In Depth:  Ukraine

Emily Pollok

Ukrainian evangelicals are standing firm in their faith as their country faces a challenging and unpredictable future.

“We are in a very difficult situation, but not without hope,” says Igor Bandura, the Ukrainian Baptist Union’s vice president for international relations. “People in Ukraine are tired. But I believe the majority of people are still standing strong and believe that Ukraine should have a just and lasting peace.

letter from Ukraine

Ryan Burton King

My phone went off with a loud siren. The voice of Mark Hamill – yes, of Luke Skywalker fame – spoke sternly: ‘Attention! Air raid alert! Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.’ I hastily moved to mute it and apologised. A large table full of Ukrainian men grinned back at me. ‘Now we can tell who is not local,’ one of them joked. We continued eating our pizza and talking.

I was in Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea in southern Ukraine - one of two other cities I visited this past month. Every day and night brought reminders of war, as Ukraine continues to defend itself against its Russian invader almost three years into a three day fight. In Odesa, my bedtime soundtrack was the mournful cry of air raid sirens, the infernal buzzing of Russian drones, the roar of explosions, and the reassuring rat-a-tat-tat of air defence guns. This is the daily lived reality of the 38 million people who still live in Ukraine, most of whom meet the threat with a weary but collective shrug and carry on with whatever they need to do.

Milla Ling-Davies

Hundreds of men and women from churches across Ukraine have gathered in Kyiv for a church-planting summit, where they heard about an exciting vision to plant 1,000 new churches in the country within the next 12 years.

The conference, run by the All Ukrainian Union of Evangelical Christian-Baptists, was held in the Baptist house of prayer ‘Temple of Peace’. Those gathered considered the theme ‘Invincible Church’ through times of congregational worship and teaching, breakout seminars, testimonies, and presentations from various organisations.

Iain Taylor

A Ukrainian evangelical has spoken of the ‘awful tragedy’ in which a pastor’s daughter was killed in a Russian drone strike.

The attack in March killed 12 people in an apartment block in Odesa on the Black Sea coast. They included a young mother called Anna, and her small baby. Anna was the daughter of Pastor Nikolai, a respected Baptist minister in the city.

Milla Ling-Davies

On the day of his 50th birthday, Daniel Rus drove 26 hours for a humanitarian trip to Ukraine – while he was there, he witnessed 50 people indicate that they wanted to accept Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.

Daniel works with the Global Network of Evangelists (part of the Luis Palau Association) and this was his 31st humanitarian trip to Ukraine. During the visit, he and his team were able to run seven events where they distributed food and shared the gospel – two were in churches and the rest were outside. While in the city of Druzhkivka, Daniel preached about Christ to a packed room and, at the end, 50 people raised their hands indicating they wanted to give their life to Christ.

Iain Taylor

A brainwave that occurred to 65-year-old former Harrier pilot Andy Dakin while out walking his dog has led to almost 10,000 Bibles being given to Ukrainian military being trained in the UK.

Gulf War veteran Dakin is the Executive Director of the Naval & Military Bible Society (NMBS), which has been providing Bibles to the British armed forces since 1779. When it became apparent that the Ukraine conflict would not end as quickly as some initially predicted, the NMBS decided to offer spiritual support to Ukraine’s frontline combatants in the form of Bibles in their own language.

Milla Ling-Davies

A Russian bomb exploded near a Christian mission worker sharing the gospel in Kherson, causing him to dive for cover, en has been told.

Daniel Rus is a Romanian working with the Global Network of Evangelists (part of the Luis Palau Association), who has organised and led 24 humanitarian trips to Ukraine. In December 2023, on day two of his most recent visit, he and his team visited five villages surrounding Kherson. While distributing food parcels at the third, a mortar bomb exploded 40 metres away, in the garden of the house they were in front of, and the team were forced to run to their cars.

Misha’s story in his own words: I was born into a family of Jewish atheists in Ukraine. My parents and my grandparents were all Jewish atheists. As a result, I grew up embracing atheism, following Communist ideology and believing that there was no God.

Being Jewish, I thought that any Jewish person who believed in Jesus was a traitor to our people, even though I hadn’t explicitly been taught this. Our family didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays, but we held to a strong Jewish identity based on intellectual and moral pride. If I had to describe myself back then, I would say I was ‘a Communist Pharisee’.

