UKRAINE — Parishioners in Ukraine face persecution under Russian occupation, leaders of the Ukrainian Council of Churches told the Daily Caller in interviews last year.
Epiphanius, primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine, told the Caller how he barely managed to flee as Russian forces prepared to strike in 2022. (RELATED: Ukrainian Olympian Disqualified After Refusing To Remove Helmet Honoring Athletes Killed By Russia)
Epiphanius was working as an advocate for political prisoners in Crimea. He believed his position made him a target, and he wanted the prisoners’ cases charged outside Crimea. He made the difficult decision to flee with only a small case containing the files of the political prisoners he represented, Epiphanius told the Caller.
The church leaders emphasized the danger of getting information out of the occupied territories. Epiphanius said he does not even have direct contact with his 84-year-old mother, who remains in Crimea.
Epiphanius (R) head of Orthodox Ukraine church and Metropolitan of Kyiv attends a ritual to mark the Epiphany Day in Istanbul on January 6, 2026. (Photo by Ozan KOSE / AFP via Getty Images)
Local clergy “rarely communicate” with their churches because any information shared could be weaponized against them, the church leaders asserted.
A priest was sentenced to prison for over a decade for allegedly sharing a message outside the occupation, the leaders told the Caller. The safety of their followers is their “number one” priority, even before obtaining information.
One documentary, A Faith Under Siege: Russia’s Hidden War on Ukraine’s Christians, shares the stories of American Christian missionaries in Ukraine and Ukrainians affected by Russian persecution.
The documentary featured a Ukrainian Christian, Viktor, who volunteered to rescue Ukrainians from the area. He recounted being captured and while he was imprisoned, a Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) priest allegedly said he needed to cast out demons from Viktor because of his Evangelical Christian faith.
Viktor claimed he was subsequently beaten and tortured with electricity and baseball bats.
⚠️TORTURED BY RUSSIA FOR FOLLOWING CHRIST:
— AFaithUnderSiege (@FaithUnderSiege) August 29, 2025
In the second part of his testimony, Viktor, a Ukrainian follower of Christ who was captured by Russian forces in 2014 during Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion into the Eastern regions, describes the brutal torture he faced in… pic.twitter.com/uBmQXw2CbC
The post-Soviet Christian advocacy group Mission Eurasia found that at least 57 civilian religious leaders have been killed by Russian forces or strikes on civilian infrastructure before January.
“We have some idea what is going on in the occupied territories, and we keep a sort of prescription list where about 70 clerics [have been] killed by Russians,” Viktor Yelensky, head of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, told the Caller in August.
OCU priest Stepan Podolchuk was allegedly taken from his home barefoot with a bag placed over his head in February 2024, according to the Memorial Platform. Russian soldiers executed him after torturing him for two days, the report alleged.
Russian soldiers have tortured and killed a local priest, Stepan Podolchak, in the temporarily occupied territory of the Kherson region.
— UNITED24 Media (@United24media) February 16, 2024
This was reported by @suspilne_news, citing the Kalanchak Administration.
"They dragged Stepan out of the house barefoot and put a bag on his… pic.twitter.com/HiTdxCuelz
The Institute of Religious Freedom (IRF) reported that at least 630 Ukrainian religious buildings have been damaged or looted by Russian forces since December 2023.
During the most recent of these attacks, a Russian bomb struck a UOC cathedral in Donetsk on Oct. 11, damaging the facade, killing two civilians, and injuring several more, according to RBC Ukraine.
President of the Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary, Ivan Rusyn, said his family attended underground churches during the Soviet era.
He told the Caller his seminary in Kyiv was struck by six Russian missiles at the beginning of the war.
“We do have churches that belong to our denomination that are destroyed by the Russians. And for us, it is clear that it was a deliberate hit,” Rusyn said.
The seminary president claimed that he found his apartment in Bucha, Ukraine, ransacked by Russian soldiers. “Bibles and Christian literature [were] just thrown on a floor,” he told the Caller.
Rusyn claimed Evangelicals are targeted because Russia believes they are American spies.
This photograph shows the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary destroyed by air strike in the village of Novoekonomichne, Donetsk region, on July 30, 2024, amid the Russian invasion in Ukraine. (Photo by ANATOLII STEPANOV/AFP via Getty Images)
“It’s impossible to have public worship services in temporary private places …,” Rusyn said. “We still have underground churches there, a few pastors remain, but most of them were forced to leave.”
After Russian forces took over the territories, churches were obligated to register under Russian law. Registration was not allowed for non-Russian churches, according to the church leaders.
