In the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has contributed to reorganizing public meaning-making under wartime authoritarianism. This paper examines how Patriarch Kirill and Archpriest Andrei Tkachev construct and moralize the category of war in sermons delivered since the beginning of the invasion. We show that war-naming is not merely a matter of lexical choice; rather, it functions as a mechanism of ideological legitimation through which clerics frame the war and shape congregational responses. Drawing on Ideological Discourse Analysis (IDA) combined with a grammatical perspective, we focus on war-categorization and substitution (the noun война and euphemistic alternatives) and modification patterns that stabilize particular moral and political readings. Our findings reveal two divergent mobilizational registers that also expose internal ambiguities within ROC discourse. Patriarch Kirill predominantly relies on oblique framing: he avoids direct references to "war," prefers euphemisms such as "events" or "conflict," displaces "war" onto metaphysical struggle, and redirects responsibility toward Western hostility, thereby softening intra-communal violence while sustaining a 'defensive' narrative. By contrast, Archpriest Andrei Tkachev names "war" explicitly from the outset and intensifies it through emotive, WWII-inflected, and apocalyptic frames anchored in biblical references, converting fear into righteous mobilization and actionable anger toward Ukrainians as a constructed enemy-other. By foregrounding the interplay between language, religion, and politics, the paper shows how religious narratives shape social cognition in wartime, when aligned with state ideology. This perspective also supports more nuanced methodological approaches to linguistic analyses of sermonic discourse, particularly in contexts where religious communication converges with authoritarian legitimation.