Dispatch from Kyiv: As Russian bombs fall, Ukraine’s church leaders are aiding the defense effort however they can and vowing ‘we won’t surrender, never.’
Kyiv, Ukraine – At the first hint of milky light cracking the darkness, the moment the wartime curfew imposed on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv lifts, a small cluster of volunteer fighters – the baby-faced to the wrinkled – climb the cobblestone steps to the stone church above the city. Some stand guard near the wrought iron gates, and others idle by the arched wooden doorway of the shuttered Church of Michael Sanctifier, with its faded dark domes, their heads bowed.
This new phase of war may have sealed off their Houses of Worship, but it has only strengthened the resolve of Ukrainians to fight for their freedom, to hold on to their Motherland.
“We fight,” one young man, Artem, tells me in halting English, cradling a rifle as it were a small child. “For God, and with God.”
With wisps of blond hair falling across his wet eyes, he says his name means “unhurt.”
Ten days into the full-scale Russian invasion, with Russian troops steadily snaking around to besiege Kyiv days after President Vladimir Putin put nuclear defensives on high alert, Ukrainians no longer flinch at the sound of artillery shells roaring from afar. Instead, many turn to Church leaders for light in a dark time. And those incensed leaders are no longer prepared to kneel passively while their neighbors bleed for their homeland.
“Kyiv is a peaceful city, Ukraine is a peaceful country, and our nation is peaceful people. But we will defend our rights, our country. God is not where the strength is, but where the truth is,” Father George Kovalenko stresses from outside Kyiv’s storied St. Sophia Cathedral in the heart of the capital. “We pray to God to provide us with wisdom and strength to defend good against evil.”
In this period far from peace, the Church and faith play an even more pivotal role in everyday life. In addition to the air raid sirens, Church bells ring out as a warning to Ukrainians to shelter in bunkers. Houses of worship that remain open in safer pockets of the country offer sermons and first-aid training. Unfortunately, such houses have also become ad-hoc homes as thousands flee the capital and other hard-hit towns and villages. Given many can no longer visit their churches, they gather in bomb shelters and subway stations on Sunday mornings for makeshift mass.
The notion that neighbors are doing this to neighbors, brothers doing this to brothers, and Christians doing this to fellow Christians, has prompted long moments of reflection.
According to the Association of Religious Archives, roughly 50 percent of the 144 million Russian people identify as Christians – the overwhelming majority Orthodox, with only around 3 percent Catholic or Protestant. However, Kovalenko suggests that much of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy is now operated “by people who may be former military officers or even active-duty officers or part of Russian security services.”
While Kovalenko acknowledges that he routinely engages with peers in Russia who do not support Putin’s war, he usually wishes them “victory, but not victory over Ukraine.”
“Meaning, I wish them victory to change their country and get rid of that regime, not only for Ukraine, but also for all of Europe and the world,” he explains.
In Ukraine, 85 percent of the population identifies as Christian, with almost 70 percent considered Orthodox, 11 percent Catholic and just over three percent Protestant. The history of Christianity in Ukraine dates back to the Apostolic Age, wrapped in the legend of Saint Andrew ascending Kyiv’s ancient hills and missionaries moving across the Black Sea. At the dawn of the 9th century, the Metropolitanate of Gothia was founded in the Crimean Peninsula, with the see established in modern-day Kyiv following its acceptance by pagan convert and Saint Vladimir the Great.
Undeterred by the snowflakes, the rumble of rockets in the distance and the eerily empty square, Father Kovalenko guides me to the front of St. Sophia. Rumors have run rampant that the cherished site could soon be attacked by a missile. Still, Father Kovalenko moves around, unfazed, reminding me that his city has endured everything from the invasion of the Mongolian Tartars to Nazi occupation during the Second World War. Even during Soviet times, Ukrainians did not abandon their faith, quickly restoring their religious communities and temples after the fall of the Soviet Union, he stresses.
