On the menu today: I hate to end this week’s reporting from Ukraine with an account that includes so many grim parts — a trigger warning is in effect for anyone who can’t handle reading about threats to children — but this is a story that needs to be heard, particularly in the face of Russian propaganda that asininely paints Vladimir Putin and modern Russia as some sort of defender of traditional or Christian values.
Earlier this week, I linked to a video from Russia Tortures Christians — as far as organizational messages go, it doesn’t get any clearer than that — and shared the short version of the story of Mark Sergeyev, a youth pastor at the Melitopol Christian Church. But the short version doesn’t really do it justice. I had the chance to sit down and hear Sergeyev describe his family’s ordeal and escape — and who knows, maybe there’s something genuinely miraculous about the Sergeyev family’s deliverance from evil, an evil that specifically targeted them for their Christian faith, and that demanded men of God bend their knee and serve a hostile occupying state.
Russia Targets Protestant Churches
Before the war, Mark Sergeyev served as a youth pastor at the Melitopol Christian Church — a Protestant church he described as “more Pentecostal, Charismatic style — we have noisy worship songs, but the theology is the same.”
Melitopol is a small city in southeastern Ukraine, a bit north of the Crimean peninsula; before the war, the population was estimated to be around 148,000. The Melitopol Christian Church was the largest church in the city, with more than 1,500 worshippers on a typical Sunday, including 400 children. Mark Sergeyev’s father, Viktor, is the senior pastor.
Russian forces attacked the city on February 24, 2022, and after heavy fighting, captured it on March 1. (Sergeyev didn’t mention this during our conversation, but during the initial days of the bombardment, he connected with Tommy Iceland, an Iceland-born, Sweden-raised, and now Nashville-based songwriter, to jointly record a song, “Whom Shall I Fear (God of Angel Armies).” The city’s intermittent internet connection remained intact long enough to upload the vocals.)
On March 9, the occupying Russian forces turned their attention to the Melitopol Christian Church.
“They bombed the city a lot with the planes and bombs and everything. We prepared the church, people are living in the church because we have a big basement,” Sergeyev told me. “And that was a crazy three weeks.”
(By the way, a note for all my interviews for the past two weeks: Almost everyone I have spoken to has given answers in English, and they speak English much better than I speak Ukrainian or Russian, which is to say, not much at all. I am generally quoting my interview subjects verbatim, and they’re speaking off the cuff, so if the wording or phrasing of these quotes seems slightly off or has imperfect grammar, cut these people some slack.)
“And March 9, at 5 a.m., they came to the church and my house,” Sergeyev said. “We built six houses for church leaders, a couple pastors from my church — if I leave my house, I can see the church, 100, 150 meters away.”
“I am sleeping, and my wife tells me someone is knocking at the door. So, I look out of my living room, I have two big windows, and I see lasers on my face,” [I presume Sergeyev meant laser sights from the Russian soldiers’ rifles] “and I can see Russian soldiers came.”
“There were more than 200 soldiers around the whole community — they take the church, our houses, and they take me outside the house, make me lie on the ground, maybe for 20 minutes.”
“My oldest son was nine years old at that moment, and they wake him up with a gun,” Sergeyev said, pantomiming holding a rifle. “They said, ‘wake up!’ My wife and two youngest kids were sleeping together, because they were still bombing the city. But the oldest one was in a different room. And he opened up his eyes, and there was a Russian soldier with a mask, ‘wake up, go.’ I was outside, laying down already. They did the same with my brother’s house, and took my parents. My mom was sleeping at that moment in the church.”
Dear readers, I know Russia has done worse things in Ukraine than awaken a sleeping nine-year-old boy by sticking a gun in his face and shouting. I’ve seen the evidence of the worse things that they’ve done and talked to some of those who survived. But this one detail sticks with me. It’s so unnecessary, so bullying, so needlessly malevolent and malicious.
He’s a nine-year-old kid. What did this soldier think he was going to do? For some reason when Sergeyev was describing this story, I thought of the infamous photo of Elian Gonzalez as federal marshals stormed into his Miami family’s home, weapons drawn, to forcibly return the boy to his father and Cuba.
What kind of thug points a gun in the face of a nine-year-old? How tough does that guy think he is? How tough is he when he’s up against a grown man who can shoot back?
“Within 15 minutes, they took every man from the house, they took [them] to the church,” Sergeyev said. “The kids and wives, they’re still with the soldiers. There are a couple of tanks they put on the highway — our church is right by the highway to Mariupol.”
“We had a very hard talk with them,” Sergeyev said. He explained that when Russia occupied Crimea and started the “little green men” paramilitary attacks in 2014, the Melitopol Christian Church took a more explicitly pro-Ukrainian stance in its public activities and in its sermons, and the church had grown in prominence and popularity.
“My father was preaching on YouTube, on the stage. Sometimes he talked about Putin, sometimes he talked about how we have this freedom, that’s why we’re different,” Sergeyev said. “When the war started, we shut down our YouTube.”
“The questions [from the soldiers] were crazy. ‘Oh, we know that you opened up this building in 2006.’ ‘We know that you put this screen in in 2016, when your mayor was here.’ I asked, ‘how do you know?’ They said, ‘we know everything.’ They had looked at our [church on] YouTube.”
The Russian soldiers, wearing masks, warned the church leaders that they had to stop any signs of resistance from the Ukrainians, now that the Russians occupied the city, “or the blood will flow.” Sergeyev said the Russian soldiers demanded the church leaders provide names, addresses, and contact information for any businesses that had worked with the church or were members of the church.
