A time to build up

The bridge traffic across the Irpin River flows as smoothly as the water underneath it. Cars, trucks, and buses pass over the bridge’s newer half, carrying people and goods in and out of Irpin, a suburb of Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, that lies a dozen miles southeast.

A high metal wall skirting the new span blocks passengers’ view of the mass of rubble, twisted rebar, and concrete wreckage that stretches alongside them. An older bridge crossed the river before February 2022, when the structure became a casualty of the suburb’s partial Russian occupation and the monthlong battle to liberate it. Ukrainian officials chose to leave the wreckage as-is, a memorial to the horrors of the Battle of Irpin. Some 300 civilians died during the fighting.

The bridge has become a symbol of the country’s resilience and its continuing struggle. Its reconstruction also stands as a paradox—a fully operational infrastructure project, typical for peacetime, completed in the midst of war. For Irpin and the rest of the country, Ukraine must decide how to fund two simultaneous needs: the front-line fighting and the long rebuilding process.

There are also the psychological and spiritual needs of the Ukrainian people, which, like Ukraine’s bridges and roads, cannot wait until the war ends for healing to begin. Peace efforts are continuing, but no one knows when the fighting will stop.

Vasyl Ostryy is IBC’s executive pastor. Photo by Viacheslav Ratynskyi

VASYL OSTRYY, executive pastor of Irpin Bible Church (IBC), wrestles daily with this competition of needs as he ministers to the local community.

“We have a new expression in Ukraine: ‘Difficult living has become easier,’” the blue-eyed, 43-year-old father of five told me as we sat together in his office in early March. IBC has sustained prewar activities while boosting ministries specific to the needs of a people under full-scale war. It’s doing its best to rebuild, and to build anew.

Even with support from foreign partners like the United States, international organizations estimate Ukraine will require dizzying sums for restoration and for the infrastructure required to support the economy, job growth, and national revitalization. A February 2025 report from the United Nations estimated Ukraine’s reconstruction costs at more than half a trillion dollars.

Likewise for social costs. Nearly 7 million refugees from Ukraine now live outside the country. Many will never return. This reality will challenge Ukraine’s demographics and workforce now and in the decades to come. Wartime pressures have led to fewer marriages—and more than twice as many divorces—since the full-scale conflict’s start in 2022.

IBC’s work has only expanded since the war’s beginning. Today, the church is both sustaining and multiplying its capacities to support the local community—and adapting its resources to the specific needs of the war’s victims. From disabled civilians and soldiers to war widows, fatherless families, and countless sufferers of post-traumatic stress, IBC has what might feel like an overwhelming weight of responsibility. Undaunted, the church’s army of volunteers is focused on offering the community what it needs most: “People need to have hope that life can go on,” Ostryy told me.

Wreckage stands as a memorial near Irpin’s new bridge. Photo by Viacheslav Ratynskyi

IBC’s WARTIME MINISTRY began as soon as the first tanks rolled across the border.

Aiming to stem the Russian advance from Belarus in the north, the Ukrainian Armed Forces deliberately destroyed the bridge at Irpin on Feb. 25, 2022. The structure’s position made it strategically important both for military purposes and for civilian escape.

By 2 p.m. on March 5, 2022, IBC deacon Roman Ilnitsky was fighting exhaustion as his country fought for survival. The stocky, white-bearded 60-year-old had been volunteering at the church nonstop, barely sleeping, since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

Amid chaos and freezing late-winter temperatures, Ilnitsky helped organize a 100-car refugee convoy headed out of Irpin. Shortly after leaving IBC’s large campus, the convoy returned. It had come under Russian shelling, and the refugees decided to retreat to the church to shelter and regroup—and think of what else, if anything, they could do.

“We prayed together, believers and nonbelievers, and waited for the attack to stop,” Ilnitsky recalled.