“We will win over Putin’s Army. Today, we are with our people. Everyone is doing something – some of us are working, some are praying, some are defending our city,” Kovalenko continues. “Sofia means wisdom, and this Cathedral was built a thousand years ago. Inside, there is a huge mosaic of the Mother of God. She is the infallible protector of war, so this city will survive.”
Still, he worries that the irreplaceable church might not. Earlier this week, Ukraine’s Minister of Culture and Information sent a letter to UNESCO asking for “the world community to intervene to save St. Sophia from the threat of destruction.”
“The Russians will destroy St. Sophia Cathedral,” minister Oleksandr Tkachenko wrote. “They seek to destroy the entire Ukrainian history, trying to appropriate it for themselves.”
Indeed, Putin’s unprovoked fight for Ukraine is not only a battle for governmental control, but to dominate the trajectory of the Orthodox churches following years of simmering tensions.
As of 2019, the Ukrainian Church, which had been ruled by Moscow since 1686 but steadily gained independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, formally split from the Moscow patriarchy. It was a move backed by the Eastern Orthodox church’s leadership, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which enraged Moscow and fueled tensions. Seen against the backdrop of a war between Ukrainians and pro-Russian separatists raging in eastern Ukraine, the split has taken on new meaning.
“Every prayer in the (Russian-led) church even here started with glorifying the top leadership of the Church when the churches were united,” one volunteer medic tells me after his quiet prayer session at the back of a Kyiv base. “These were the people killing our people in Eastern Ukraine, so this became unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, other Ukrainian churches still toe the Moscow line, skimming the surface of what is happening with liturgies that “pray for peace in the Russian land” and suggesting that land “includes Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.” Putin has been accusing NATO and the West of failing to consider Moscow’s security concerns, asserting that the former USSR country belongs to Russia to justify his violent invasion of sovereign territory.
If the Kremlin succeeds in taking over Kyiv, the Ukrainian branch of the Church will likely be erased. And even though most Orthodox churches across Ukraine still fall under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate, as the Russian bloodletting thickens, even some Moscow-linked church leaders now refuse to stay silent.
“Putin is the world’s global evil. He is the antichrist,” insists Father Valerian Golovchenko, standing in the snow holding beads outside his modest apartment building in Kyiv. “The whole world tries to predict or forecast his actions somehow, but he is fundamentally evil, and he looks very much like an ideal ruler. The ideal ruler is the antichrist. He tricks people; he tells lies straight into your eyes and face.”
Golovchenko is so embittered by the breaking of his land that he thinks every day of bearing arms himself.
“The job of the Church is always first to pray. I hope that many of those cartridges did not drop onto citizens’ heads because of the Church’s prayers. As a priest, I cannot take arms in my hands although I know all too well how to use them,” he explains. “So I am constantly struggling with this internal wave of wanting to do something, but then I would no longer be a priest.”
Golovchenko belongs to the Temple of the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia, which answers to Moscow. He says he is profoundly ashamed of his parish.
“My Parish doesn’t see me, it doesn’t hear about me, it doesn’t care about me,” he says bitterly, waving his hand. “If I see a Russian, I will tell them to shoo, get out of here.”
Meanwhile, the mood in the once-bustling capital hinges on deep uncertainty, a ticking time bomb, ready to explode at any moment. Ukraine is a nation at war, and no one knows precisely when bombs will rain down or Russian tanks will take over the quiet streets. Residents stand poised, as if ready to face the apocalypse. Nobody could have imagined weeks ago that their beautiful historical city of aureate domes and sprawling monasteries would be pockmarked by military checkpoints, fatigues, and unspoken fear.
But Ukrainians are united by apprehension, by stoicism, by belief. People are doing whatever they can to hold onto faith and to hold onto each other in this surreal and strange time.
