A documentary about the suffering of evangelical Christians in Ukraine shows how one objective of the Russian invasion is to degrade Christianity, including allowing Chechen Muslims to partially Islamize occupied areas.
Steven Moore, founder of Ukraine Freedom Project and co-producer of A Faith Under Siege, said from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv that the country was surprisingly “highly functioning” despite the challenges of consistent attacks against the population – a drone-and-missile attack reported on Thursday night (July 30) resulted in 16 people dead, including a 6-year-old boy and another child.
“It’s understandable if people outside Ukraine think that Kyiv could be a smoke-and-ruin because that’s what the media portrays,” said Moore, who has lived there since day five of the Russian invasion in February 2022. “But this is a city of millions of people, and life goes on, and Ukraine is very resilient.”
In the 18 percent of territory controlled by Russia, however, “the worst things in the world are happening,” Moore said – torture, imprisonment, indoctrination, kidnapping of their children and brutal killings.
For example, occupied areas of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the southeast are now under the control of Ramzan Kadyrov, a Chechen Muslim warlord who has “declared an ‘Orthodox-Muslim Jihad’” against Ukrainians, according to an eyewitness called Petro, a young evangelical preacher who escaped an area of occupied Ukraine at the end of last year.
His identity hidden for security reasons, Petro testifies in the documentary to the realities of occupation.
“They’re repopulating our land with Muslims from Chechnya and from the Caucuses, and they’re focused on eliminating other religious denominations,” he says about the intentions of the Chechens who support Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
God’s Call
Moore, co-producer Colby Barrett and executive producer Anna Shvetsova are the forces behind the film, which originated with a phone call that Barrett received from a graduate school friend inviting him to join an aid convoy to Ukraine.
Barrett, a U.S. Marine veteran and entrepreneur, said he had “no connection to Ukraine whatsoever” and had never met a Ukrainian, but his experience during the first of a number of visits challenged his presumptions about the conflict, in particular how Christians are faring badly under Russian rule.
He felt additionally challenged when his research revealed how Christians were suffering there.
“At that time, the statistics were staggering, and they’ve gotten worse since then: 630 churches shelled, looted, or destroyed by Russia. That number is now 650,” Barrett said. “Thousands of churches seized in the occupied territories and turned into military barracks, municipal buildings, and other kinds of state apparatus buildings; 47 priests and pastors had been murdered by the Russians. Now it’s 49. That number keeps ticking up, and that just floored me.”
Barrett soon realized he had a calling from God to not only support delivery of practical aid to Ukraine but also to produce a film to help evangelicals in the West to understand realities that are underreported or misunderstood.
“I’ve never made a documentary before,” he said. “I have no background in that, but I have built and worked with teams throughout my career. I was a Marine officer for four-and-a-half years. I also ran a large, billion dollar-plus business.”
This experience helped Barrett feel confident to enlist a film crew in Ukraine with a post-production team in New York. The Ukraine Freedom Project helped with introductions to Ukrainian evangelicals to enable them to tell their stories.
“We made a conscious decision not to interview folks for our movie that were still in occupied areas,” Barrett said. “It would have made perhaps a better movie but put them in grave danger. All of the people we talked to were in areas that the Russians had been pushed out of.”
Barret particularly recalled meeting a number of young people who had escaped occupation, fleeing possible removal; 19,546 Ukrainian children have been abducted by Russia to date.
Also challenging was conveying stories of escaped people without endangering relatives still living in occupied areas, who could be tortured or prisoned as was Petro, to ensure that the film “was only doing good and not doing harm,” Barrett said. He recalled a young woman sentenced by Russian authorities to 20 years in prison for terrorist activity after she held a small Bible study in her home.
“It is really dangerous for believers there,” said Barrett, adding that some stories could not appear in the film due to such security threats.
Barrett was still keen to find evangelical escapees from occupied areas to tell their stories, and “it wasn’t particularly hard to track them down because there’s a lot of them,” he said. One person who had escaped torture and imprisonment spoke to Barrett and later was contacted by an agent from Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), who informed him what his 16-year-old niece was wearing to school that day.
“That’s the level of intimidation that people are facing who want to talk about it, who want to share their stories,” said Barrett.
Although the film has been shown on various media networks in the U.S and become a topic of discussion by an estimated 50 online influencers, Barrett said there was a longstanding issue with conservative U.S. Christians remaining uninformed about the realities suffered by evangelicals in Ukraine.
“That’s largely because there’s certain powerful figures in the conservative media ecosphere who are saying things that are not entirely truthful about what’s going on here,” he said. “These people are powerful and rich, and it’s hard to work against that narrative with the truth. But the good news is that when you tell people the truth, they come around.”
Making the truth known about what Christians face in Ukraine has been very encouraging.
“I think that there’s a real hunger for actual firsthand stories of what’s happening in Ukraine,” Barrett said, adding that misinformation abounds from pundits and Russian propaganda. “We really wanted to cut through all that and just say, ‘Who are the people that this happened to? Let’s hear from them. Let their story be the real centerpiece of this…the folks that have suffered, the pastors who have lost parishioners, the fathers who have lost their families.”
