If You’re Bombing Churches, You’re Not Defending Christianity

Anybody who still believes that Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a defender of Christian values is someone who wants to be fooled, and who is willfully blind to a not-so-small mountain of counterevidence, from the raiding, seizing, harassing, and takeover of Protestant churches in occupied Ukraine, to the torture of Christians, to the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children, to the attempted systematic eradication of faiths other than the state-aligned Orthodox church.

Still . . . sometimes you just have to see it, like a Russian drone hitting the Greek Catholic St. Andrew’s church in Lviv earlier today.

That’s a particularly dramatic video, but the war crime it depicts is not particularly rare. A report published in January calculated that Russian forces have damaged or destroyed at least 737 religious buildings since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.

If you’re bombing churches, you’re not defending Christianity.