Churches that sought registration faced high barriers to entry, including the need to travel to Moscow five times throughout the process. Many locals instead opted to register under other sects “in order for them to continue living.” (RELATED: Democratic Candidate Sarah Garriott Complains Iowa Leaders Are Too White, Too Christian, Too Male)
On Jan. 25, the Sunday worship services of two Baptist churches were reportedly raided by weapon-brandishing military officers in Russian-occupied Ukraine, who accused churchgoers of meeting illegally for failing to register with the government, according to Forum 18.
“They said that if we don’t register, they’ll come to every service and stop it taking place,” the church’s pastor, Vladimir Rytikov, told Forum 18.
Russia has also targeted Crimea’s Muslim community, church leaders told the Caller.
One leader claimed local heads of the Islamic community were offered an ultimatum: register under the Russian Federation or be forced to register by Russia, placing all Muslims under Moscow’s control.
They chose the former option to “preserve the Muslim community,” according to the Ukrainian church leaders.
More than 100 Muslims were sentenced for being part of an “extremist movement” and were forced into mainland Russia, according to Yelensky. Russia stripped their access to the Quran, attempted to force-feed them pork and prohibited them from washing before prayer, Yelensky told the Caller.
Yelensky said Muslims, especially Crimean Tatars, are Russia’s “favorite victims.”
Epiphanius, primate of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and metropolitan of Kyiv and All Ukraine; Vitalii Kryvytskyi, bishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Ukraine; Oleksa Petriv, archpriest of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; and Oleksandr Zaiets, chairman of the Institute for Religious Freedom, spoke about their experiences and those of their parishioners in occupied Ukraine with the Daily Caller in Kyiv in August. (Photo by Derek VanBuskirk)
He also claimed children are targeted by the Kremlin. Ukrainian children are deported from the occupied territories to orphanages in the heart of Russia, where their identities are changed. Healthy children face heavy political and religious brainwashing while they are adopted into Russian families, according to the church leaders.
There have been around 20,000 reports of children being forcibly transferred or deported from Ukraine, according to Bring Kids Back.
Yelensky and the church leaders compared the hostilities of Russian soldiers to those of the Soviets and fascists.
“Russians are a natural enemy of religious freedom,” Yelensky asserted.
Rusyn told the Caller that many believe persecution is worse now than it was under the Soviet Union. The Soviets “at least pretended” there was an investigation and trial, he claimed. Some Ukrainians who lived through WWII told Rusyn that the “fascists were more gentle and kind than the Russians.”
“Nothing has changed,” Oleksa Petriv, an archpriest in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, told the Caller. He said the main goal of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party was atheism, and religion was treated as the opium of the masses.
Referring to a resolution adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Yelensky claimed the ROC is an “ideological continuation of Putin’s regime and collaborator which share the responsibility for a crime against humanity.”
It not only “inspired war against Ukraine, but takes part in this war directly,” he told the Caller.
A picture taken on February 8, 2012, shows Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin speaks with Orthodox Patriarch Kirill during Putin’s meeting with religious leaders in the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. The protests sweeping Russia have failed to shake the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, which regards him as the guarantor of the country’s stability. (Photo credit YANA LAPIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)
He said Patriarch Kirill of the ROC declared a holy war and “blessed not only war against Ukraine, but also arms, weapons of mass destruction.”
“He promised eternal life for those Russian occupiers who will be killed on the battle line,” Yelensky told the Caller.
Ukraine is not without its own accusations of limiting freedoms. Priests, parishioners and metropolises of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church told the Caller they have been the subject of unfair legal treatment at the hands of the Ukrainian government, which seeks to seize their churches.
Yelensky and the church leaders told the Caller those accusations are overstated, as the law in question is directed at any church with ties to Moscow, which they fear could spark anti-Ukraine radicalization. UOC leaders said that they are now operationally independent from Moscow, with the exception of canonical ties with the ROC, which they say do not affect church policy.
A Ukrainian man who lost his wife and children to artillery fire, Serhiy Perebyinis, spoke about the nation’s trials and faith at a National Prayer Breakfast in August. (RELATED: Iran, Russia And China Stage Show Of Force Near US Warships As Nuclear Talks Wrap)
Perebyinis acknowledged God could have saved his family and taken the country’s trials away, but left them to “bless further generations,” to “see what is in our heart,” and so that “the whole world will see who are the Christians of Ukraine.”
The U.S. has mediated rounds of negotiations between the two warring countries, with Zelenskyy telling reporters that they want the conflict over by June, according to Euractiv.
