bestowed itself with in 2016, with the Yarovaya Laws that curtailed the freedoms of evangelical churches. However, they would not, as a first step, curtail religious practice but enhance transparency by pursuing conditional registration and insight into financing and related information needed to determine whether a church would likely function as a conduit for hostile actors.

4. Develop NATO Guidelines on Religious Subversion

NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence and Hybrid CoE should jointly produce doctrinal guidance on the role of religion in hybrid warfare. This framework should:

• Define religious subversion as part of hybrid operations.

• Establish standardized indicators (e.g., foreign funding, links to sanctioned actors, proximity to critical infrastructure).

• Integrate religious influence mapping into NATO’s early warning systems.

Beyond the Moscow Patriarchate, this bears conspicuous relevance for other religious institutions such as mosques, which the State Security Department of Lithuania (2025) describes as a further foundational vehicle for Putin’s legitimization campaign in Europe regarding the invasion of Ukraine that started in 2022. In addition, autocracies such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and its networks of mosques on alliance territory could similarly be contained through such guidelines. This is in line with NATO’s fight against terrorism “as the most direct asymmetric threat” to the alliance’s citizenry, as specified in Article 3 of the Washington Summit Declaration (NATO 2024), and the 2024 South Report warning that “pro-Iranian extremist movements carry out attacks against NATO partners, Allied infrastructure and maritime security” (NATO 2024, 2).

5. Protect Religious Freedom while Enhancing Security

To maintain its status as an alliance of democracies, NATO and member states must pair security measures with transparency and community engagement. For instance, governments could fund independent religious dialogue councils to prevent alienation of Orthodox believers who reject Kremlin influence, such as Ukrainian, Moldovan, and Georgian churches. Another option would be to establish a national Orthodox church, separate from the Moscow Patriarchate, as was partially done by Finland. All in all, empowering local clergy and diaspora networks that oppose Russian state control will help delegitimize the ROC’s political agenda, and with it, the foreign intelligence and potential military hazards from within.

Conclusion

The Kremlin’s instrumentalization of the Russian Orthodox Church is an “unorthodox” but potent weapon in its hybrid arsenal, combining soft power, espionage, and ideological warfare. The fact that NATO members tend to treat religious institutions as sacrosanct civic spaces without appropriate oversight provides Moscow with a convenient cloak for subversion. Similar trends have been observed by allied intelligence services with regard to mosques - whether as tools for Dagestani and Russian, Iranian, or other extremist states and non-state actors.

NATO’s security architecture must therefore evolve beyond traditional threat perception. Recognizing and regulating religious vectors of influence is essential to closing the gap between hybrid warfare theory and practice. A coordinated, legally grounded, and intelligence-informed response will ensure that democratic values remain the foundation of the Euro-Atlantic defense community.

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