Steal, kill, destroy

In the middle of Sunday morning service, Russian troops stormed into Grace Church of Evangelical Christians, a Baptist congregation in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Melitopol. The glass in the church’s doors shattered as the Russians, using sledgehammers and military assault tactics, smashed their way in.

The heavily armed men proceeded to arrest, fingerprint, and interrogate dozens of church members. The soldiers confiscated computers, cellphones, records, and other property.

Later, the Russians took the church building itself.

Mykhailo Brytsyn, the church’s longtime pastor, was preaching at another church that morning, Sept. 11, 2022. He later returned to the church grounds and suffered his own Russian interrogation. The questions were a formality, because the Russians planned to shut the church down anyway, extending a pattern across Ukrainian territories under Russian occupation since the start of full-scale war in February 2022.

Several months before the attack on Grace Church, Brytsyn, members of his congregation, and Christians from other denominations held open-air worship services in downtown Melitopol, a local tradition. That custom would later serve as the basis of a twisted accusation from Russia against the pastor and other Melitopol believers.

Brytsyn was forced to leave the city a few days after Russian troops took over his church, he told me, during a series of interviews I conducted with evangelical Christians in Ukraine’s western city of Lviv this May.

I met the pastor and his wife, Svetlana, at a Vienna-style café in downtown Lviv. Brytsyn, who wore his clerical collar, described his interrogation, and the commander who led his questioning.

“I asked him: ‘Why are you closing our church? After all, there are evangelical churches in Russia.’ To which he replied: ‘Those churches are temporary! There will be only an Orthodox church!’”

The commander likewise accused Brytsyn of being an American spy, a common claim made against evangelicals and Protestants in Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the former Soviet Union.

For Ukrainian Christians, occupation has meant targeted persecution, an experience familiar to believers inside Russia who are not aligned with the Russian Orthodox Church. Russia considers evangelicals—who share the Western values of free speech, freedom of assembly, and obedience to God before government—as a threat to state control.

Pressure against evangelicals looks set to persist as the war grinds on. The United States this summer turned its diplomatic focus elsewhere, especially to the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. But in July, following a brief halt in weapons deliveries to Ukraine, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the United States would resume sending military support to the country. He also gave Russia a hard deadline to sign a peace deal or face additional sanctions.

Brytsyn now lives in the town of Dubno, in western Ukraine, where Svetlana has family connections. Many evangelical Christians have found refuge in Ukraine’s west, away from the horrors of 3½ years of Russian occupation. Russia now controls about one-fifth of Ukraine’s pre-war territory, mostly in the country’s east and south.

Persecution in occupied Ukrainian territory has targeted Baptists, Presbyterians, charismatics, and pre-Reformation forms of Christianity, including Greek Catholicism. In some Ukrainian regions, like the southern peninsula of Crimea and the eastern Donbas area, Russian persecution of churches began in 2014, when Russia seized those territories in smaller-scale offensives.

Members of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which professes allegiance to a church hierarchy based in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv, not Moscow, have also suffered state pressure, armed intimidation, and violence.

Brytsyn recalled the Russian commanders gave him an ultimatum to vacate Melitopol.

“We were told, ‘We give you two days in order to leave, otherwise, we kill you,’” he said.

Mykhailo and Svetlana Brytsyn at a café in Lviv. Photo by William Fleeson

BRYTSYN NOW DIVIDES his time between weekly preaching in Dubno, maintaining online contact with his Melitopol flock—and a new role, in which he compiles evidence of war crimes and human rights violations Russia has committed against Ukrainians, Christian or otherwise. Brytsyn publishes his findings with Mission Eurasia, a Tennessee-based group focused on Christian missions and leadership training in post-Soviet countries.

According to a February report from Mission Eurasia, the threats Russian forces issued to the Melitopol pastor are neither empty nor isolated. To date, Russia has killed nearly four dozen Ukrainian religious leaders, the report found. Of these victims, nearly half were evangelical or other Protestant believers. That’s a disproportionately high number given the size of Ukraine’s Protestant population: Just 2.5% of all Ukrainians call themselves Protestants, per 2024 data from the Razumkov Centre, a Kyiv-based policy research group.

In March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported that Russia’s activities in occupied territories amount to “gross violations of religious freedom against Ukrainians.” The commission recommended designating Russia a country to watch, for “engaging in systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom” in the occupied territories of Ukraine and in Russia proper. USCIRF also cited allegations that Russia has killed Ukrainian religious leaders from outside the Russian Orthodox Church.

Many Ukrainian refugees have relocated to Lviv, which offers a concentration of housing and job options—and a safe distance from the fighting.

The Agarkov family came to the city in early 2022. Vasyl Agarkov, a Presbyterian pastor in training, and his wife, Viktoria Agarkova, lived in eastern Kharkiv until February of that year, when the advancing Russian army compelled them to flee. The couple, then without children, drove slowly west in seemingly endless traffic. They endured 36 sleepless hours and 650 miles in a packed car, alongside friends and their cat, Cherry.

As I interviewed the couple, their four boys—adopted all at once, just three weeks earlier—played in a separate room, in the rambunctious way of boys everywhere. They bashed around, shouting occasionally, and sent toys crashing against the walls. The couple told me that the war, as much as wanting a family, spurred them to adopt.

The move to Lviv felt especially poignant for Viktoria. It was her second evacuation. A former resident of Crimea, she fled when Russians seized it in 2014, before fleeing again in 2022 from Kharkiv.

“It was scary, for sure,” she said, referring to the 2022 invasion. “We were expecting the war. But when you expect it, and when it really happens—it’s still different.”

Vasyl calls the war “unprovoked” and “satanic.” And he considers Russia’s persecution of Christians pure evil. He, too, confirmed reports of Protestant pastors and other believers killed or abused for their faith.

