Cutting against growing tensions between the United States and Russia, influential and politically well-connected, Tea Party-aligned American evangelical leaders – including one who has called for a “military takeover” – who hold dominionist or even theocratic political leanings and are tied to former high-level U.S. military and intelligence community members, have over the past decade allied with one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s closest political allies, Vladimir Yakunin.The attached follows along in the same vane. On that list is Brian Brown of NOM
The emails include frequent correspondence between senior Russian figures, such as Dugin, the financier Konstantin Malofeev — who has close ties to Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine and is a patron of causes dear to the Orthodox Church — and Alexey Komov, an official with the Orthodox patriarchy and the “Russian representative” of the World Congress of Families, a social conservative network based in Rockford, Illinois.Emails Show "Pro-Family" Activists Feeding Contacts To Russian Nationalists - BuzzFeed News
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The conversations also make clear that Malofeev relies on Gavrish as a gatekeeper with some European contacts. It also includes discussion of a global summit of social conservative leaders convened in Moscow in September organized by Komov, including two emails in which Komov sends a full list of people invited to the conference — along with their contact information and details of passports and visas — to Gavrish.
The conference caused an uproar in the United States because it was originally organized as a World Congress of Families summit, but the WCF was forced to drop its official sponsorship when some American partner organizations withdrew their participation in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Komov, who had promoted the event as the “‘Olympics’ of the international Pro-Life movement supporting the Natural Family,” moved ahead with the event under the auspices of foundations controlled by Malofeev and another oligarch in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, president of the state-owned railway company Vladimir Yakunin, and two members of the WCF’s leadership served on the organizing committee.
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The conference closed with a declaration calling on the world to stand against LGBT rights in order to “unite before the threat of total dehumanization of society, to set up a barrier on the road of ideology-lined, state-supported interference in the private lives of people, in an attempt to foist specific sexual lifestyles and preferences of the minority upon the majority.”
The following two articles are of note as well (H/T John Newcomb):
- The Kremlin Builds an Unholy Alliance With America’s Christian Right: The Kremlin reaches out to U.S. evangelicals, but reciprocating Moscow’s gestures can backfire
- Russia’s traditional values initiative result in abuse at domestic level
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