Over the last decade, we've charted Russian propaganda efforts to affect elections here in the U.S. and overseas.

Those multi-layered campaigns are also a key part of the Russian war against Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin tries to portray himself and Russia as defenders of Christian and so-called traditional values.

And as special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky tells us,

those arguments have found an eager audience within certain sectors of American politics.

This church burned down more than 10 years ago in a remote Russian village on the border with Kazakhstan.

But since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the video has reappeared all across the Russian Internet.

Official sources are falsely claiming it shows a church in Ukraine with the accusation that Kiev is destroying churches and going after priests and parishioners across the country.

Although the story is untrue, the message that Ukraine is fighting against Christian values has turned into a powerful narrative used to justify the war to the Russian public.

Even the head of the Russian Orthodox Church calls the fighting a holy war and sends

Russian soldiers off to battle with a promise of salvation.

But the story about a war against Christianity isn't just for Russians.

It was designed for export to their Orthodoxodox neighbors, to disillusioned

Europeans, and increasingly to Americans who see in it a reflection of their own culture wars

and grievances. Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Green.

This is a war on Christianity. The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians. The Ukrainian

government is executing priests.

Russia is not doing that.

They're not attacking Christianity.

As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.

Especially within the MAGA movement, Moscow is no longer the old adversary.

It's an anti-Woke, anti-LGBQ, defender of Western civilization, a spiritual superpower.

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