Russia attacks Khmelnytskyi Oblast for second night running, damaging houses and businesses
Russian forces launched another combined attack on Khmelnytskyi Oblast on the night of 25-26 May. Preliminary reports indicate that no civilians have been injured, but civilian infrastructure has been damaged.
Source: Serhii Tiurin, Head of Khmelnytskyi Oblast Military Administration
Quote: "Russia has attacked Khmelnytskyi Oblast for the second night in a row. Another combined enemy attack took place overnight.
Preliminary information indicates there are no civilian casualties. However, houses and businesses have sustained damage."
Background:
An air-raid warning was issued in Kyiv and most parts of Ukraine on Sunday evening due to a large-scale Russian drone attack. Air defence systems were deployed against the incoming targets.
Later, Russia launched missile strikes from strategic aircraft over Ukrainian territory.
On the night of 24-25 May, Khmelnytskyi Oblast came under Russian missile attack, with four civilians killed and five injured. Civil and social infrastructure sustained significant damage.
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Donald Trump is building a strange new religious movement
is a research associate at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in the United Kingdom and the author of Holy Russia? Holy War?: Why the Russian Church Is Backing Putin Against Ukraine. President Donald Trump hands out pens to faith leaders after signing an executive order on the establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden of the White House on May 1, 2025. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images For over six decades, the 'religious right' in America was boomer 'Christian nationalism,' straight out of The Handmaid's Tale. It was about 'keeping God in the schools' and the National Prayer Breakfast. It was traditionalist, mindful of theology, and, well, theocratic, which is to say it wanted to take the standards of a religious tradition and apply them to the secular law. They wanted the books of Scripture to replace the statute books. But President Donald Trump is trying to create a new religious right, one that is not just illiberal but fundamentally different and opposed to traditional religion as we've known it. The faith of the MAGA movement is not one in which the state conforms to the church, but one in which the church is bent to the will of the strange beast that is American nationalism — the belief that the American project is an exercise in freedom and prosperity like the world has never known, but also the sole possession of those who are white, heterosexual, and unquestioningly loyal to the nation. It's a model of church-state relations that has less in common with post-revolutionary Iran, where an Islamic cleric known as the supreme leader and his council of religious jurists preside over government, and more in common with Soviet (and arguably contemporary) Russia, where the Russian Orthodox Church is subject to the whims of the Kremlin, acting as everything from propaganda tool to spy center. This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives. It's not coherent in a religious sense. It's coherent in a political sense. This is evident from the members and mission of Trump's new Religious Liberty Commission, as well as its three advisory bodies of religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The commission is tasked with preparing a report on the history and current state of religious liberty in America. By contrast, Trump's three immediate predecessors maintained an Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to advise on how faith-based organizations and the government could collaborate on issues like human trafficking, climate change, or global poverty. Called 'Community Initiatives' under Bush, this model reflected the church coming to the aid of the state to address issues arising from the collective moral failings of secular society. Trump abolished this office at the beginning of his second term. His new plan — the commission charged with producing an 'official account' of American religious liberty past and present — is not only unprecedented in American history; it is the product of a very different view of the church-state relationship. In this formulation, faith is not a balm for the moral ills of a nation. Here, the United States, its history and institutions, is the means by which religion can sustain itself. And therefore religious institutions prosper or fail in proportion not to their own morality or faithfulness but to the extent to which America is 'American' enough. This strategy was one of the founding tactics of the old religious right, a tactic it shares with this new religious movement. But the MAGA religious right has taken this strategy to a new level. And this new movement is far more complex. If we believe that these ideological architects are simply 'conservative Christians' or even 'Christian nationalists' in the old vein, we are fundamentally misreading both the religious character of the MAGA movement and its broader ideological and practical aims. If, however, we perceive and understand the difference, we are much better situated to combat the radical remaking not just of American religion but of America itself. The strange makeup of the Religious Liberty Commission Nothing makes this new religious movement more clear than a quick survey of whom Trump has appointed to serve. Of the 39 appointments