The puppet regime there functions in the capacity of the hands and mouth of the Kremlin. The occupied territories are a test site for Russian policies regarding the freedom of religion. The test results are sometimes implemented in Russia, usually in diluted form. Although the levels of violence in Russia and Donbas are different, the tendencies are synoptic. They look to create a religious monolith, without a hint of plurality. The Russian Orthodox Church and its loyalty to the political regime in the Kremlin are the cornerstones of this monolith. All other religious groups are excluded. In Russia, the instrument of exclusion is law, while in Donbas—Kalashnikovs.
I would like to tell three stories on how religious minorities are persecuted on the occupied territories of Ukraine.
The first story is about the Christian University in Donetsk—the administrative center of Donbas. The university was established by evangelical churches, in cooperation with the Denver Theological Seminary in Colorado. At the same time, it was truly ecumenical. It featured one of the best theological libraries in Ukraine. When Russian troops occupied Donetsk in summer 2014, they forcefully closed the university. According to available reports, soldiers burned books from the university library, deeming them “heretical.” However, in fact, many of the books were Orthodox. This means that the Russian soldiers, although they pretended to protect the Orthodox Church, weren't able to recognize this church's teachings.
The second story is not about an institution, but about a person. His name was Vladimir Vrona. He was a simple worker at a car plant in Stakhanov. He belonged to the Roman Catholic minority—a group much smaller than the Orthodox or Ukrainian Greek Catholic communities. He was an open-minded person with Orthodox friends. When the Revolution of Dignity (or Euromaidan) happened in Ukraine in winter 2013 and 2014, Vladimir supported it. He wanted Ukraine to be a country free from corruption and injustice. He shared his hopes for a better future with friends and through social media. When the Russian Spring counter-attacked Ukraine in the aftermath of the Euromaidan, and Russian troops annexed Crimea and later invaded eastern Ukraine, Vladimir was marked as an enemy by the Russian-established security services in the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic.
In summer 2014, these services came after Vladimir and arrested him. He was falsely accused of being a member of the nationalist group Right Sector. People who knew Vladimir assured me that he was not a member of any political group. His only membership was with his Catholic parish. Similar false accusations led many in the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics” to prisons, torture rooms, and graves. Vladimir, it seems, walked the full distance of this via dolorosa. Today he is reported missing, and his friends mourn him and pray for his soul. Soon after Vladimir disappeared in the torture rooms of Luhansk, his Catholic community was dissolved. It became dangerous to be a Catholic in the occupied territories.
It is also dangerous to be Orthodox, if one does not also believe in the “Russian world.” This third story happened more recently, in summer 2017. Svetlana Surzhenko is an Orthodox Christian in Luhansk. One day she walked back from Ukrainian-controlled territory to her home in the Russian-occupied zone. She brought with her some humanitarian aid provided by Protestant organizations. At the check-point she was routinely interrogated by the separatist militia. She is almost deaf and cannot hear without a hearing aid. On that day, the battery in her aid went flat, and she could hardly understand what she was asked at the checkpoint. This made the separatist militia suspicious. They began checking her mobile phone. Another problem for Svetlana on that day was that she took with her not a “clean” phone, which she normally used when she walked in streets or crossed checkpoints, but her private phone. It contained her pro-Ukrainian Facebook posts. These were enough for her to be arrested by the pro-Russian separatists.
Svetlana would probably have disappeared like Vladimir and many other Ukrainian patriots. But she was lucky. Her case was widely publicized and reported to the group negotiating hostages. The separatists kept her for a while, until the traces of torture disappeared from her body, and finally released her alive. The story of Svetlana tells what sort of religion is permitted in Donbas and growing in Russia. This religion requires that its followers believe simultaneously in Orthodoxy and the “Russian world.”
These stories also exhibit an important feature of Russian propaganda. This propaganda accuses others of what Russia does itself. This extrapolation of its own guilt to others applies to religious persecution in particular. Thus, the propaganda accuses Ukrainians of what Russians do at home and in occupied Ukraine. If one wants to understand the state of religious freedom in Russia, one has to listen to what Russian propaganda tells about others.
