During Moscow’s invasion in 2014, Oleksandr Pavenko, pastor of Transfiguration Church in Slovyansk, Ukraine, lost two of his sons—both of them also pastors. Kremlin-backed separatists stormed his church and abducted his sons and two church deacons, then tortured and killed the four men.
A year after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, a third son died from a Russian rocket while he was ministering to troops in eastern Ukraine.
“Many people are suffering in Ukraine right now, and one of them is me,” Pavenko told an American documentary team.
Yet Pavenko remained in Sloviansk, only 10 miles from the war’s frontlines, and turned his church into a humanitarian aid center for the community. The congregation provided food, clean drinking water, English lessons, and a thrift shop full of clothes, stuffed animals, and household items, according to documentary producer Colby Barrett, who visited the church in 2024.
Then on April 25, a Russian guided bomb destroyed most of Transfiguration’s windows and significantly damaged the roof. Pavenko noted extensive damage to the building’s exterior, according to messages sent to Barrett’s production team.
The congregation immediately boarded up the windows and patched the roof “as best we [could] with whatever materials we [had].” Pavenko noted that the inside of the church also sustained some damage, yet the day after the Saturday strike, 170 people arrived for Sunday worship.
“Life in the church continues,” Pavenko wrote.
The attack comes on the heels of ongoing attacks against Ukraine’s churches and clergy, which local Christians and American lawmakers believe is part of Russia’s war against religious freedoms in Ukraine and Russian-occupied territories. A bipartisan proposal seeks to sanction the Russians responsible for them.
Still, Barrett said the resilience of Pavenko and other Ukrainian Christians reminds him of the first-century Christians who persevered amid persecution and deep loss. “Putin—if he’s trying to crush these people’s faith—is not picking the right tactics. They are very resilient and absolutely living their faith,” he said.
On April 16, a Russian missile struck a church in Zaporizhzhia in southwest Ukraine, killing one person and injuring two others. In March, a drone attack damaged the 17th-century St. Andrew’s Church—part of a UNESCO World Heritage site—in the western city of Lviv.
At 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning in September, two Iranian Shahed drones narrowly missed the Spasinnya (“Salvation”) Evangelical Church—a megachurch in the Kyiv region—as 20 pastors lodged at the church for a conference, Barrett said. Still, worshipers packed that morning’s service, which included a planned special dedication for a new worship hall.
Barrett visited the church a week later and said the attack destroyed vehicles in an adjacent parking area and sprayed shrapnel into three of the church structures, including the building where the pastors were staying.
“There’s no military or even energy infrastructure targets around there, so the fact that it got hit is suspicious,” Barrett said.
Image courtesy of Anna ShvetsovaSome members of Congress agree. Just days before the attack on the church in Slovyansk, a bipartisan group of US representatives and senators introduced the “Countering Russia’s War on Faith Act.” The legislation requires the secretary of state and secretary of defense to report on Russian violations of religious freedom and impose sanctions on those responsible.
“Russia targets and kills persons of faith as a matter of policy wherever it invades,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), one of the bill’s sponsors, noted in a press release. “War criminal Putin seeks to prevent free worship of all believers and crushes any faith not subservient to its state-run church and corrupt former KGB agent Patriarch Kirill or otherwise submit itself to repressive state control.”
The proposed legislation accuses Kirill—the head of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church—of using theological language to justify the war. It cites a 2022 sermon during which he stated that Russian soldiers who die in the war will have their sins washed away.
The bill also notes the damage or destruction of more than 600 churches, the deaths of more than 50 Ukrainian religious leaders, and the abduction, torture, or forced disappearance of many other clergy since 2022. Other organizations report even higher figures—citing damage to more than 700 churches and the deaths of 67 religious leaders.
On May 9, Russian president Vladimir Putin suggested he may wind down the war, yet Moscow has given no indication it is willing to back down from its maximalist demands.
Mykhailo Brytsyn, a pastor from Melitopol in southeastern Ukraine, is close friends with the pastors at The House of the Gospel Church in Zaporizhzhia, which sustained significant damage when a Russian missile struck on April 16. A man from the community—on site to help with some work on the Baptist church—died in the attack, Brytsyn said. While other reports claimed the church’s minister was killed, Brytsyn noted that was false.
Brytsyn preached at the church in December and said its congregation organizes aid for the Russian-occupied territories and has coordinated evacuations in his hometown, among other cities.
Moscow’s forces invaded Melitopol in March 2022 and began closing churches unaffiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church, including the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Six months later, Russian soldiers interrupted Brytsyn’s Sunday morning worship service at Grace Church, fingerprinted and photographed congregants, and copied their identification documents.
After searching the church, the soldiers interrogated Brytsyn and scoured his home for “extremist literature” proving ties to the West. Although the soldiers found none, the unit’s commander expelled Brytsyn from Melitopol.
Brytsyn currently lives in Ukraine’s Rivne region and continues to pastor his church online, with congregants scattered across 16 countries. He also partners with Mission Eurasia to document the atrocities perpetrated by the Russian military, monitor the situation for Christian communities in occupied territories, and create a book that will tell the stories “of those who remained faithful to God to the end.”
Brytsyn said the pastors of the Zaporizhzhia church are mourning the loss of the man who died on the church property. Still, they are grateful that the children who often gather at the playground were not present during the attack. They also noted the building might have been completely destroyed if the missile landed just 10 meters closer. The main worship hall was damaged in the strike and the doors were blown out, yet the congregation continues to meet for worship even as the room is being restored, the pastor told Brytsyn.
The church leaders found some encouragement as they surveyed the damage on the second floor, Brytsyn added. While the windows were blown out and the ceiling collapsed, in the corner stood an untouched mirror with the words “He is alive.”
“The believers are looking to the future with hope,” Brytsyn said. “They are supporting the family of the man who died, and they are placing their trust in God’s mercy.”
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