“They say, ‘We are freeing you from your slavery!’ But they kill, and take [Christian Ukrainians] into slavery,” Vasyl said. “You see how they want to destroy the church, destroy Christians.”

The Christians who remain in occupied territories—those who have not died, fled, or been terrified into silence—now gather in secret, the Agarkovs said. The couple compared the current situation to the experience of Christians in the early church, when Roman and other authorities drove believers underground.

“[The Russians] are fighting not only with Ukrainians but also with Christianity, with God,” Vasyl said.

Viktoria added that she left Crimea specifically because she was a Christian. She knew all too well the persecutions of believers in the Soviet period.

“If you are a citizen of the Soviet Union, it means that you are a communist,” she said. “If you are a communist, it means you are an atheist. So, churches are not allowed. Priests are not allowed. Christmas is not allowed. Nothing is allowed. The Communist Party is your god.”

Though constrained to live in a distant city, the Agarkovs are now free to live out their faith. Adopting their four boys is part of that. It’s also a longtime dream come true—they first discussed adopting children a dozen years ago, while still dating.

“We worship an adopting God,” Vasyl said. “This is our way, how we can reduce the evil [of war] in their lives, and give them hope.”

The Agarkovs plan to finish pastoral training, then take up full-time ministry. They dream of planting churches in Ukraine, just as they once dreamed of adopting children.

“Russia is trying to destroy churches,” Vasyl said. “We’re thinking about planting more churches. That’s our response to this evil.”

Brytsyn preaches to a Ukrainian diaspora church in Vienna, Austria, in 2024. Photo courtesy of Mykhailo Brytsyn

MISSION EURASIA is not the only group tracking Russian persecution in Ukraine. Steven Moore, a former Republican chief of staff in the U.S. Congress, moved to Kyiv in 2022. He founded the Ukraine Freedom Project, a nonprofit that combines humanitarian work with defense of Christian religious liberty. The organization runs a website, RussiaTorturesChristians.org, to document religiously motivated crimes—including murder, torture, illegal seizure of homes and property, and sham trials—against Ukrainian believers.

In May, the Ukraine Freedom Project premiered its documentary film, A Faith Under Siege, at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. I interviewed Moore by phone a few weeks later. He expressed confidence in the power of bearing witness about crimes against Ukrainian Christians—and warned of the dangers that misinformation can bring. Western media is contending with a “fire hose of Russian propaganda,” he said. Consumers can sometimes receive, and believe, distorted news reports seemingly rooted in fact.

Moore cited the case of employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, paying U.S. conservative media figures a total of $10 million to “pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice statement from last September. The case is currently under FBI investigation.

Despite Russian efforts to spread false narratives, Moore takes comfort from his work.

“The truth still works in the world,” he told me. “We are American Christians, talking to Ukrainian Christians, and trying to get the stories of war out.”

Longtime gospel workers in Ukraine have also reported a spike in persecution of Christians. Presbyterian missionary Doug Shepherd moved to Ukraine in the 1990s, following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. A native of Dallas, three decades in foreign missions have not softened Shepherd’s Texas accent. He and his wife, Masha, who is Ukrainian, have raised their children in Lviv since 2006.

Lviv is a “refuge city for many people,” Shepherd said, as we sat in an upscale hotel lobby near the historic old town square. His duties have transformed from peacetime ministry and next-generation missionary training to crisis-mode humanitarian support, often by delivering aid to front-line communities.

“Where Russia occupies, the church dies,” Shepherd told me. Russian authorities feel that “Christians are a massive threat, because they don’t submit to a tribe or a nationality. They follow Jesus, they read the Bible.”

When Ukraine shifted from mission field to battlefield, Shepherd said, staying posed a “true test” for professing Christians. Avoiding personal risk is tempting, he said, but genuine commitment is shown through staying put—and serving where needs are especially great.

Shepherd struggles to see or plan beyond the present moment. Instead, he focuses on the needs in Lviv and Ukraine today, while keeping faith in the ultimate promises of God.

“He’s always several steps ahead,” he said. “That’s where our hope is. But it’s exhausting.”

Grace Church’s building in Melitopol before (left) and after Russian forces took over. Photos courtesy of Mykhailo Brytsyn

AFTER WE FINISHED our coffee, Brytsyn and his wife took me to an assistance center in the south of Lviv. The gray, rainy day was cold enough that we could see our breath. The pastor stepped inside with a smile and a bagful of food to donate.

“We call this the ‘Melitopol Embassy,’” he joked. Volunteers at the center provide various forms of aid, from social and legal assistance to free medical checkups for children. In a back room, an examination table held toys, cartoon stickers, and a pediatrician’s instruments. People flowed in and out, exchanging goods and documents.

Before we parted ways, Brytsyn showed me photos of what Grace Church has become. The grounds now host offices for Russia’s military administration. The building’s exterior walls, formerly pure white, have been painted blood red. Paintings modeled after the faces of fallen Russian soldiers stretch across the brick façade.

The tall, white cross that once crowned the top of the church has vanished.

In December 2022, several months into Brytsyn’s forced exile in Dubno, Russian forces issued paperwork making their takeover of the property official. Written in Russian, the language reeks of irony: Grace Church’s leadership had taken part in “mass unrest and anti-Russian demonstrations in March-April 2022,” apparently a reference to the church’s open-air worship meetings in downtown Melitopol.

As for Brytsyn, Russian authorities found him guilty of “agitations … against the Russian Federation and the establishment of peaceful life” in Melitopol’s surrounding, occupied region.

Despite so many setbacks, Brytsyn keeps straining toward the goal.

“We will return home,” Brytsyn said. “Wherever we are today, we are still the church.”