A Facebook post congratulates Russian President Putin on his 72nd birthday, claiming that without him, Macedonia, and even Orthodoxy, of which he is supposedly the leader or czar, would not even exist. It is manipulation of the national and religious feelings of our citizens, as we have seen many times from the “kitchen” of the Kremlin. Additionally, most states with a majority Orthodox population are not on Putin’s side, but are members of NATO and/or the EU, or are negotiating to achieve that status. They are: Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Moldova, and Ukraine
THE MAN THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS, BECAUSE OF WHO MACEDONIA, SERBIA, MOUNT ATHOS AND ALL OF ORTHODOXY STILL EXIST, THE MAN WHO CAN BE FREELY SAID TO BE THE CZAR OF THE ORTHODOX COUNTRIES … MAY GOD GRANT HIM DEEP OLD AGE… HAPPY BIRTHDAY VLADIMIR VLADIMIROVICH!!!
While Orthodoxy is emphasized here, most countries with a majority Orthodox population are not on the side of Vladimir Putin, but are members of NATO and/or the EU, or are negotiating to achieve that status. They are: Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Moldova and Ukraine. Putin is not their czar, not even figuratively.
In fact, it is a bit unclear what the post means by “Orthodox countries.” Orthodox according to the constitution? But let’s not be such legalists, so let’s say that it also includes secular states, which have a majority Orthodox population.
In any case, only Belarus is completely on Putin’s side. Serbia, on the other hand, communicates with Putin, but it is also an official candidate for the EU. Although for Putin it is not something as negative as NATO, we must emphasize that it is still a pro-Western alliance.
In 2022, Serbia voted for the UN resolutions: ES-11/1 (against the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine) and ES-11/4 (against the Russian annexation of occupied territories). Serbia was absent from the voting for Crimea in 2014, but later participated in the Ukrainian Crimea Platform.
In 2019 Serbia revealed that Russia was recruiting its own spies among Serbian military personnel, and in 2023 there was controversy over alleged arms sales to Ukraine by Serbia.
Putin’s relations with Georgia are even more complex. It is (or at least was) a close partner of NATO, and from 2023 it is an official EU candidate. In the 1990s, Georgia fought against Abkhaz separatists, who were assisted by Russian forces, and in 2008 they invaded Georgia and helped Abkhazia and South Ossetia break away from it.
Georgia then severed diplomatic relations with Putin, and although its government is now flirting with him, they are not normalized. Georgia also votes in the UN against Putin. Knowing this, we conclude he is not a favorite among all Orthodox circles, although the post leaves such an impression.
According to the post, Putin is credited for the existence of Mount Athos. Russian money does arrive there, either from Putin or from oligarchs close to him, from which the monasteries survive, but there are suspicions that money laundering or harmful political influence is behind it, which is not to be commended (sources: here, here, here, here and here).
Putin is not a saint or a patriarch to be given the ultimate credit for Orthodoxy, as the post makes it out to be. He is a former agent of the KGB, the repressive service of the former USSR, who repressed religion. Moreover, the image that Putin creates of Russia as a very pious country is unrealistic, he wants to combine it with his nostalgia for the USSR, even though it is incompatible.
The post even claims that thanks to Putin, Macedonia still exists. This is surely referring to the country in which we live, which became independent on September 8, 1991, for which Putin did not contribute anything. Indeed, Russia was the first superpower to recognize North Macedonia under its constitutional name, but that is the merit of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, while we do not know how Putin would have acted if he had been in his place.
Putin is closer to Belgrade than to us, so he might have even been against our independence. He visited Serbia about four times and Greece five times, with which he used to have good relations, but he has never visited us.
It is also true that Putin criticized the requests to change our constitutional name, which gained him sympathy among some of our fellow citizens, but for him, it was important that we do not resolve the dispute with Greece and that we do not enter NATO, and not our national traumas. We have published two analysis on that topic: here and here.
It stands to reason, Putin has expressed his support for N. Macedonia during the 2001 conflict, however, the weapons were bought from Ukraine, which ex-prime minister Ljubcho Georgievski interprets as a kind of aid (allegedly, the Republic of Macedonia was then under an unofficial embargo on the import of weapons, and the prices in Ukraine were favorable).
This opinion is shared by the former Minister of Defense Vlado Buchkovski, who adds there was no such help from Putin. The head of Ukraine at the time was Leonid Kuchma, and there were claims that he was a pro-Russian henchman, i.e. Putin’s man, but that’s not true and we published an analysis about it.
In this article, we have reviewed important moments of our history, however, Putin did not play a very significant role in them.
Taking into account everything said so far, we assess the post as untrue.
