A prayer in Ukraine

By the summer of 2024, Kyivans could joke that there was no way the Russian army could take their city now — they’d never get through the downtown traffic. The simple normality of urban congestion, crawling through grand boulevards in the shadows of buildings that, with fresh coats of paint, would suggest a Wes Anderson vision of Mitteleuropa, could lull a visitor into thinking he could be in any capital on the old Orient Express route. So, too, would the world-class Fenix restaurant, run by a celebrity chef and festooned with Chihuly-inspired decor.

It was between the salmon tartare eclair and the rabbit ravioli that I heard for the first time, face-to-face, what it’s like to be persecuted for worshipping God in the wrong way. The cosmopolitan surroundings fell away — and the conversation was stripped in an instant to its barest elements: light and dark, good and evil, life and death.

My dining companions were the Sergeyev brothers, Anton and Mark, and their father Viktor. They came from Melitopol, a city in southeastern Ukraine now under Russian occupation. When the Russians first arrived, the Sergeyevs were early targets. That’s because they ran an evangelical church — and to the Russians, evangelical Christianity is an American plot. They were threatened by the FSB, their families were held at gunpoint and eventually they were forced to flee. Their church building was expropriated, its cross torn down. It functions today as a Russian “cultural center.”

Today the Sergeyevs are among the ranks of Christians who find themselves exiled for their faith. By virtue of being alive to break bread with foreign visitors and share their story, they are the lucky ones. Religious aid workers I spoke to reported dozens of faith leaders killed by Russian forces since the 2022 invasion. Many more have been captured and subjected to torture, and more than 600 churches have been destroyed.

The younger Sergeyevs now serve as volunteer army chaplains and speak for their fellow believers who can’t. On the way back from lunch with them, all illusions gone, it was easier to notice the checkpoints, the tank traps piled on corners like a giant’s discarded jacks, and the uniforms on every other pedestrian.

I was in Kyiv for the Ukrainian National Prayer Breakfast. I’d been offered a last-minute spot in an American delegation run by Gary Marx, head of Defenders of Faith and Religious Freedom in Ukraine, and having no set plans for summer travel abroad, I accepted and flew out the next week.

There I met the men and women who are trying to build and maintain a religiously pluralistic society amid a conflict that tracks along centuries-old schismatic furrows. Kyiv is an important center of Orthodox Christianity — some say the most important. It was there that the Apostle Andrew is said to have stood on a hill (the cathedral marking the spot stood directly behind our hotel) and declared the rise of a great Christian kingdom. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church asserted its independence and broke from Moscow in 2019. The leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church has a different, Moscow-oriented vision, which is why Kirill, its patriarch, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, has used language translating to “holy war” to describe the ongoing conflict. Caught in the middle are several other Ukrainian Christian denominations, including Roman and Greek Catholics — the latter of whom are in full communion with Rome but allow priests to marry — plus evangelical Protestants like the Sergeyevs, along with Jews, Muslims, Seventh-day Adventists and others.

This summer, all these groups came together in an effort to show the world how they can coexist in the shadow of an aggressor nation where church, state and army are all one. For the foreign guests, it was a whirlwind of receptions, discussions and prayers in grand halls and cramped offices. Like the visiting scholars buffeted around the fictional Neutralia in Evelyn Waugh’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe, we “lived by rumor… for nothing in [our] exhilarating experiences had quite corresponded with the printed plan.” The printed plans that appeared were items of great currency — with each new agenda that was issued, more clues to the timing and location of the Prayer Breakfast itself were revealed.

This was due, of course, to the intense security precautions surrounding the rumored appearance of President Volodymyr Zelensky. When we arrived at the venue, the nineteenth-century Mystetskyi Arsenal, signs not only pointed to the nearest bomb shelters, but urged us to turn off geolocation on our phones and to observe a strict social media embargo until 5 p.m.

Under the arching, vaulted ceilings, the mood was ecclesiastical and ecumenical. A Greek Catholic priest almost exactly my age told me what it was like to be among the first generation to grow up free of the Soviet yoke, and of his fears for the future. A mufti invited me to visit his mosque. A woman who casually joined our table turned out to be Oleksandra Matviichuk, who won the Nobel Prize for her work bringing world attention to the 20,000 Ukrainian children abducted by Russian troops from occupied territories “for their safety” to a new life of Kremlin indoctrination. A few tables away sat Ivan Levitsky and Bohdan Geleta, two Greek Catholic priests from Berdyansk only recently released from Russian captivity.

