On the menu today: Interviews with two Ukrainian evangelical Protestant pastors serving in different ways near the front — one entertaining the troops through song while hoping to not encounter a Russian glide bomb any closer than he already has, and the other dodging Russian drone attacks in a van while attempting to ferry the elderly and the infirm away from the front. Sometimes it seems like every Ukrainian has a fascinating story.
A Crooning Pastor and a Demanding Father-in-Law
Dnipro, Ukraine — The good news for this city is that it’s considerably further from the southern and eastern fronts than Kharkiv is from the northeastern front. The bad news is that Dnipro has fronts to the south, east, and north, beyond Kharkiv. Since the war began, the city has been a logistics hub and, oddly, something of a boomtown as refugees from the other regions attempt to resettle in one of the larger and (very relatively) safer cities in the east. As mentioned yesterday, air-raid sirens are now just part of the background music of people’s lives in this city.
In Dnipro, I spoke with a pair of Ukrainian-born Protestant evangelical pastors who volunteer in war-related relief charities. If you read my interview with Mark Sergeyev, a youth pastor at the Melitopol Christian Church last year, you may recall that the Russian forces are openly and consistently hostile to evangelical Protestant churches in Ukraine, seeing them as a form of Western influence and a threat to the Russian Orthodox Church, which is largely inextricably intertwined with Putin’s regime.
A July 2022 survey found 54 percent of Ukrainians identify themselves with the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, only 4 percent identified with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, 14 percent said “Orthodox” without specifying, 8 percent are Greek Catholic, and 2 percent are Protestant. In a country with about 38 million people, that’s roughly 760,000 Protestants.
Pastor Gleb Kopalin became a Christian in 1994, and he started a new church in 2009. In the closing months of 2021 and the start of 2022, he said he “didn’t believe that it would be full-scale war. I thought it would be big clashes in Luhansk and Donbas region, but I never thought it would be so big, so massive.” When the war began, Gleb and the other men in the church community sent their wives and children to Germany. They began as volunteers in hospitals and delivering food to refugees.
“The beginning was very shocking for us,” he recalls. “We were all just doing what we could do.”
Gleb used to be a jazz singer, and he had friends who were volunteer chaplains who asked him to perform services and to sing in hospitals. (The Ukrainian army has both professional and volunteer chaplains.) Then one day those friends asked him to perform services and music much closer to the front. “I was scared!” he exclaims. “This was a new thing for me! But when we came, I saw guys like me, some of them younger, some of them older, and we became friends. Now, for more than a year, we’ve been going to the same battalion.”
He described it as a forward operating base, usually a village where the houses have been abandoned by the previous residents.
Gleb’s friend and fellow volunteer, Oleksii, explains that soldiers are usually situated about 20 kilometers from the front line, and they rotate in and out on shifts that last for several days. Both locations are dangerous; the frontline gets raids, while the camps behind the front lines can be hit by artillery or drones. Trench duty is as difficult as you would imagine — no hot food, limited ability to bring up water, danger in moving supplies to the front, and so on. Heating systems and fires are forbidden because of the danger of the heat signatures getting detected by Russian weapons. Little food, little water, little heat — and, of course, the Russians are firing weapons at you.
Gleb said he’s heard the explosions from Russian glide bombs landing and detonating.
“I’ve never asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’” Gleb said. “I’m here for our soldiers, our warriors. And my life is in the hands of the Lord. I am sure that everything will be okay, in any situation.”
Gleb speaks English quite well, but I’m still surprised when he suddenly croons, “Fly me to the moon,” with a voice so smooth it would get an approving nod from Frank Sinatra himself. You can hear him singing “My Funny Valentine” here.
The life of Igor Pilipyshka has some very dark chapters, so reader discretion is advised for what follows.
Igor is also a pastor and volunteer, often working with Project Victory. Igor’s story begins in Luhansk in the Donbas region in 2013, the last year of anything resembling peace between Russia and Ukraine. Earlier in life, Igor made some bad decisions and developed a drug addiction. That year, he was admitted to a rehab facility and started turning his life around. Along the way he converted from Russian Orthodox to evangelical Christianity, under the mentorship of a pastor who Igor credits with turning his life around.
But by 2014, Russia occupied Crimea and started its “little green men” operations in Ukraine’s easternmost Oblasts. In April, Russian-backed separatists seized government buildings in the region, proclaimed the establishment of the Luhansk People’s Republic, and declared the city their new capital. During our conversation, Igor described the Russian-backed separatists as “Cossacks.”
Igor found himself and the rehabilitation center he was in on the wrong side of the line. The pastor who had been working with him said he couldn’t cross the line anymore. “It was complete lawlessness, nobody knew what was happening,” he tells me with Oleksii translating. “I was basically stuck on my own in occupied territory, without my pastor.”
Even worse, after being discharged from the rehabilitation center, the Russian-backed separatists arrested Igor, suspecting him with being a collaborator with a local resistance group. The “evidence” for his arrest was his ID from Dnipro on the other side of the line and the fact that Igor had a bank card and flash drive — the Russian separatists believed this was evidence he was raising money for forces resisting them and that he knew the resistance’s secrets.