made to the Religious Liberty Commission and its related advisory boards, not a single mainline Protestant is among them. Instead, the board is dominated by evangelicals. Evangelicals' emphasis on personal salvation, biblical literalism, and emotive worship made them much more popular among America's least wealthy and least educated, in contrast to the more theologically flexible mainline Protestants who once dominated the country's political and cultural elite. These differences also made the evangelicals naturally more politically conservative than their mainline counterparts. The evangelicals on the commission are joined by conservative Catholics, Orthodox Jews, the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America, and Dr. Ben Carson, who is a Seventh-Day Adventist. Significantly, two of the three Muslims appointed by Trump, are white, American converts to the faith. These are both inclusions and omissions that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when American civic religion — that is, the collective and largely unspoken religious values of a nation — was dominated by the mainline denominations while Catholics, Jews and Muslims remained on the periphery. That's not to say that this exclusion was a good thing. But who is invited to the table does tend to reveal the values of the people and nation doing the inviting. The reign of mainline Protestants and WASPs reflected a certain set of principles about both religion and politics: moderation in religion and a separation of church and state in politics that not only maintained the neutrality of the government but also the independence of the churches. Not surprisingly then, as the old religious right rose to power, their enemies included not only secular liberals but also the mainline churches by whom they had long felt belittled. The simple explanation for the omission of mainline Protestants now is that these denominations and their members have become more progressive and are simply too liberal for Trump. They are 'victims' of the sensibility, good education, and pragmatism that defined them for generations and then lured them leftward. But this is only part of the truth. High-profile splits among Episcopalians and Methodists, as well as the existence of deeply conservative mainline churches like the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, demonstrate that there are still plenty of socially and politically conservative mainline Protestants in America, even if they are now a minority within their own tradition (which might also be said of politically conservative Jewish Americans). These religious and political conservatives would seem like natural allies to include in a coalition interested in traditional religion and traditional society. Moreover, the evangelical leaders of this new coalition might, in theory, be far more comfortable with a fellow Protestant Christian than with a Muslim, a Jew, or even a Catholic. And yet, they have been excluded. The old American civic religion is dead. Instead, we are confronted with a cross-faith coalition united not by theology, but by a shared sense of cultural siege. This coalition has manifested not only in the Religious Liberty Commission, but on podcasts, in rallies, and in a growing number of organizations. Trump even touted the alliance in his now-infamous Madison Square Garden rally on the eve of the 2024 election. This is not to say that the traditions included are themselves devoid of theological content or that every member of these traditions is part of the new coalition. That is clearly not true. But the individuals and institutions entering this coalition are willing to put aside theological concerns, even subsume them completely, in the interest of the coalition's nation-building project. This project, born from that shared sense of threat (largely around issues of gender, sexuality, and race), is not, as they would have you believe, a concerted effort to return society to some earlier state. Trump 2.0 has made clear that it is seeking to reshape America in unprecedented ways. That's the opposite of being traditional and conservative. The goal of the new movement is to radically transform American life and society. Related The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies How the new American religion works While the religious right of the 1980s and 1990s was political because of their theology, this is a group doing the opposite: constructing a theology that fits their politics. Take, for example, the defense by evangelical leaders of Trump's sexual transgressions. Trump's sins are excusable because he is a messianic figure, they say, sent not to save our souls but America. It's not coherent in a religious sense. It's coherent in a political sense. You can't counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional 'believers.' He also penned a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post titled 'Muslims Like Me Don't Have Theological Beef with Evangelicals. It's the Prejudice Against Us That's the Problem' in which he recounts how 'at home' he and his wife felt at the anti-abortion Washington March for Life among 'fellow believers.' He also bemoans the greater welcome Muslims have received on the American left, arguing it has caused American Muslims to abandon hardline positions on issues like sexuality. Of course, Royer ignores that, as a white man, he is in the minority (in a way that matters) among American Muslims. But he is also making a fairly