Russian Radicals Baptize Moon to ‘Make it Orthodox’

Members of a far-right nationalist intelligentsia group and bikers from Vladimir Putin’s favorite motorcycle club have held a ceremony to “baptize” the Moon, saying they wanted to “make it Orthodox and connect it with Russia.” The bikers then performed a stunt show involving a lunar rover and an armored vehicle.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. The surreal event was the brainchild of Alexander Prokhanov, chairman of the Izborsky Club—a state-funded think tank bringing together nationalist and ultraconservative intellectuals. Its members include Alexander Dugin, a nationalist political philosopher often referred to as ‘Putin’s brain.’ Meanwhile, Russian "Z-writer" Prokhanov and pro-Kremlin "Night Wolves" bikers baptized the Moon.They brought a piece of a granite boulder, called it a "celestial moon rock," held a religious procession, and claimed they were making the Moon Orthodox to "unite it with Russia."… pic.twitter.com/1iTZyc7F6a— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) September 30, 2026 The Izborsky Club issued a declaration shortly after its founding, calling on “all statesmen who value the future of Russia to act as a united patriotic, imperial front” and unite to work towards a “return to the Orthodox-Christian spirituality and universality of traditional Russia” in order to make the country “invincible.” The group was joined in the September 27 baptism ceremony, held near the Estonian border, by the Night Wolves, a politically radical biker group described as “friends” by Vladimir Putin. The bikers assisted in the 2014 annexation of Crimea and fought alongside Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. ‘Message from the heavens’ Other Topics of Interest Lithuania Moves to Ban Russian, Belarusian Artists Who Performed in Occupied Ukraine Performers would have to sign a declaration condemning Russia’s war and backing Ukraine’s territorial integrity, under a proposal from Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry. Independent Russian investigative news site Agentstvo cited Prokhanov as saying they had decided to baptize the Moon to “make it Orthodox and connect it with Russia.” The ritual involved consecrating “fragments” of the Shcheglets stone, a granite boulder located in Russia’s Novgorod region that bears Bronze Age petroglyphs. Night Wolves leader Alexander Zaldastanov described the stone in a blog post as being of “celestial origin.” Prokhanov referred to the boulder as a “moonstone” and claimed that it “landed several millennia before our era.” “It was a message from the heavens to this land, which later became Russia,” he said in an interview with prominent Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda. Prokhanov’s comments came after he was asked by the paper about Donald Trump’s “appropriation” of the “Soviet Moon,” according to Agentstvo. A piece of soil taken from the boulder was placed at the base of a ceremonial cross, after which a prayer service and procession were held and what Prokhanov referred to as the moonstone was blessed, Agentstvo reported. TVP World is Poland's first English-language channel where you can find our guest interviews, world news from the Polish perspective and the latest news from the CEE region.