Ukrainian Baptists know firsthand which side of the conflict is a threat to religious liberty. It’s not Zelensky’s.
As I wrote last February:
In Luhansk, the Ukrainian Baptist Union was designated as a terrorist group, the Baptist Hymnal was banned, and all 44 Baptist churches in the region have been closed. “We’ve heard repeatedly from pastors in that area who have talked about being taken into the woods and beaten and had the money they had on them stolen. We’ve heard repeatedly about military forces stationed outside of churches,” [Baptist World Alliance general secretary and CEO Elijah] Brown says. “One of the pastors from that region, an older gentleman, told us that the persecution he was facing today was worse than anything he had lived through during the times of the U.S.S.R.”
Baptists in Donetsk have faced less physical persecution under the occupation government. Restrictions on their freedom have been more like those faced by Evangelicals in Russia: Facially neutral regulations are used to harass Baptists in particular.
Brown told NR, “We have an example of a Baptist church which was brand new, had just been built before the occupation, so it was totally up to all the local and applicable fire codes, but after the occupation was immediately told that they no longer met the fire-code regulations. So, another church, which was nearby and had qualified under the new fire-code regulations, offered to allow the Baptists to meet in that church. . . . When the Baptists went to meet at that building, they were met by the police and barred from entrance to that building.”
We know from the rest of Ukraine that it doesn’t have to be this way. Baptists in the parts of Ukraine under Kyiv’s control enjoy religious liberty. They were preaching sermons about peace the Sunday before the invasion. They live alongside Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Pentecostals, Jews, and Muslims.
Putin can’t stand that. Religious liberty is antithetical to his regime’s view of “spiritual security.”
“This fight is very much, for many of our Ukrainian Baptist friends, a fight to preserve their right to worship,” [Baptist missionary Andrew] Bunnell tells NR. “The stark differences between the freedoms that Baptists enjoy in Ukraine and the kind of soft and at times even hard suppression that they get in Russia — it couldn’t be more stark.”
Bunnell still communicates with Baptist pastors in Ukraine. One of them, named Olek, told him the following: “We have many church members fighting now. While this war is happening, we are shepherding our flock, and caring for our people. And we will continue to do this no matter what happens with the war.”
You can read that entire piece, which includes a description of the Russian idea of “spiritual security,” here.