innovative argument: In claiming he wants to restore Christian principles and complaining against Muslims being welcomed by the left, he says theology doesn't matter; only politics does. Because in the end, America (not God) — and specifically America as it is imagined by the MAGA movement and Trump — is the source of liberty and human flourishing. With respect to the things that matter most to him, Royer does have more in common with the evangelicals at the March for Life than he does with those Muslims whom he mourns being 'secularized' by the tolerance of the left. It appears that Royer shares a political vision of America with those evangelicals and does not care about sharing a theological vision with Muslims. Royer might become fast friends with fellow commission member Eric Metaxas. Raised Greek Orthodox, Metaxas has existed in a sort of denominational gray area for the whole of his adult life. He attended an Episcopal Church in Manhattan (where he served in the vestry) and has written bestselling biographies of the two most famous Lutherans ever: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther himself. But he is now comfortably described as an 'evangelical intellectual.' All suffice to say, Metaxas probably doesn't care all that much about the deep theological issues that have divided Christendom. What he cares about is politics. This movement seeks power not to preserve a spiritual order or influence their own or anybody else's afterlife but to reshape society in the here and now. This is the only world they really care about. In fact, one of the most shocking differences between the old religious right and the MAGA religious right is how little the afterlife comes up. Where Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Pat Buchanan never ceased talking about the threat of eternal punishment, both for individuals and the nation, these new guys never bring it up. They are, for all intents and purposes, metaphysical atheists, occasionally invoking vague theological language only because it still holds cultural sway. Finally, there's the seemingly endless celebrations of the state and its power. In the brief time since he returned to office, Trump has planned a military parade and established two new holidays. Now, with the commission, he has ordered a hagiographic recounting of the nation's history, placing the story of the country within a sacred narrative by official channels. That is big imperial cult energy (and if you don't believe me, read the 'Aeneid'). This is the displacement of the trappings of religion with America First alternatives. Related The movement desperately trying to get people to have more babies The old methods of resistance won't work All this should matter to anyone who wants to stop them. First, you can't counter this kind of movement the same way you would more traditional 'believers.' Combating the religious right in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s was in many ways as simple as pointing out hypocrisy and holding leaders to the same standards they held others. And it worked. Many of the figures of the old religious right have simply been shamed from public life, making way for their new, more pernicious, replacements. But MAGA is pretty impervious to shame. You can't just appeal to theological humility or scriptural counterpoints. And you can't rely on their own sense of conscience. What animates them is political utility. If we understand how the MAGA religious movement is different from the old Christian nationalists, those who wish to combat Trump and his ilk might find some new allies. All of those traditionalist conservative believers — the Latter-day Saints, the conservative mainline Protestants, Catholic bishops without Instagram — might be the key to taking down the Church of MAGA. This doesn't mean that progressives have to agree on everything or anything or even like them. But it does mean recognizing that the enemy of your enemy might be your political frenemy, especially when they are alarmed for different but equally serious reasons. Many traditional conservative believers remain committed to some basic moral architecture, to rules that bind even their leaders, and to a God who ultimately cannot be manipulated. The administration's draconian immigration policy is now disquieting some evangelicals, concerned about co-religionists who have sought refuge in America from real religious persecution. And the Trump administration's pronatalist advocacy for IVF has many conservative Christians, including conservative Catholics, on edge. These groups may not like the world as it is, but they don't like the world MAGA's new civic cult seeks to build either. And in this light, they may wish to fight it out on the old terms. If progressives can make the idea of the last war appealing, there is hope for a viable coalition. Trump and MAGA have declared a religious war, not just against secularism or progressive forms of religion, but also against traditional religion that refuses to serve their radical vision for the world. This is not a theocracy in the making. This is not The Handmaid's Tale. It's something newer, stranger, and much more difficult to fight: religion of nation and identity disguised in the trappings of familiar faiths. We won't defeat it with scripture or appeals to conscience. We'll need to name it, unmask it, and forge unexpected alliances with those who (whatever their doctrine) still believe in a higher power than Donald Trump.