The film includes footage of former Marine and U.S. Special Forces Green Beret Christian Hickey going to the front lines and ministering to troops. Barrett said this raw footage helped reveal brutal realities.
“It’s horrible what’s happening, and it’s also challenged me with my faith, you know, and thinking about how easy I have it as a Christian in America,” Barrett said. “No Russian soldiers show up at my church on Sunday. I can worship freely, and that’s a blessing and that’s a gift. And the believers in Ukraine, their faith is so strong to remain faithful while being subject to torture, murder, imprisonment… for worshiping God.”
Moore said Russian laws have been passed in the occupied territory that criminalize public preaching of the gospel. A Protestant seeking to hold church services in the occupied areas must first register the building; every one of the parishioners must be registered and recorded on a list with occupation authorities; and if fewer than 30 people with Russian passports are attending the church service, it is deemed an illegal terrorist activity.
“And the reason is that the occupation authorities assume if you’ve got 30 Russian passport holders there, that at least one of them will be affiliated with the [Russian] State and can report on the activities that are going on,” Moore said. “The pastors there are coerced in different ways to try to make them collaborate with the occupation authority.”
Most evangelicals and other Christians are worshipping secretly in those areas, meeting in very small groups, he said.
“They have not given up their faith,” he added. “I wouldn’t say faith is flourishing there, but the Russians have not been able to stamp it out.”
Ukraine is known as the Bible belt of Eastern Europe, as U.S. missionaries “flooded” the country since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moore said. The result was a Protestant ecosystem that thrived to the point that Ukrainian churches began sending missionaries out of the country.
Before the Russian invasion, veteran evangelist Franklin Graham was even able to hold an event in Lviv with 39,000 people; such a large-scale event would now be deemed unsafe.
“Individual faith is flourishing,” said Moore, “and as you get closer to the [war] front line, the size of the churches… some of them have to split up and worship in building basements at different times.”
This “thriving ecosystem” has been reflected in wider Ukrainian society, which has seen Christian faith encouraged, even to the point of chaplains of various denominations enlisting in the military, a new occurrence. In fact, there aren’t enough chaplains yet to serve the spiritual and practical needs of military personnel defending their country.
“In America, there’s all these fights about the government’s role in the church and the church’s role in government,” said Moore, who once worked as chief of staff for former U.S. Republican Pete Roskam, former chief deputy GOP whip. “And you can’t put the 10 commandments on the courthouse lawn because the American Civil Liberties Union will come after you. By contrast, in the city of Kyiv, the official symbol is the archangel Michael and it’s all over the place.”
In Ukraine scriptural references are etched onto signs; Moore said he once saw Bible verses on billboards while driving to the city of Odessa.
Trends
Barrett noted trends of stronger Christianity in Ukraine as a result of the invasion, beginning with a greater sense of faith with Protestantism flourishing. An exception to the smaller, secret gatherings is the ongoing construction of a building for megachurch accommodating 4,500 worshippers in Kyiv.
Moore said people are moving away from the Orthodox denomination loyal to the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, where Patriarch Kirill has declared a “holy” war against Ukraine, to the point of saying that if a Russian dies fighting in Ukraine, all their sins will be washed away.
“People don’t want to be associated with a church that has those ties to Moscow, and they’re moving either to Protestant denominations or the Orthodox Church of Ukraine,” Moore said. “It has its power center in Kyiv, and so is more of a homegrown, national church.”
Barrett said people especially nearer the battle lines want to hear a message of hope and resilience, and the fact that pastors and priests have not fled has helped give them a sense of ordered religiosity by attending church services, whether or not they have a faith.
Barrett saw a comparison with the early church in Israel and Roman times, when Christians would stay to care for the sick and poor when plagues happened in cities, which was “gasoline to expand the faith.”
“You see similar stuff there; the pastors and priests in Ukraine are staying, delivering aid and ministering to their flocks and to their communities in general,” he said. “So it’s really heartbreaking on one hand to see them go through this, but very heartening on the other, seeing them living their faith in a true fashion.”
Barrett asked evangelicals in the United States and other countries in the West to “cut through the noise” and see what was really happening to Christians in Ukraine, citing 1 Cor. 12:26a, “And if one part of the body suffers, all the parts suffer with it.” He added that although Ukraine may seem far away, evangelicals have a responsibility to alleviate the suffering of their brothers and sisters in Christ.
“You need to know what’s going on. You need to do whatever is in your power, and that may just be prayer,” he said. “But I can tell you the believers that we met over there, they can tangibly feel the prayers that are coming from the international community, and they also feel it when those prayers wane.”
The non-profit film, which can be seen by clicking here, has been shown on Newsmax, CBN News, Salem and other U.S. media networks. A prayer guide can be found at https://www.faithundersiege.com/how-to-help