Iain Taylor

With the eyes of the world now fixed firmly on the new military offensive by Ukraine and the aftermath of the Kakhovka dam breach, Russia’s ongoing campaign to persecute and shut down non-Orthodox churches in the occupied regions shows no sign of stopping.

Respected US think tank, the Institute for the Study of War, has announced the following recent events: ‘Russian forces have shut down another Ukrainian evangelical Christian church in Mariupol, probably as part of a wider systematic religious persecution campaign in occupied Ukraine. Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor, Petro Andryushchenko, reported that Russian forces seized the Ukrainian Christian Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity in Mariupol and are using it to house 10 to 30 Russian servicemen.

Iain Taylor

Christian medics and dentists are playing a crucial role in the Ukraine conflict – despite the constant threat of missile attacks.

The International Christian Medical and Dental Association (ICMDA) links around 60,000 Christian doctors and dentists in over 100 countries worldwide.

A 69-year-old pastor with bone cancer who is receiving daily chemotherapy is refusing to leave Kherson, Ukraine, so as not to abandon his congregation and others in the city.

Sergei Synii has been urged by his daughters to travel to the USA, where they are, for safety and medical treatment.

Demand for Bibles has multiplied exponentially in Ukraine since the vicious Russian invasion, new figures are revealing.

Some national church leaders are comparing the situation to that of immediate post-Communist days, when there was a significant and strong spiritual movement, resulting in many conversions to Christ. The Ukrainian Bible Society reports that in the first nine months of 2022, more than 359,000 Bibles were given out – at least two and a half times more than the number distributed in 2020. The trauma of the war, far from setting many hearts against God, has in fact created a desire in many thousands to know God and the nearness of His presence.

Iain Taylor

Despite extensive searches and enquiries by Baptist churches, there is no news whatsoever of missing pastor Leonid Ponomaryov and his wife Tatyana.

They were seized by armed, masked men wearing military uniform from their home in Russian-occupied Mariupol in September. Neighbours ‘distinctly heard groans and cries’ as the masked men took Leonid and Tatyana away ‘in an unknown direction’, local Baptists said. Indications are that they were taken after they refused to allow their church building to be used for the referendum held to rubber stamp the annexation of the eastern Ukrainian territory by Russia.

One of the devastating aspects of the war in Ukraine is the huge number of people – the UN estimate the figure at 12 million – who have fled their homes with little more than the clothes they were wearing.

Around seven million people are still thought to be displaced inside Ukraine itself, many in the western region of Rivne and Sarny where Christian charity Mission Without Borders (MWB) is operating.

Iain Taylor

The need for healing and hope is huge in Ukraine. So TWR Ukraine, Trans World Radio’s (TWR) local partner, has been producing new content which is not only reaching Ukrainians but also the nation’s traditional Roma, or Romany, communities.

Around 200,000 to 300,000 Roma live in Ukraine; thousands are committed Christians. Despite their challenging and often poor circumstances, many enjoy using modern technology, giving TWR Ukraine a variety of ways to reach them.

Iain Taylor

A church in Ukraine has given away 10,000 gospels to its country’s troops – and has a further 40,000 to distribute.

Hope Lebedyn is a church founded by Sergey Ovcharenko which aims for community regeneration, aid provision and, most importantly, spreading the gospel. Lebedyn is about 80 miles north west of Kharkiv and close to the border with Belarus.

Iain Taylor

Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in February Evangelicals Now has been inundated with stories about how UK churches and Christian groups are helping refugees and reaching out to them with the gospel. But Christians in other parts of Europe have been busy too.

Here is how Message Germany (an international hub of Manchester-based The Message Trust) has responded to the crisis.

Iain Taylor

During the first 90 days of the war in Ukraine, over 6million refugees fled to other nations, A further 7million were displaced internally, making this the largest movement of people in Europe since World War II.

In response, 72 Christian leaders from 22 European countries recently gathered in Krakow, Poland, to focus on the war and refugee crisis. The five countries that have received the most refugees (Poland, Romania, Moldova, Hungary and Slovakia) admitted they are overwhelmed and can no longer handle the ongoing flow of highly-traumatised women and children.

Iain Taylor

As the war in Ukraine grinds on, many commentators are looking for historical parallels to point towards how the conflict might end, what the impact may be on those forced to endure it and what life might be like afterwards.

