“The Eastern Orthodox Church is the natural and historical inheritor of Rome/Christendom...and since its subjugation by islam...only Russia can possibly claim the mantle as in Byzantism which refers to a renewed Russia to counter the increasing secularism of the West.”
The protestant churches are as derivative from the church of Rome as the Russian church is from Constantinople.
Also, as a matter of fact, there are other eastern european countries that maintained the faith far better than the KGB riddled church of the Kremlin.
The bottom line is that there is a direct lineage from the Roman Empire to the Holy Roman Empire and then to the current superpowers.
Western powers - mainly the Europeans - today bear little resemblance to the Christian infused nature of Byzantium.
As for Russia—its identity was almost destroyed by the Bolsheviks—most of whom were not even Russian!...a foreign ideology that crept in and almost destroyed Russian Orthodox Identity. It did not however.
Marxism lost. Russia and Russian Orthodoxy lives on.