CHURCH leaders in Ukraine have urged citizens not to lose heart in the face of renewed Russian air and land assaults and the delayed arrival of fresh Western military aid.
“After more than ten years of war, every city and village now sadly has its Walk of Fame, naming relatives, friends, and neighbours who’ve lain down their lives defending the motherland — often just a list of names etched in the hearts of survivors,” the Primate of Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church (OCU), Metropolitan Epiphany (Dumenko), said in a weekend message.
“The enemy seeks to destroy us, leaving just barren ashes and scorching heat, and sometimes it may even seem that evil is winning. But its victory is only temporary — it can never be final, because goodness, light, and life will inevitably triumph.”
The message, for the Orthodox Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women, said that Ukrainians should learn from the example of women, who were often the “first teachers of faith and virtue” by placing hope in God and never despairing, even when conditions seemed “insurmountable, even impossible”.
The Primate of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, said that Kharkiv Cathedral was providing shelter for refugees from the besieged northern border town of Vovchansk. He urged residents to compensate for Russia’s “deliberate strikes on critical infrastructure” by saving on electricity.
“Once again, the Russians are again committing crimes against humanity, shooting civilians and preventing their evacuation,” he said in a message on Monday. “Kharkiv is in constant alarm, as weapons of all kinds strike this heroic city day and night, and Russians do everything to scare its inhabitants and force them to leave. Yet Kharkiv is standing.”
The appeals were made as President Zelensky again urged quicker delivery of promised Western military equipment, and as Russian forces launched exercises with tactical nuclear weapons in what the Moscow Foreign Minister described as a “sobering signal” to the West and its “puppets in Ukraine”.
The Kyiv parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, was suspended on Tuesday, when legislators occupied its rostrum demanding accelerated drone production and tighter border defences, as well as final enactment of a long-delayed law banning Orthodox communities affiliated with Moscow.
Ukraine’s Moscow-linked Orthodox Church, the UOC, condemned the overnight bulldozing last weekend of its Tithe Monastery of the Nativity, in Kyiv, allegedly built without authorisation on the territory of the country’s National History Museum in 2012, and again accused officials of violating religious freedom.
The move was defended, however, by Ukraine’s Acting Culture Minister, Rostyslav Karandieiev, who warned on Tuesday that UOC monks also faced forced eviction from the capital’s historic Pechersk-Lavra monastery, in the latest move towards state repossession.
Presenting a pastoral letter this week, Archbishop Shevchuk warned that the Ukrainian education system had been left “deeply wounded” by the war: more than 400 schools had been deliberately destroyed, and 200,000 children left without access to learning.
He said that targeting education formed part of a planned “destruction of Ukrainian identity”, and that newborn children in occupied Luhansk were now being removed from their parents unless at least one held Russian citizenship.
In a weekend social-media post, Metropolitan Epiphany said that darkness was again “seeping into Ukrainian homes” because of new power outages, and called on embattled citizens to continue “bearing clean bright light” by “creating social projects, supporting each other and teaching children. . . When the lights are turned off by another Russian shell, we do not sit with arms folded and complain about the darkness — we light a candle, a flashlight, a lamp and drive out the gloom.
“Much has already been achieved, incredible challenges overcome; far from being forgotten and left alone with evil, we are all together, each with his own lamp, dispelling the darkness no matter how dense.”
In a further sign of loosening ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, a delegation of Bulgarian Orthodox leaders visited the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate last weekend, alongside senior members of Ukraine’s OCU, while the first Orthodox parish in Estonia voted to end its ties with the Moscow Patriarchate.