Throughout the meal a succession of religious and political leaders took the stage to pray for peace and for an end to their peoples’ suffering. The head of the Ukrainian parliament said that “Russians have sold their souls for a nickel to the Devil.” Another prayer was more charitable, asking God to “free Russians from this imperialist spirit.” A double-amputee veteran with haunted, sunken eyes prayed for his countrymen, military and civilian, still held as prisoners of war. A black-robed Crimean Tatar sang a plaintive song about “the path home” that she hoped to one day see. When President Zelensky appeared at the finale, he acknowledged the “different paths” represented among the multifaith audience, and quoted the line from Ecclesiastes, that “a rope of three strands is not quickly broken,” to emphasize the theme of unity.

They prayed for peace, but not at any price. The language always specified a “fair” or “just” peace. At a private reception later, deeper into the Arsenal catacombs, Vitaliy Kryvytskyi, the Roman Catholic bishop of Kyiv, explained what that meant. “Our whole society must be unified and heal together, every part of it,” he told me. “That’s what we mean by a just peace, as the president has called it. That’s what all faiths in Ukraine are praying for.”

Talking to Kyivans in the street, I came away with a few different ideas of what peace might mean. Some wanted to see their country fully reunified. Some said they wanted to see the war over as quickly as possible, even if it meant ceding territory. A few even said they supported President Zelensky’s war aims but criticized his politics. In other words, it sounded like a democracy — a free society where varied opinions can be openly expressed, even to a stranger. If I’d been caught having such a conversation on a street in Moscow, my local interlocutor would likely disappear forever, and I would end up standing in a plastic hamster cage before a kangaroo court, praying for the White House to trade me for a jailed Kremlin goon.

Many factors will determine what form peace in Ukraine will eventually take. But a society where people feel free to express political opinions to a stranger on the street is a society where religious freedom can flourish, and it would be a tragedy to see it summarily snuffed out.

That is not to suggest that society is perfect. Ukraine’s commitment to ecumenicism was questioned some weeks after the Prayer Breakfast when its parliament passed a law aimed at curtailing the power of the Russian Orthodox Church in their country. Similar laws can be found in other European countries wary of Russian influence, like Latvia and Sweden, but the Russians pounced on it as an attack on religious liberty.

But the quarrel with the Russian church, whose modern incarnation has historically been “practically a subsidiary, a sister company of the KGB,” is political rather than spiritual. There is truth and beauty in Orthodox Christianity — including the centuries-old Russian tradition — but blessing invading armies to recapture supposed schismatics by force, killing their priests and stealing their children is the warped dream of fallen man, not God.

In a uniquely modern perversion of Winston Churchill’s 1940 assurance to besieged Britain that “the new world with all its power and might” would “step forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old,” the former Soviet colony of North Korea is now providing troops and equipment to aid Russia’s conquest. How this militantly atheist country, whose only approved deities are its three Kim-dynasty rulers, fits into Patriarch Kirill’s “holy war” narrative has not yet been clarified by his church.

The echoes of the conflict will be felt especially acutely as Ukrainians prepare to celebrate Christmas. The Russian Orthodox Church celebrates on January 7, and Ukraine, as of last year, officially celebrates on December 25. But this, according to Mark Sergeyev, is a long-standing tradition. “Even before the full-scale invasion,” he tells me, “Christmas in Ukraine was celebrated on December 25, despite the fact that Ukraine is considered a more conservative, Orthodox country.” This year, he expects, it will be “very difficult for children and all Ukrainians to feel the spirit of the holiday.”

Gary Marx is thinking of the families whose children are among the 20,000 spirited across the border by the Russian forces in collaboration with the Russian Orthodox Church. “Imagine being at a Christmas Eve service, looking at the candles around you, and praying for the return of your kids,” he said.

Christmas is meant to be a time of both joy and solemnity, when Christians rejoice in the Lord incarnate among mankind, and show reverence for the universe-quaking gravity of that event. For those whose lives are at risk today by virtue of how they worship, both those emotions will doubtless be felt in full measure.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s December 2024 World edition.