The Rev. Mihail Britsin, an evangelical Christian pastor from Melitopol in southeastern Ukraine, is focused on a more secular form of salvation these days, praying for the liberation of his city and what remains of his congregation from Russian military domination.
As the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, representatives of Christian and Jewish communities are speaking out about what they say is the devastation wrought by Russia’s invasion, the Kremlin’s attempts to co-opt churches in occupied areas, and the repercussions for those who don’t comply.
“I’ve just spent six months under the occupation,” Mr. Britsin said in a telephone interview this week. “I’m cautious about my people who are still there in Melitopol.”
Mr. Britsin said the Church of Grace congregation he serves includes “hundreds” of members — he wouldn’t say exactly how many out of concern for their safety. An estimated 300 members of his flock left the city located in Zaporizhzhia Oblast near Crimea and have scattered since.
“They are in 15 countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Germany, Poland, all over Europe,” he said. They communicate via the encrypted WhatsApp and Telegram messaging apps and connect via Zoom for worship services.
Now working in exile with Mission Eurasia, an evangelical group that served much of the region from offices in Ukraine before the invasion, Mr. Britsin said, “I understand God is in control, and he can use anything. If he allowed it to happen, we can overcome it, because he’s the great Father.”
According to Sergey Rakhuba, a Ukrainian who now heads Mission Eurasia from its Texas headquarters, the group’s operational center near the town of Bucha outside Kyiv “was destroyed.” The U.N. and rights groups are investigating reports of mass killings of civilians and other human rights abuses in Bucha during the occupation by Russian forces in the early stages of the invasion in the spring of 2022.
“All our materials were burned,” Mr. Rakhuba said, with the Russians taking “it all out and burning it on purpose. They blew up our building with explosives and left.”
Mr. Rakhuba said the group will “continue with our ministry, training and mobilizing the next generation” of Christian leaders in the region.
He said the group distributed 200,000 “family food packages” in Ukraine and 100,000 Christmas gifts to refugee children in Poland, Moldova and the western, unoccupied areas of Ukraine.
But while relief efforts and training are important, Mr. Rakhuba is worried about the pastors and church members trapped under Russian occupation in eastern and southern Ukraine. The Kremlin officially annexed regions of the Donbas as part of Russia late last year, a move that only a tiny handful of countries has recognized.
“As of last week, Russian authorities — the FSB — came and detained three pastors in three remaining churches in Berdyansk, another city in Zaporizhzhia,” he said.
“They interrogate all of them, intimidate all of them,” Mr. Rakhuba said. “They use the tactics that were no different than I grew up under the Soviet Union regime. They threaten them with death.”
Fears of registering
The pastors feared registering their churches with the occupying authorities, he said, because that would mark them as collaborators when Ukraine recaptures the area. Some pastors left the area, he said, but one agreed to the registration.
In one city in the annexed Kherson region, Mr. Rakhuba said, a pastor who refused to cooperate with the Russian authorities was found dead three days later.
“That’s the tactic of intimidation, and then when they come to other churches, [the] pastors already know what they’re capable of, and that’s how they force them to cooperate,” he said.
According to Maksym Vasin, executive director of the Institute for Religious Freedom in Kyiv, such strategies are typical.
“Russia uses religion as a tool to increase or maintain its influence on Ukraine …, trying to influence Ukrainian people affiliated with their Ukrainian Orthodox Church that is connected to the Moscow Orthodox Patriarchate,” Mr. Vasin said.
“Believers of different denominations suffered persecution because if they don’t cooperate with Russian occupation authorities, if they manifest their Ukrainian identity, they are persecuted,” he said. The occupiers, he said, “seize church buildings, loot them, or close them for public worship services.”
Mr. Vasin, now working in exile in the U.S., said expelling Russian forces is the only long-term solution for the affected churches and congregations.
“I believe that if we are looking for a solution to this military conflict, we have to understand that [the] only option we have to establish a just full peace and restore human rights and religious freedom is to kick off Russian troops from Ukrainian sovereign territory,” he said.
“If Russia retains its control of some territories in Ukraine, there is no freedom, human rights, or any religious freedom,” he said.
Speaking at a panel presentation during last week’s International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, an American working in Kyiv since 1989, accused Russian forces of bombing synagogues.
He said some of those facilities are former police or military installations. The Russians, using antiquated maps, were unaware that the structures had since become houses of worship or rabbinical seminaries.
“Seventy-eight years after Auschwitz was liberated, we are sitting in Europe and witnessing a repetition of what happened 70 to 80 years ago during World War II,” he said.
“People are being killed,” the rabbi said. “Buildings are being bombed — synagogues, churches are being bombed. People are being killed, murdered just for who they are. It’s not an ethnic genocide, but it may be a national genocide.”
• Mark A. Kellner can be reached at mkellner@washingtontimes.com.
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