As Ilnitsky coordinated the evacuations, his wife, Zoya, helmed the church kitchen for days, cooking thousands of meals. Few of the refugees or church workers knew how to respond as Russian forces continued their attack on Irpin, a key step in Russia’s plan to capture Ukraine’s capital.

Pinned between an advancing enemy and the impassable bridge, civilians huddled under the wrecked concrete structure, attempting to traverse the narrow Irpin River on foot, one by one, over rubble and makeshift walkways. The returning convoy members counted among Irpin’s fortunate. IBC provided food, support, and a large basement where they could sleep safely. But that wasn’t what they lacked most.

“What people needed wasn’t food or clothing. It was hope,” Ostryy said. “We prayed, asking God for hope.”

The following day, Russian troops opened fire on the civilians trying to cross the Irpin River. Anatoly Berezhny, a 26-year-old IBC member volunteering to help others cross the water toward Kyiv, died when a mortar exploded near him, just 200 yards from a waiting evacuation bus. Berezhny was also a refugee from the long-running war in Ukraine’s east and had been married six months. The attack made for a graphic, now-famous photo, where Berezhny appears, lifeless, in the foreground. The same mortar also claimed the lives of all but one member of a Ukrainian family.

IBC only confirmed Berezhny’s death after hearing of the bridge attack, scanning social media, and later, finding his body at a local morgue. Within the widespread suffering across Irpin, IBC now had its own very personal loss to mourn.

UKRAINIAN OFFICIALS prioritized building a new bridge across the river as soon as possible. The project, finished in November 2023, became one of the first Ukrainian public works to reach completion since the start of full-scale war, according to Mustafa Nayyem, who served as Ukraine’s minister of reconstruction and infrastructure development between 2023 and 2024.

“I was very happy that our team was able to deliver this result,” the bald, 43-year-old told me as he relaxed in a hoodie at a Crimea-themed restaurant in Kyiv’s bohemian Podil neighborhood. “Definitely, this was necessary.”

As much as a physical bridge was needed, Nayyem insisted a psychological bridge between past and present was equally vital. He faulted a “lack of memory” as one of the contributing reasons the war began in the first place. In his view, people had forgotten past Russian crimes in and against Ukraine, including a Soviet-planned famine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions, the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and the ongoing persecution of Christians in Ukraine’s occupied territories.

“I think it’s very important to show people what [the war] was, what we have seen all these years,” Nayyem said. “Memorializing the war is one of our duties for the next generations.”

Nayyem also emphasized his view that no contradiction exists between rebuilding infrastructure and maintaining a war. Both require spending, at the same time, if a country hopes to gain victory, he said.

“All this needs to work during war. Energy infrastructure, roads, ports. We need to survive in order to fight.”

The city of Bucha, which neighbors Irpin and also endured a Russian attack, displays portraits of residents who have died in the war. Photo by Viacheslav Ratynskyi

THAT FOCUS on both survival and rebuilding also drives IBC’s ministries.

After we met in his office, Ostryy took me on a tour of IBC’s grounds. The booming sounds of demolition rang out across the church campus. As we watched, an excavator swung its arm around, cracking against an old brick wall and kicking up a cloud of dust. Workers in boots and gloves moved debris from the building site. Inside the church, children’s voices echoed down the halls. IBC runs a preschool that educates the community’s youngest—and helps answer the kids’ tough questions about growing up amid war and violence.

The church’s largest current project is a full-service rehabilitation center, now under construction. Officially called the Postwar Recovery Center, the site will deliver physical, psychological, and spiritual care to patients of all ages in and beyond Irpin. The center will include a consultation practice for post-traumatic stress disorder, therapy of various kinds, and a chaplain’s wing. Ostryy describes the facility as part of the church’s calling. But between in-progress fundraising and the unknown timing of an eventual peace, the church cannot set a firm date for completion.

The center also needs to recruit a full-time staff of professional doctors, nurses, counselors, and administrators.

