Father Mikhail Shusharin, a priest at a cathedral in western Siberia, is pale with haunted eyes as he talks about his time with a Russian assault unit in Ukraine. In the spring of 2024, he volunteered to spend several months in the combat zone, inspired by the sacrifices of his grandfather’s generation in the Second World War.
In a new film Callsign Dalmation – his nom de guerre – the priest admits he thought he would be meeting soldiers in churches and distributing humanitarian aid. Instead, he found himself plunged into the thick of war, cowering in a trench and cramming body parts into bags after a thermobaric bomb hit his evacuation brigade. Asked how he reconciled the slaughter around him with his faith, he said: ‘Killing a person is a sin, but in war it is a necessity’.
