Ukrainian Pastors Detail Persecution in Russia-Occupied Territories

Before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022, Tavrisky Christian Institute (TCI) in Antonivka, a town on the bank of the Dnipro River in the Kherson region, had one of the most extensive Christian libraries in eastern Europe.

Its pastor and rector, Valentyn Syniy, told VOA that in partnership with the U.S. Pioneer Bible Translators, it started a Bible translation project for Central Asia. Since 2014, it has also supported many Ukrainians who fled the Russian occupation of Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk regions.

Most of TCI's 40 staff members and 300 students had to flee after the Russian troops occupied the TCI campus in early March 2022. Russian troops turned the campus into a military base, looted computers and equipment, and burned or threw away Bibles and other books, Syniy says. When retreating ahead of a Ukrainian offensive, they shelled the campus, reducing it to rubble.

'Russian soldiers called us 'sectarians' and our faith 'false,'" the Protestant pastor said. Because the seminary had Ukrainian and English-language books, Syniy said, Russians also called them 'Nazis' and 'American agents.'

Syniy said several pastors who stayed behind were detained and beaten by the Russians, who told them that 'sectarians' have no place in Russia and should be buried alive. Russia has illegally annexed many of its occupied territories in eastern Ukraine.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Russian military has killed at least 39 priests, pastors and monks; destroyed, damaged or looted at least 640 churches, monasteries, mosques, synagogues, theological institutions and other places of worship, said Viktor Yelensky, head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience.

'The 39th victim is a 58-year-old pastor from the city of Kupiansk, Kharkiv region, who was killed yesterday in his Protestant Church of Jesus Christ during the Russian air raid of Kupiansk," said Yelensky during an online discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on February 29.

He said that Russian troops deliberately killed several priests and pastors, targeting Protestants and priests of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, whom they see as rivals to the Russian Orthodox Church.

According to a Ukrainian Institute for Religious Freedom report, dozens of Ukrainian priests and pastors were arrested, arbitrarily detained, tortured and deported. Ukrainian Protestants, who make up only about 4% of the Ukrainian population, are disproportionally targeted for their faith.

'During the Russian occupation, believers of evangelical churches in Ukraine [Pentecostals, Baptists, Adventists, Charismatics, etc.] are particularly affected. Russian soldiers repeatedly threatened the total physical destruction of all evangelical believers, calling them 'American spies,' 'sectarians,' and 'enemies of the Russian Orthodox people,' says the report.

Clash of values: religious freedom vs. restrictions

Western religious scholars argue that Ukraine and Russia diverged in their attitudes toward spiritual freedom after gaining independence from the Soviet Union.

Catherine Wanner, a professor of history, anthropology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said Ukraine adopted one of the most liberal and pluralistic approaches to religion. In contrast, Russia chose to restrict and regulate religious life, giving a preferential status to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Since its invasion of Crimea and portions of Donbas in 2014, Russia brought its repressive practices into the Ukrainian pluralistic environment, according to the US Department of State 2022 Report on International Religious Freedom, including widespread regional bans on minority religious groups, such as evangelical Christians, Roman and Greek Catholics.

Other practices included illegal imprisonment, physical abuse and disappearances of religious leaders, and the deliberate destruction or seizure of religious buildings.

After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia's forces intensified these practices and carried them into other occupied areas. Borys Gudziak, metropolitan-archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, recently said, 'There is no active Catholic priest in the occupied territory, Greek or Latin rite.' He spoke during a recent discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

He said that religious institutions that do not actively support the occupying regime are 'destined for annihilation.'

Wanner said eastern and southern Ukraine was a 'stronghold of Protestant presence' in Ukraine. The Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, now partly under Russian occupation, were home to thriving new communities of Baptists and evangelical Christians, built primarily with the help of U.S. missionaries.

'There were things such as the Christian university, a variety of seminaries, publishing houses that serve not only Protestant communities within Ukraine but even more broadly within the former Soviet Union,' she said.

Role of the Russian Orthodox Church

The Russian Orthodox Church is not a mere observer of religious persecution in Ukraine, Wanner said, it is President Vladimir Putin's partner.

'We have the rise of not just Christian nationalism, but indeed Orthodox nationalism and the Russian Orthodox Church as a rather energetic supporter of this war,' she said.

Wanner said it provides an ideological basis for the Russian state's imperial encroachments.

'Putin posits together with Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church that there is something like 'Russian world,' Ruski Mir, Russian space, that is founded and grounded in a shared eastern confessional tradition," Wanner said. "And it creates a historical and spiritual common space that just as it should be governed religiously by the Moscow Patriarchy, it should be governed by the Kremlin in a political and especially in a geopolitical sense."

Speaking in 2022, Patriarch Kirill was quoted as saying to the Russian soldiers to whom he was giving a blessing during the sermon that dying in the war of aggression "washes away all sins.'

Gudziak said that out of 300 Orthodox bishops, 'not a single one had spoken out against the war.'

Ukrainian authorities say that through the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, formerly of the Moscow Patriarchate, Moscow exerts its influence on Ukrainian priests and believers to act against the Ukrainian state.

Ukraine's security service, the SBU, reported in late 2023 that it had initiated 68 criminal proceedings against UOC representatives since the war began, bringing charges such as treason, collaboration, aiding and abetting an aggressor country and public incitement to religious hatred among the others.

According to the SBU, Ukrainian citizenship was revoked for almost two dozen UOC representatives who held Russian passports and spread pro-Kremlin propaganda about the war.

At the same time, Patriarch Kirill accused Ukraine of an 'anti-church smear campaign,' 'seizures of churches with the use of brutal violence against the clergy and believers' and 'falsified criminal cases, pressure on the episcopate from the secret services.'

This reaction was triggered by the plans of the Ukrainian parliament to adopt legislation that requires religious organizations with 'ties to the aggressor country' to sever those links.

Orthodox Church Row Threatens US Aid to Ukraine

'We need help to be free again'

Ukrainian religious leaders and scholars say they see no way to reinstate religious freedom in the occupied territories of Ukraine other than to return them to Ukrainian control.

'We could freely worship and study in independent Ukraine. We could teach new pastors for Ukraine and had more than 200 students from other countries who studied in our programs. Now, our pastors are getting arrested and tortured in the occupied territories. We want to be free again," said Syniy.

Syniy, whose institute first moved to western Ukraine and now plans to move to Kyiv, said he prayed for his students and staff to return to Antonivka to rebuild its campus and continue their work there.

'But we will only be able to return to our campus near Kherson when this territory is liberated, and the Russians will not be able to shell us anymore. And for this, we need the military, financial and prayer support from our U.S. brethren,' he said.