The experience of Aleppo, in north west Syria, may provide a few clues. Early on in the Ukrainian conflict a BBC correspondent said that, if we were unaware of what Russian battle tactics look like, ‘then we had not been paying attention’. He drew a direct line between what Putin’s military did, first in the Chechen capital Grozny during the war of 1999–2000, which resulted in the United Nations calling it ‘the most destroyed city on earth’ by 2003, and then Syria.

Christians in Lviv shared the gospel ‘from morning till night’ during the Eastern Orthodox Easter period (a week later than in the West).

The Slavic Gospel Association (SGA) writes: The people of Lviv brought Easter bread to Bucha and Gostomel. Volunteers from Lviv distributed 600 pieces of Easter bread to the residents of Gostomel and Bucha.

One of the largest groupings of nations in the world is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), comprising 11 countries with a total population of 680 million people of whom around 120 million are Christians of various denominations.

Churches of these countries have been forthright in supporting Ukraine. The Protestant Christian Batak Church in Indonesia wrote and distributed a song of prayer and hope dedicated to the people of Ukraine and the countries receiving them. Similarly, Singapore churches called for prayer and supported humanitarian aid efforts. The Grace Baptist Church wrote: ‘After weeks of posturing and diplomacy with the US and Europe while the world waited with bated breath, Russian president Vladimir Putin launched an invasion by land, air and sea on neighbouring Ukraine. This is the largest conventional attack on a European state since World War Two, 80 years ago.’ New Creation Church wrote: ‘As a church, we are supporting a Christian humanitarian organisation to bring relief and aid to the people.’

Iain Taylor

More than 2.5million Ukrainians have already fled their homeland, according to the United Nations, causing the greatest refugee crisis in Europe since 1945. But remarkable stories are already emerging of how people are responding to their desperate needs with kindness and generosity, with Christians often to the fore in this vital work.

Mihai Malancea is the Director of Christian University Divitia Gratia, located at Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, which borders southern Ukraine. Evangelicals Now caught up with him during his short trip to the UK to link up with the Eurasia Education Foundation and asked him what his university did, and how it was responding to the flood of Ukrainian refugees.

Iain Taylor

The Slavic Gospel Association (SGA) is a supporter of the Grace Shelter, an orphanage run by Grace Church (Baptist) in Odessa, a port on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, since 2004.

Fifty-three children, aged from about three to 18, and their ‘orphan parents’ lived there. The site also hosted a ‘transition house’, which provided a number of small apartments for young adults for a couple of years whilst learning to become independent.

Moldova has suffered particularly badly in the Covid pandemic, coming as it did on the heels of a severe drought and disastrously poor harvests in 2020, which added to the already heavy burdens of the poor and vulnerable.

Poverty is endemic in large sections of the populace, and its consequences are evident not only in material terms but in the realm of relationships, and particularly family life. This scenario is common in a number of East European countries. Families are poor. The parents cannot find work to sustain their children and their homes. They take the decision to go to other countries where work can be found, and children are left in the care of ageing grandparents who themselves find life difficult and challenging. Often this results in children growing up without adequate parental guidance and discipline, and falling prey to many dangers and temptations, including addiction, sexual abuse, and even human trafficking. It is no exaggeration to say that chaos is evident in many family situations.

With tensions remaining high in the region despite Russia’s recent military pullback from the Ukrainian border, evangelicals on both sides of the border have spoken out wanting peace.

The Russian Evangelical Alliance has led calls to ‘restore the peaceful relations between the peoples of both countries’, while churches in Ukraine have been encouraged to ‘pray and fast for the peace in our land’.

Approaching 30 years after the Ukraine left the Soviet Union and gained its independence, scores of Jewish people are reported to be turning to Jesus as they reject decades of communist teaching when they were raised as atheists and forced to deny the existence of God.

Over the last several years missionaries have recorded increasing numbers of Jewish people coming to faith and many of these have been from Ukraine or from a Russian-speaking background. Misha, a Christian Witness to Israel missionary (and Russian-speaking Ukrainian Jewish person himself), highlighted the story of Kayla, a Jewish woman who approached him when she saw he was reading an article from a Christian magazine. Misha took time to share his faith and after they had met many times for Bible study, Kayla gave her life to Jesus.