They took him to an automotive garage that had been converted to an interrogation center and prison. In the pit where the mechanics would work underneath a car, Igor said he saw only “blood and shell casings.” He said there were two groups of prisoners, a “regular” group and the ones who were made to sit in the pit, who everyone knew were going to be executed at some point soon. Igor said he noticed that those prisoners were not fed by the guards; the thinking was apparently, “Why bother feeding someone we intend to execute soon?”
Igor said that one of his interrogators claimed to have formerly been a Russian Orthodox priest, and he seemed to have a particular animosity toward Igor for converting to evangelical Protestant Christianity, accusing him of “betraying” the true faith. (I told you that in some ways, this is a religious war.) Igor said he was severely beaten and given an ultimatum: Confess to the crime of helping the resistance, or be taken out to the front lines, where “we will dump you in a hole, and no one will ever find you.”
“I saw who they really are, not who they say they are, not who they pretend to be, but their nature, and I really understood who these people are,” Igor told me. “I saw how they treat people.”
He describes his release was a miracle. After about 24 hours of beatings and threats, they used his phone, called his pastor, and tried to lure the pastor into separatist-occupied territory. But instead, Igor’s pastor called an usher in Igor’s church who used to have a “Cossack” classmate. The usher called up the classmate, who knew the men holding Igor, and negotiated Igor’s release. Igor said that after his release, “My faith in God became very strong. Only God could make a miracle like that happen.”
Now out of the detention center, Igor still had to figure out a way to get out of Russian-separatist occupied territory and not get arrested a second time. He spent five months hiding and begging for help, ultimately arranging a van with other families who wanted to get out. They packed up everything, including a sound board for a musician fleeing with them. Igor said he and the others were nervous at every checkpoint. At every stop, the Russians inspected Igor’s hands; apparently looking for calluses that develop if you fire a gun frequently.
The final checkpoint was the tensest, and Igor had heard it was the toughest to pass through. But apparently one of the check point guards was a musician, and he was fascinated by the sound board they had brought in the van. He spent the time asking questions about the sound board, and when done casually waved everyone else through.
It’s here that Igor’s story takes an almost hilarious, and perhaps quite romantic turn. Igor’s then-fiancée, now-wife still lived in the occupied territory with her family, and his father-in-law wasn’t willing to let her marry him unless he met Igor.
In person.
In the Russian-occupied territory that Igor had just risked his neck to escape.
In the sort of act that they make romantic movies about, Igor summoned his courage and made the journey back into where he had escaped a few months earlier. Ladies, find yourself a man who’s willing to go back to a land where he was tortured to meet your parents.
I asked Igor what that meeting with his father-in-law was like.
He paused for a moment and then answered, “formal.”
Fast forward to 2022, where Igor, Gleb, Oleksii, and the other pastors in community were debating whether the tensions would erupt in full-scale war. Igor and his friends chose to focus their efforts on helping evacuate civilians from dangerous war zones. Igor sent his family to western Ukraine, further from the front.
But as the Russian invasion and occupation continued, evacuating people only grew riskier and more difficult. Good vehicles and reliable sources of gasoline were few and far between. Igor said that at one point in the city of Zaporizhzhia — once a city of 700,000 people, about the population of Denver — there was just one repair shop that could fix cars. Igor says he was sleeping maybe five hours a night, and otherwise scrounging whatever gas, parts, and resources he could find to continue the evacuation trips.
In Donbas, he and his team found a partially destroyed, abandoned gas station, with a decent supply of gasoline remaining in the underground tanks, but the station’s pumps were destroyed. Eventually they found a water pump and pumped the gas up out of the tanks into their vehicles, and hoped it was the right kind.
Igor still assists with evacuations; there is no shortage of elderly, infirm, and handicapped who cannot get out on their own. Many of those who need evacuation have lost their IDs, passports if they ever owned ones, important documents, etc. Global-positioning-system spoofing means that you can’t use electronic maps, but thankfully the volunteers are often helped by either local cops still on duty or retired local cops, who know the backroads and neighborhoods well. But they’ve come under fire by Russian forces and drones quite a few times.
Oleksii shared images of one of their vans, badly damaged by shrapnel from Russian drones — note the van is clearly labeled “VOLUNTEERS”:
You can watch a Project Victory evacuation from Myrnohrad that Igor assisted with here.
ADDENDUM: This newsletter will return to U.S. political news in the not-too-distant future. If I were not otherwise busy these past weeks, I would have enjoyed raking Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass over the coals for saying now that she shouldn’t have gone on her trip to Ghana, but no one told her before she left that there was a wildfire risk. (Remember, it’s not just the departure, it’s that there’s no indication she even contemplated cutting her trip short and returning as soon as possible.)
She can be recalled, Los Angelinos. The process is not quick or easy, but I think it is abundantly clear she was derelict in her duties and has failed her city.