From the very beginning of its existence, our publication has covered the persecution of Christians in Africa and Asia.
Meanwhile, a growing body of research published in Europe and the United States has documented the severe repression of religious leaders in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.
Twelve years ago, on July 5, 2014, news spread across the world’s media. It emerged that four ministers of a local Protestant church had been brutally murdered by Russians.
On Trinity Sunday, immediately after the festive church service, militants from the armed group led by Igor Girkin, also known as Strelkov, stormed the church building. They detained four men, brothers Albert and Ruvim Pavenko, together with deacons Volodymyr Velychko and Viktor Bradarskyi.
The Russians confiscated their vehicles and took the men to a building that was being used at the time as a prison and torture site.
On June 9, 2014, the detainees were executed the very next day. To conceal the crime, the militants staged what they claimed was “death caused by shelling by the Ukrainian military.” They placed the bodies inside one of the confiscated vehicles, an all-metal panel van, and set it on fire with a rocket-propelled grenade on the outskirts of the city. The remains were then secretly buried in an unmarked mass grave on the grounds of a children’s hospital.
Three of the four victims left behind families. Altogether, twenty-four children lost their fathers that morning. Deacon Volodymyr Velychko was survived by eight children, Viktor Bradarskyi by three, and the elder Pavenko brother, Albert, by thirteen. Ruvim Pavenko, who was thirty years old, had not yet married.
News of this brutal killing quickly reached the West.
Ukraine is often called the “Bible Belt of Europe” because of its large Protestant community, by analogy with the Bible Belt in the United States. It has also been described as the principal hub of Protestantism in the post-Soviet region.
Before the start of the full-scale war in 2022, Ukraine had between eight thousand and ten thousand Protestant churches, including Baptist, Pentecostal, Charismatic, and Adventist congregations.
This status as the “Bible Belt” played a crucial role in bringing the truth to light at several levels. Information about repression did not merely reach Kyiv quickly. It immediately became an international issue because of the unique structure of Ukrainian Protestantism. Protestant churches are organized not as a rigid hierarchical system but as a vast network of sister congregations. If a pastor was detained in a village near occupied Tokmak or in Melitopol, fellow believers in Kyiv, Lviv, Riga, Sacramento, and Frankfurt learned about it the very same day.
The tradition of daily shared prayer chats and close personal ties among congregations made it possible to document abductions virtually in real time.
This was the first killing, but by no means the last. Repression returned in the very first days after the 2022 invasion, this time on a horrific scale. Reports of deportations, torture, and the killing of clergy began to emerge.
In interviews given after the liberation of occupied territories, it also became clear that the names of priests of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, together with pastors known for their pro-Ukrainian views, had already been identified by units of the Federal Security Service before the occupation itself.
The history of the Russian-Ukrainian war now includes countless names of those killed, the circumstances of their deaths, and the testimonies of survivors. Some clergy, including Stepan Podolchak, were killed simply because they refused to join the Russian Orthodox Church.
Others, including the monk Iov Zvarychuk, were shot in Bucha and thrown into a garage pit. At the time of writing, approximately two dozen Orthodox clergy are known to have been killed by Russians. According to various estimates, the total number may be as high as seventy.
In November 2022, Russian security services arrested two hieromonks of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Berdiansk, Ivan Levytskyi and Bohdan Heleta. They were accused of possessing explosives, which parishioners said had been planted, and of engaging in “subversive activities.” The priests spent more than a year and a half in captivity and under torture. They were released only in the summer of 2024 as part of a prisoner exchange.
These are the most widely reported cases covered by Ukrainian media.
The number of people who have suffered because they do not belong to the Russian Orthodox Church and because they love Ukraine is measured in the thousands. We will continue to write about these stories from time to time so that behind the statistics of killings and torture we do not lose sight of the people themselves, and so that we remember such a fundamental value as religious freedom.
Anna Jansone
