What will a peace deal mean for Ukraine’s evangelicals?

OLENA, A CHRISTIAN WOMAN who lives outside Kherson, endured eight months of Russian occupation. For most of 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Christians in Kherson suffered the constant threat of harassment, torture, and even murder at the hands of their Russian occupiers. WORLD has agreed not to use Olena’s real name out of ongoing fear for her safety.

Despite the threats, Olena’s church maintained its humanitarian care to locals—believers or not. That ministry has continued since Ukraine’s liberation of Kherson in November 2022.

“It wasn’t easy,” Olena told me via text message. “But with God’s help we continued to serve orphans, the elderly, and those in need.”

Russian forces remain near Kherson, which sits on the Dnieper River in southern Ukraine, and have continued to strike the city—using shells, drones, and other deadly projectiles—from the Dnieper’s opposite bank.

“We have a lot of people we know, friends, over there,” Olena said. Olena’s brother is among those trapped in Russian-occupied territory.

The fate of front-line Christians like Olena—those in free Ukraine, or those still under Russian occupation—appears increasingly uncertain amid talks of a potential peace deal. President Donald Trump campaigned on a platform to reduce U.S. aid to Ukraine while brokering a peace agreement between Kyiv and Moscow. Many analysts have speculated that any settlement may push Ukraine to forfeit the roughly 20 percent of land now under Russian control. Last year, Trump promised that, if reelected, he would end the war in one day. Although that time frame has come and gone, the situation in Ukraine remains a priority.

Speaking to a world leaders’ conference at Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 23, Trump vowed to push ahead on a peace deal—although he provided few details.

“You’re going to have to ask Russia,” Trump said, when asked what a settlement might include. “Ukraine is ready to make a deal,” he added.

Trump likewise mentioned the potential for a grand-diplomacy type of effort, especially from China, to drag Russia to the negotiating table. “Hopefully China can help us stop the war,” he said. “And they have a great deal of power over that situation … and hopefully we can work together and get that stopped.”

FOR UKRANIANS, if the road toward a final peace remains obscure, the going has gotten tougher already. On Jan. 27, Trump and the U.S. State Department, now under the leadership of Secretary Marco Rubio, suspended all foreign humanitarian aid. “The United States is no longer going to blindly dole out money with no return for the American people,” a State Department memo stated. The following day, a suspension of that suspension came from a U.S. district judge, and Rubio later added a humanitarian exception to the aid ban.

This limbo—call it a freeze on the freeze—will stay in effect until at least Feb. 3, according to current reports. After that, future U.S. aid remains in doubt.

The original aid freeze, set at 90 days, has pushed aid groups in Ukraine further into crisis conditions, according to Jon Eide, a church planter with Mission to the World (MTW), the missions-focused ‘sending agency’ of the Presbyterian Church in America.

Eide, who has served Ukraine since 1997, described the changes for front-line churches as a near-total pivot, requiring church leaders to transform themselves into aid workers and provide for the urgent needs of shelter, safety, and sustenance. Those needs are most acute in winter, given that Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure, knocking out the means of electricity, heating, and plumbing for homes and businesses.

Wartime logistics have become a “diaconal obligation,” he said. “But no one learned that in seminary.”

Front-line ministries have had to get creative, according to Eide. One Kherson-area church bought a dozen portable, multi-plug electricity generators and started a checkout system, library-style, so the church’s members can rent the generators for their homes. That means non-Christians can also come, plug in their phones and devices, and receive help from the church alongside believers. That’s Ukrainian ministry and evangelism at work—meeting practical needs in arduous times, Eide said.

In the occupied territories especially, Eide’s ministry has suffered significant setbacks. Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, MTW had 15 partner churches in Ukraine. Two of those churches now sit in Russian-occupied territory, Eide said. Both churches have had to stop meeting, under pressure from occupying Russian authorities.

Eide estimates that Ukraine’s evangelical Christians, of all denominations, number about 1 million. That makes Ukraine the “Bible Belt of Eastern Europe,” he said. Any changes to Ukraine’s borders, and how the country fares in an eventual U.S.-led peace deal, could have a cascading effect on church activities across the broader region.

EIDE’S EXPERIENCE fits other reports of large-scale Russian repression targeting evangelical churches. Last year, Time magazine reported—under the chilling headline, “Russia’s War Against Evangelicals”—that Russian occupiers have tortured, and sometimes murdered, evangelical pastors and lay believers. Among Baptist congregations alone, Time said, some 400 churches have fallen behind Russian lines of control in Ukraine. That figure has almost certainly grown as Russia, pushing for an optimal bargaining position before a peace deal, continues a monthslong streak of gaining ground in Ukraine.

Russia’s assertions, in a purported return to traditional Russian Orthodox values under President Vladimir Putin, include the idea that evangelical missionaries and locals are actually undercover agents of Western spy agencies. Another Kherson-based organization, the Tavrisky Christian Institute, which managed Bible translation projects and one of the most extensive Christian libraries in Eastern Europe, suffered antagonism from Russian troops in the war’s first year. Gun-wielding soldiers stormed the school’s campus and accused its leaders of being “American agents,” according to Voice of America. Russian forces later occupied the Tavrisky site, burning Bibles and other books. When they retreated from advancing Ukrainian forces, Russian troops shelled the school out of existence.

Christian aid groups have expressed concern for other territories near those Russia now holds, like the southern Ukrainian city of Odesa. Pastor families, like MTW partners George and Snizhana Kadyan, have served in Odesa for 25 years. Now the Kadyans have “bull’s-eyes on their backs” in the event of further Russian aggression, Eide said.

Russia’s persecution reaches beyond evangelicals and other Protestants to include churches and individuals not aligned with the Kremlin-friendly Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). Ukraine’s post-invasion break with the ROC, which is also called the Moscow Patriarchate, exacerbated long-festering tension between Kyiv and Moscow. Last year, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a prominent Washington think tank, gathered a panel of experts to discuss Russia’s strategy of religious persecution in Ukraine. Panel members noted that Russia targets nearly everyone outside the ROC. A continued Russian presence in Ukraine will only allow that trend to persist, the CSIS panel warned.

“Russian occupation—the Russian desire to undermine the Ukrainian state, a state that has guaranteed religious liberty—will diminish or negate the liberty of Muslims [eg. the Tatar minority of Crimea], of Jews, of Protestants, of Catholics and Orthodox,” said panelist Borys Gudziak, president of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. “It’s very important that people of faith internationally, and especially in the United States, understand this.”

The situation in long-occupied parts of Ukraine is particularly dire, according to CSIS. For example, the partially occupied Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, or regions, have endured Russian control since 2014. The zones make up the Donets Basin, often referred to as Donbass. In Luhansk, not a single Protestant house of worship remains active, CSIS said. In Donetsk, just a few are hanging on. Together, those oblasts, each about the size of Massachusetts, held a pre-2014 population of 6.6 million. Given wartime conditions, Donbass population levels—and numbers of surviving believers—remain difficult to estimate. Donbass evangelicals likely have fled, or must practice their faith in secret.

WHILE THEY AWAIT news of a peace deal, front-line Christians like Olena, are focusing on their faith.

“We hope in God, we pray for a just peace,” she said. Olena warned me her internet connection might cut out before finishing our text-message exchange. Russian shelling had started again, she said—a frequent occurrence in her part of Ukraine. Olena did not know when she might be able to get back online, or where Russian shells might fall this time.

But she was able to send out one last message: “We do everything we can. We support our defenders, our guys on the firing line. But we rely on the mercy of God.”