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Russia Claims "Baptism of the Moon" Made It Orthodox and Russian
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Alexander Prokhanov, chairman of the Kremlin-aligned Izborsk Club, and the pro-government Night Wolves biker club staged a "baptism of the Moon" in Izborsk, in Russia's Pskov region, on September 27. Prokhanov later stated that the aim was to "make it Orthodox and connect it with Russia."
This was reported by the Russian outlet Agentstvo on September 30. According to the outlet, the event coincided with the Orthodox feast of the Exaltation of the Cross and included a prayer service and a religious procession.
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Night Wolves leader Alexander Zaldostanov wrote that members had brought a fragment of the Shcheglets stone from the Novgorod region to Pskov.
Shcheglets is a granite boulder with Bronze Age petroglyphs near the village of Mytno, Agentstvo explained. Zaldostanov's post described the boulder as having "celestial origin" and holding the secret of the Battle of Kulikovo.
VGTRK's local branch clarified that the bikers had actually transported only a particle of soil from the boulder. The soil was placed in the base of a worship cross, the report noted, and the prayer service and procession took place beside it. Prokhanov told Komsomolskaya Pravda that the stone itself was consecrated.
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In the interview, published under the headline "Prokhanov Defended the Soviet Moon," the newspaper's Alexander Gamov asked for counterarguments against US President Donald Trump's appropriation of "our Soviet property," meaning the Moon.
"Just as Rus and Russia were once baptized and Russia became Orthodox, so we decided to baptize the Moon, make it Orthodox and connect it with Russia," Prokhanov replied.
Prokhanov called the soil a "lunar stone" and applied the same label to the Shcheglets boulder.
"It landed several millennia before our era. It was a message from the heavens to this land, which later became Russia," he declared. Agentstvo emphasized that no scientific evidence supports an extraterrestrial origin for the stone.
After the service, the Night Wolves performed a stunt show featuring a platform with a lunar rover and an armored vehicle, the outlet added.
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The Izborsk Club was founded in 2012 by Prokhanov and philosopher Alexander Dugin as an ultraconservative expert center. Agentstvo recalled that it enjoyed official backing from the start. Then-culture minister Vladimir Medinsky and Pskov governor Andrei Turchak attended its first meeting, and Putin adviser Sergey Glazyev was among its members.
An educational center created under the club developed school manuals, including for temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories, the report stated. They include "A Unified History with the Heroes of Donbas" and "My Russia," one part of which is titled "Crimea and Russia—A Common Destiny."
According to the outlet Proekt, cited by Agentstvo, kindergartens also ordered the center's materials. In 2025, the club received funding for the forum-concert "Angel of Chersonesos" in temporarily occupied Sevastopol, which featured a rock opera about participants in the war in Ukraine.
Also in 2025, the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, awarded Prokhanov the title Hero of Labor and personally presented him with the medal. Putin stated at the time that the writer's books and speeches unite society around patriotic values.
Moscow's lunar rhetoric has repeatedly outpaced its hardware. Russia's first lunar mission in half a century ended in 2023, when the Luna-25 probe crashed into the Moon's surface during a landing attempt.
In April 2026, the next lunar launch slipped from 2027 to 2028, and Russia conducted only 17 orbital launches in 2025, tying with New Zealand. Officials nonetheless continue to predict lunar colonies, and a Deputy Prime Minister promised Putin in 2025 a nuclear power station on the Moon by 2036.
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