Russia has killed around 120 members of the clergy, while approximately 800 religious buildings have been destroyed or damaged.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made the statement in an interview with This Week on Capitol Hill.

According to a post on the president’s official channel, these were deliberate attacks.

“Deliberately, not accidentally. These people, our churches and other religious institutions were deliberately targeted,” he said in the interview.

According to the president, some of the damaged buildings were a thousand years old and had been subjected to extensive drone and missile strikes, including cruise and ballistic missiles.

“This is horrifying and insane. It’s not about money. It’s about our heritage, history, art and architecture. You can’t simply repair them,” Zelenskyy stressed.

As LF previously reported, religious persecution in the occupied territories of Ukraine forms part of a sustained and systematic campaign of repression by the Russian Federation. This is documented in a report by the International Partnership for Human Rights (IPHR) titled Who Is Your God? Religious Terror in the Temporarily Occupied Territories.