Aleksei Pavlov, an assistant secretary on the Security Council of Russia, has called for the “desatanization” of Ukraine.

“I believe that with the continuation of the special military operation, it becomes more and more urgent to carry out the de-Satanization of Ukraine,” Pavlov said.

Pavlov said he didn’t know how many covens of satanists there were in Ukraine but that he expected it to be in the hundreds. “Some of them were created ‘having been sharpened in advance for a specific purpose and flock’, others ‘simply existed as branches of richer patrons,’ others— ‘and did in the form of a kind of closed joint-stock company with a couple of hundred small-town adepts,’” the TASS story said, quoting Pavlov. He also highlighted the fact that the Church of Satan is an officially recognized religion in the U.S. and that its influence has been spreading in Ukraine since the 1990s.

On the Russia-1 television channel, satanism has come up repeatedly. “Who is the Ukrainian God? It’s the devil, basically,” a guest on one of Russia-1’s shows said, according to a translation by Russian Media Monitor’s Julia Davis. “And when we’re surprised at the cruelty of these people, there’s nothing to be surprised at. That’s paganism. It demands human sacrifices. It demands blood.”