Another of IBC’s key efforts is a school for chaplains, launched last year. Classes meet for eight intensive weekends during the yearlong course. Initially focused on IBC only, the school now welcomes students from across Ukraine. Nearly 80 participants completed the chaplaincy program in May.

“Volunteers are our strength,” the pastor said. “We see a big effect, because these people, they’re like superstars.” He added that the chaplaincy work IBC supports “touches the lives of hundreds of families and thousands of people.”

But the incessant need has taken a toll. Volunteers are stressed and tired, the pastor said. Between the ongoing efforts and the constant difficult news from the front, volunteers risk burnout—or the temptation to quit altogether. IBC organizes an annual retreat for its volunteers in the mountains of western Ukraine, where they can unwind, have fellowship, and talk about the good that more volunteering can bring.

Ostryy noted that the volunteers witness daily the size, and seriousness, of the needs they are straining to meet: “Veterans are everywhere, widows are everywhere.”

To date, five members of IBC have died fighting or volunteering. Nineteen are in active military service. No less than 40% of IBC’s original congregation has left Ukraine. In light of the war’s persistence, returnees are rare: Only five IBC families that left have come back, the pastor said.

And while the church’s Sunday attendance now stands at roughly prewar levels, the challenge for IBC’s pastors comes in ministering to the many newcomers, whom they have only recently gotten to know.

Among its other programs, IBC conducts home and building repairs. The church typically works on two to three projects per month, though the pace ran higher immediately following the Battle of Irpin. IBC’s volunteer center, set up permanently on the church grounds, caters to IBC members and other locals through clothing donations, grocery distribution, free medicine, and other measures. Church members pay visits to the military hospitals across the Kyiv region, encouraging soldiers and veterans. IBC also runs a youth soccer club—and with nine teams and 150 participants, the program is more like a full-blown soccer league. The players attend teamwide chapel services and Bible studies. A “social café” operates three times per week, and many of its patrons are Ukrainian refugees relocated from the country’s hardest-hit conflict zones.

“People stay around, talk, share each other’s burdens,” Ostryy said.

Feelings of social cohesion are perhaps as important as ever. Survivor’s guilt—in which those still alive feel conflicted or at fault, when so many have died—is a widespread problem. Refugees who chose to leave Ukraine feel similar pangs of guilt, Ostryy said. The pastor stays in regular contact with church members in other countries. They can blame themselves for the difficulties endured by those who did not, or could not, leave Ukraine to seek safety abroad.

“Some thought we were judging them” for leaving, Ostryy recalled, speaking for himself and other IBC leaders. “We don’t. It’s every person’s choice, every family’s choice.”

ROMAN ILNITSKY sees Ukraine’s endurance—its continued existence—as God’s work made visible.

“That Ukraine stands, is a miracle,” he said, waving to the church’s kids as they passed by. He draws a direct link between his faith and his decision to stay and serve. “If I wasn’t a believer, I would have left already.”

Like others at IBC, Ilnitsky tempers his wartime anxiety by staying involved. Church volunteering is the best stress reliever he knows. Bearing the burdens of others lightens his own. It helps that his wife, Zoya, works just as hard. Her name is a Slavic variation of Zoë—the Greek word for “life.”

“There’s scared and doing nothing, and there’s scared and doing something,” the deacon said.

Yet Ilnitsky admits that an uncertain outlook—on war and on the peace talks among Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and the United States—weighs on him, too.

Ostryy also acknowledged that uncertainty. Should the war take a dark turn, IBC’s rebuilding efforts, and the community itself, could disintegrate.

“If something new happens, people will leave,” he said.

Still, Ostryy continues to pray for a more peaceful tomorrow. Some seeds of hope are already bearing fruit: After a long period of grieving, Anatoly Berezhny’s widow remarried. IBC counts the couple among its volunteer corps.

“We live, we plan, we hope,” Ostryy said. Then he began to chuckle and added, “But we [still] keep everything in suitcases.”