Oleksandra does not remember the sound that killed her family.
Shrapnel wounds scarred her body.
It was after midnight in a small apartment outside Kyiv. Her husband, her little daughter, and she were each in their beds, fast asleep. The next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital. Her pelvis was fractured in multiple places. A lattice of metal rods held her in traction. Shrapnel wounds scarred her body.
Then came the sentence no one should ever hear. Her husband and her daughter had died in the blast.
What followed was half a year of physical and spiritual testing. Surgeons replaced the external frame with a metal plate. Later they replaced the plate with titanium pieces. Learning to move again meant first rolling over, then sitting up, then taking a step. Each action was painful, but also a small act of defiance.
“It was like learning to live all over again,” she told me. “I don’t know where the will came from. I just had this desire to move.”
The greater agony was not in her pelvis. It was in the empty beds.
Do not stay alone with the pain.
During this time, she learned one rule. “Do not stay alone with the pain.” Her father and sister stayed by her side. They talked about the husband and child they had lost. They remembered holidays, shared meals, small jokes. They prayed and they wept. And she leaned on her faith.
“Friends’ support is great,” she said, “but a huge part of this process is my conversations with God. I tell him I do not want to live inside these emotions. They steal my strength and take away my focus on the future.”
Unfathomable strength and courage.
When we spoke on Zoom, I saw that faith in real time. Electricity was being rationed that day, and she had only a single lamp. Her screen glowed with just her face suspended in darkness. The room behind her was so black I could not fully read her expressions, but her voice was clear, and it conveyed almost unfathomable strength and courage.
Today, Oleksandra walks again. She leads the teen ministry in her church. She sings in the worship band. She has created a space where teenagers and children can gather after school. They come for safety, for Bible lessons, and for someone who understands what it is to lose everything.
Many of them, like her, have lost homes or relatives or both.
She wants to help raise a new generation.
Her theology of survival is simple and bracing. “The enemy always aims at your calling,” she said. She believes Russia tried to kill not just her body, but her purpose, and the purpose of Ukraine itself. She describes Ukraine as a “spiritual and breadbasket” nation, meant to serve others. Her answer has been to double down on that calling. She wants to help raise a new generation, one capable of building “a world where there will be less evil and where people care for one another.”
For Oleksandra, faith is the source of courage, resilience, and purpose.
However, for the Kremlin, faith is a weapon.
From the start of the full-scale invasion, Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, has preached what some Ukrainians call an “Orthodox jihad.” In a sermon early in the war he said that Russian soldiers who die in Ukraine have all their sins forgiven. He portrayed their deaths as a holy sacrifice. In later comments he cast the war as a sacred struggle against a sinful, collective West, and promised eternal salvation to those who die fighting.
Russian forces have damaged or destroyed hundreds of religious buildings.
The Russian Orthodox church targets Ukrainian churches, mosques, and synagogues that are loyal to Ukraine. Russian forces have damaged or destroyed hundreds of religious buildings. Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish communities have all been hit.
Priests have been tortured and killed. Religious communities have been banned. In parts of occupied eastern Ukraine some congregations now meet in cemeteries, the only place they can gather and sing hymns without immediate arrest.
Against this, the Kremlin has launched a second campaign. It is a global propaganda effort that claims Russia is defending Christianity, and that Ukraine, led by a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is persecuting believers.
The only place in Ukraine where there is systemic religious persecution is where Russia controls the ground.
Igor Bandura, a Baptist minister and vice president of the All-Ukrainian Union of Churches of Evangelical Christian Baptists, has spent years trying to correct that record. His denomination is a member of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations (AUCCRO), which unites more than 90% of religious communities in Ukraine and includes Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim bodies, among others. Together they say with one voice, “The only place in Ukraine where there is systemic religious persecution is where Russia controls the ground.”
And as he told me, “When we lose territory, we lose religious freedom.”
In the week before Thanksgiving in the USA, a representative of the Moscow aligned church in Ukraine turned up in Washington and was received as a representative of “Ukrainian faith.” It was an impressive propaganda feat, and created the illusion that his small, pro Kremlin flock speaks for the whole country.
Ukrainian clerics like Igor are horrified at the thought that the White House might be forming its views of religion in Ukraine based on someone who represents perhaps three percent of Ukrainian believes, and whose loyalty is to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow.
Priests who refuse to bless the war are fined, defrocked, imprisoned, or killed.
The difference between Russia and Ukraine comes down to what happens when a church displeases the state. In Russia and in the territories it occupies, priests who refuse to bless the war are fined, defrocked, imprisoned, or killed. In Ukraine, the embraces religious freedom.
Oleksandra’s life shows what that pluralism looks like on the ground.
She belongs to a small evangelical church, one of thousands across Ukraine. Down the street there may be a Greek Catholic parish. In the next neighborhood, a mosque. In the city center, an Orthodox cathedral loyal to Ukraine. All are free to operate.
“When the enemy bombed my house,” Oleksandra told me, “they tried to destroy my calling. But I am still here.”
On a recent Sunday she stood before a room full of teenagers, some of them newly arrived from front line regions, and spoke about the future. She asked them to imagine a Ukraine where no one burns churches, no one tortures priests, and no one claims God’s blessing for the murder of neighbors.
Faith can be both a refuge and a summons.
In that sense, her story is Ukraine’s story. It is a wounded body learning to walk again. It is a shattered family discovering that faith can be both a refuge and a summons.
Behind her, quietly, stands a coalition of bishops, rabbis, imams, and pastors who are saying to the world: If you want to see religious freedom in this war, look for the places where churches are free to disagree, and where people like Oleksandra are free to lead.
Mitzi Perdue writes from and about Ukraine, she’s is a fellow at the Institute of World Politics and the Co-Founder of Mental Help Global, a philanthropy that uses AI to support mental health.
