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Russia’s government is systematically persecuting Christian and other faith communities in occupied regions of Ukraine, experts told U.S. lawmakers.
“My parents lived through the Soviet Union, and they say conditions today in Russian-occupied Ukraine are worse for believers than they were in Soviet times,” said Mark Sergeev, a Ukrainian military chaplain and worship leader who served as youth pastor of Melitopol Christian Church until that city’s seizure by Russian troops.
Sergeev testified about his own experiences fleeing Russian persecution July 24 before the U.S. Helsinki Commission in Washington. Also known as the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the independent federal commission was founded in 1976 to uphold the principles of the nonbinding 1975 Helsinki Accords, which sought to ease Cold War tensions through acceptance of the post-World War II order in Europe.
Joining Sergeev in testifying before the commission were Catherine Wanner, professor of history, anthropology and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University and a specialist on religion in Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine; and Steven E. Moore, a former chief of staff in the U.S. House of Representatives and founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project, a nongovernmental organization bringing humanitarian aid to the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Moore also launched RussiaTorturesChristians.org, a website to highlight persecution of Christians in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Sergeev — whose great-grandfather was killed for his faith under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — recounted to the commission how in March 2022 he was pulled from his house by Russian troops.
“They take me outside, put me on the ground. I was only in my underwear (in) that moment,” he said. “They wake up my oldest son. He’s 9 years old … (with) an AK-47 gun in the face.”
Sergeev said his father, the church’s senior pastor, was given 72 hours by the soldiers “to record a video in the front of the church building (saying) that this is already Russian territory, and Putin is our president.”
The soldiers threatened Sergeev that for every day his father delayed in making the video, they would cut off one of his fingers.
Sergeev told the commission it was “God’s miracle that (the Russian soldiers) did not come back with their knives” — but the troops took over the church building, tearing down the 40-foot cross in front of it and installing a Russian flag.
Other religious leaders have not been as fortunate: Wanner told the commission that since 2022 — when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, continuing attacks begun in 2014 — “over 40 clergy have faced reprisals and five have been killed.”
Similarly, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said in a June 25 interview with media outlet Ukrinform that “there is not a single Catholic priest in the occupied territories today — either Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic,” with Russian forces destroying or appropriating churches, while driving out clergy.
Wanner told the commission that Ukraine’s religious demographics — which include Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Jewish communities — reflect the nation’s “tolerance, religious diversity and religious pluralism as governing principles,” with religious symbols and practices “broadly accepted in public institutions and public space.”
But that diversity “clashes with the imposition of the Russian world ideology that comes with Russian rule,” said Wanner during her commission testimony.
Such an ideology — which holds that Russia is a superior civilization entitled to expand at will, since it claims to safeguard conservative values and Orthodox Christianity — “justifies the repression of religious minorities and privileges Russian orthodoxy as a state-protected guardian of these traditional values of public morality and social and political order,” said Wanner.