One deeply devoted, prominent artist, Oleksandr Klymenko, visited Ukraine’s eastern Donbas frontlines in 2015 and noticed how much a wooden ammunition box mirrored sacred Christian icon panels. Using waxen colors and etchings that gave the effect that it was many centuries old, he painted the Byzantine Virgin Mary cradling the Christ Child on top of the box.
“Ammunition could be converted into something which symbolizes life, resurrection. Those funds go to a mobile hospital, so they are literally saving lives,” explains Klymenko, 45. “I look at the Mother of God now, and for me, it symbolizes the suffering of children from this war.”
Weeks later, Klymenko and his artist wife Sofia Atlantova began painting wooden panels and ammunition boxes, auctioning off their treasures far and wide for hundreds of thousands of dollars in their “Buy an Icon – Save a Life” project to raise funds for the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital (PFVMH), a non-governmental project that employs civilian medics to provide aid for the war-wounded in Eastern Ukraine. Only now, the need to assist extends much further across the conflict-ravaged country.
Klymenko, who now dons U.S. military fatigues he found in a pile, has swapped painting for the volunteer driving of medics across various frontlines. Meanwhile, his wife remains armed with a paintbrush in their home in the woods as the fighting intensifies.
And while accurate death toll figures are obscured by the haze of war, the United Nations has recorded more than 200 civilian deaths. Yet Ukraine’s State Emergency Services estimate that over 2,000 non-combatants have been killed since the invasion ignited last week, including at least 21 children, with many thousands more injured.
Russian Forces are also said to be sustaining large-scale casualties, upwards of hundreds per day. Ukrainian officials claim to have slain more than 5300 Russian troops, while the Kremlin reluctantly confessed that more than 500 have died. In any case, it is a shocking blow to Moscow’s morale and one that will only solidify as young men return in body bags.
“The most important thing now is for us Christians to be united, not divided. I will be helping everybody. If I see a Russian military guy wounded in combat, I will help him,” Klymenko tells me. “Not for Russia or Putin, but for the mother who gave birth to him. What does it mean to lose a child?”
One afternoon, Klymenko drives me to St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery overlooking Kyiv’s merchant quarter, nestled to the right of the Dnieper River. We wander aimlessly around the empty square, the Church bells ringing out at the same time as rockets wrack the city’s edges. A security guard cautions me that a “terrorist” could assault the Baroque-style Cathedral at any moment. Then, in learning that I am an American, he strolls through the snow to thank me for the weapons and aid my country is sending the embattled Ukrainian people.
I marvel at the blue exterior, the color of the sky on a sunny day, set against the glitter of the gold domes. Originally constructed in the Middle Ages, the beautiful place for prayer was ripped down in the 1930s by communist leaders for having “no historical value,” Klymenko says wistfully. After the fall of the USSR in 1991, St. Michael’s re-opened after almost a decade of reconstruction efforts.
Everyone worries it will happen again, all too soon, with too many having already sacrificed their lives for this semblance of religious freedom.
Stretching along the exterior of the Church is a memorial for the hundreds of Ukrainian men and women who have fallen since the conflict ignited in the early spring of 2014. The smiling faces seem never-ending, and it’s painful to realize that there are many more names to be added to the Memorial Wall. We leave behind crowns of sunflowers, the Ukrainian national flower, and then drive to the fringes of the feeble city, stopping by a memorial site submerged in a kind of urban forest – a refuge in the middle of madness – to pray for the days ahead.
The U.N. estimates that more than 160,000 people are displaced within Ukraine’s borders, while over one million have fled the fragile country. However, for those in Kyiv, the window of time to get out appears to be narrowing as the capital, once brimming with three million souls, has been drastically transformed into a frontline in the fight.
“My task now is to pray. I will not leave my home for anything. I will be with my people, my neighbors. My mother lives next door, and if something happens, we will come together. I will hug her, and we will sit together and wait for the rockets,” Father Golovchenko adds, emotion catching in his throat. “But we won’t surrender, never. Ukraine is its own country; it will not be part of that Russian world.”