“My father said, ‘I cannot give you this. I cannot.’”
Sergeyev’s father said he would resign, and the Russian soldiers told him he could not. “You’re going to work with us,” the Russians warned. Then they pulled him aside and, according to Sergeyev, threatened to cut off his fingers.
During this time, Sergeyev went into the church to grab all the security videos and remove or destroy them, so that the Russians wouldn’t know who was in the membership of the church. This is how the video above includes short clips of security-camera footage of Russian military vehicles — marked with ‘Z’ — pulling up to the church and Russian soldiers attempting to break down the doors.
“They gave [my father] 72 hours to record a video,” Sergeyev said. “They wanted him standing outside the church, and they told him to say, ‘Everything is okay, Putin has already came [sic], this is Russian territory,’ and he would raise up the Russian flag. My father is sitting, and he realizes he cannot do this.”
Sergeyev said the following morning, the Russians abducted Melitopol mayor Ivan Fedorov. Part of the abduction was caught on video; you can see him with a plastic bag over his head, with one Russian soldier holding each arm, marching him across a square.
“Our mayor has a great relationship with the churches. They imprisoned him, and then President Zelensky — and they traded him.” Fedorov was released from Russian captivity in exchange for nine captured Russian conscripts.
One person from the city government warned Sergeyev that he had to get his father out of the city, because he was the next target on the Russian occupiers’ abduction list.
“In an occupation, you don’t have information. You don’t have internet. Russian soldiers said to us, every day, ‘We already took Kyiv.’ ‘We took Odesa.’ And you don’t understand what’s going on. We wouldn’t have electricity for four or five days. It’s a different world in occupation. So, we understood we had to just go. Just pray and go. . . .We set out in four cars, and run away from the city, through the front line. It was crazy.”
Mark traveled with his wife and kids, father and mother, and brother. Packed up and in their cars, the Sergeyev family soon arrived at what was then the front line of the ongoing fighting between the Russians and Ukrainian forces.
He describes the battlefield around them as looking like a scene from World War II movies such as Fury and Saving Private Ryan — “the same picture. My kids saw [severed] legs, hands, everything. Our fighters had destroyed their column of tanks, and we saw Russian soldiers dead and so many civilians. It was March, no leaves, nothing green, everything is grey.”
Pardon the long stretch of quotes, dear reader, but this story is best told in Mark Sergeyev’s own words:
I’m talking with these Chechen guys from Russia, they’re sitting on a tank [part of the invasion force] and I say, “we need to get to this Ukrainian part.” And they say, “you’re crazy. Everything is dead. You’re going to get killed.” And we’re still praying. . . . They bombed, like, every 30 seconds. The kids are sitting [in the back seat]. And I understand, we don’t have another way. The Russians are waiting for us in the city. We have to go. And after 15 or 20 minutes, the Chechen says, “You can go.”
We are going on a hill. . . . I see they start to destroy with artillery, a village. They begin to destroy the village. I see the houses, destroyed within a second. My wife is screaming, “Jesus, help us! Jesus, help us!” And then when we get up to the top of the hill, I see Ukrainian soldiers with the Ukrainian flags. You know, it’s a crazy moment. I’m going to remember this the whole of my life. You’re falling down in the arms of others. My father is beginning to cry. Within a couple of minutes, we could have been dead.
Forty minutes later, I’m standing in a big supermarket in Zaporizhzhia [a city further to the north]. And people are still living! The [supermarket checkout counters] are still going “beep!” The cards and Apple Pay are working! My wife asked, “Are bank cards working? And you have internet?” And they’re like, “Yeah, everything is okay!” And in that moment, I’m in shock, standing in the center. Thirty or 40 minutes earlier, I was supposed to be dead, and I’m still alive. And in that moment, I thought, “God, you must have something planned for me and my life, and I’m still alive.”
Maybe the Russians just had bad aim, or maybe four cars of terrified civilians were not a target of any importance during the ongoing battle. Or maybe some will conclude that the man upstairs had something to do with Sergeyev and his family escaping death while crossing the front line during all the shooting.
Sergeyev is a Ukrainian military chaplain right now, and his wife and three sons are currently living safely in Germany. Today, his three sons are twelve, ten, and seven.
All the Protestant churches in Melitopol were destroyed.
In the pre-war Ukrainian Christian music scene, Sergeyev and his band were a big deal. Sergeyev knows the U.S. Christian music scene quite well — dc Talk, Michael W. Smith, Chris Tomlin.
He hopes to travel to the U.S. in the near future, and to tell other evangelical churches about the horror and brutality that the Russian forces have inflicted upon Ukraine’s evangelical communities.
ADDENDUM: Every now and then, someone will leave a comment or write in that I’m not covering what’s happening in Ukraine with objectivity, that I clearly favor the Ukrainians in this war. As if the long list of abominable crimes committed by the Russians isn’t enough. . . .
Look, pal, the other night, Vladimir Putin and his army launched 31 missiles — two ballistic, 29 cruise — into the city I was sleeping in. Now, I don’t know about you, but to me, that’s not the sort of thing you can just shrug off. Like Michael Jordan, I take that personally.
Yesterday, we crossed the border into Moldova — as scheduled. It wasn’t a reaction to the attack on Kyiv — and by the time you read this, I’ll be on my way home. Next week, I’m on vacation and Noah Rothman and Dominic Pino will be filling in for me.