KYIV, Ukraine — In a remote area of abandoned farms and dense pine forests, a little over a mile from the Belarus border, an eight-man artillery unit of the Ukrainian army had just finished a barbecue of fresh chicken grilled over a wood fire — a meal brought to them by two volunteers from St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church in East Hanover, New Jersey.

Cigarettes appeared. As the fire’s embers died out, the men, like men everywhere, poked at it to build up the flame. When one set down the poker, another picked it up to improve the last guy’s work, just as they had done while grilling — laughing and ribbing each other the way men do. 

These men had fought near Kharkiv, and R&R for them meant guarding the Belarussian border — the same one the Russian army had crashed just five months earlier — and they lived in abandoned farmhouses with scant electricity, just north of the radiation-contaminated Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. 

As the mesmerizing effect of the dying embers quieted them, I wondered if they were thinking about wives, children or parents left at home — or now off in Poland — or about friends killed in action. Or, with incredible discipline of mind, were they just enjoying this moment under a clear summer sky that had more glittering stars than black spaces in between?

I moved off to respect the loneliness of their thoughts and leaned against my rented Volkswagen Polo, which the men had emptied of supplies brought by me, the American, and a Ukrainian woman named Lena Dudchenko, who had a friend in the unit.

The soldier who spoke English followed me and offered a cigarette. I’d quit 25 years ago, but the pensive moment felt right.

He waved his hand across the sky from horizon to horizon.

“All up there, no life. Here, we have life — but here we try kill each other. Makes no sense. God must be disgusted with us. Again.”

The Ukrainian Diaspora Steps Up

There are two untold stories of this war, and both revolve around Christianity. The first is how the Ukrainian diaspora — through Catholic and Orthodox Ukrainian churches in the United States, Canada and Europe — has gathered tens of millions of dollars and tons of food, medicine and supplies to support Ukraine’s war victims and army. 

The New Jersey church I represented sent 25 shipping containers of goods, financed a dozen SUVs and two ambulances headed to the front, and shipped over a school bus retooled as a mobile operating room. One church, one town.

In every warehouse-sized collection and distribution center I’ve visited across the country, the most common letters on the sides of cardboard boxes are “St.”

“It just shows there are so many more good people in the world than bad ones,” said John Leshchuk, who, along with his wife, Roksolana Vaskul, has organized the effort of the Ukrainian American Cultural Center of New Jersey, where volunteers include refugees whose husbands are fighting back home.

While donations come in from all over the world, it’s a network of Ukrainian mom-and-pop foundations that handles distribution — sometimes at the risk of their lives.

Add to that the goods and funds raised by major Catholic and Orthodox organizations — including Catholic Relief Services, Caritas, the Knights of Columbus, the International Orthodox Christian Charities, and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA — and the war in Ukraine takes shape as a battle between the godly and godless, humanity and inhumanity, and at its core, good versus evil.

Christianity Under Fire

Russia has now banned Caritas and the Knights of Columbus from delivering humanitarian aid to areas of eastern Ukraine it occupies — which leads to the second untold story, at least in the mainstream media: that Christianity in Ukraine is under attack.

On Orthodox Palm Sunday — the date of which the Catholic and Orthodox Churches shared this year — Russian missiles killed 36 people in Sumy and injured scores of others. The attack came at midday, while the streets were filled with people celebrating their religious holiday.

As of March 15, Russian soldiers had killed 67 clergy members and detained or imprisoned others. Russian missiles, drones and artillery have destroyed nearly 700 churches — most in areas currently or previously occupied by Russia. Some of these churches are historic, built on land where their predecessors had stood for centuries before being looted and leveled by anti-church Soviets or destroyed during Germany’s march across Poland and Ukraine in World War II.

It is a historical fact that Josef Stalin killed as many Ukrainians as Hitler killed Jews — and with equal cruelty, through forced starvation, Gulag imprisonment and secret-police disappearances.

The barbarity of the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, horrified the world. Brutal murders by gunshot, torture, bludgeoning and incineration. Sadistic rapes that included mutilations. Children ripped from the arms of their parents and held as hostages.

Ukraine has endured the same — for more than three years now. 

The latest United Nations statistics say that about 13,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and nearly 30,000 injured, as Putin continues to order missile strikes across the country. Tellingly, only 16% of those casualties have been in territory controlled by Russia, while 84% have occurred in places far from the front. 

In the city of Lviv — just 35 miles from the Polish border and 775 miles away from the war-torn frontline city of Bakhmut — 33 civilians have been killed, including the three daughters and wife of Yaroslav Bazylevych, who had left their apartment to get water because he didn’t want his girls venturing out onto the street.

Creating civilian terror is just one of Putin’s tactics — along with destroying infrastructure to leave Ukrainians in the cold and dark during the country’s harsh winters, and relentlessly attacking hospitals and health care facilities, including medical centers for children and expectant mothers. 

I witnessed this on my first day in Poland, on my way to the refugee crisis at the border. Beneath my hotel window, I saw two young men and two young women begin to unload about 40 wheelchair-bound people — bundled in coats and blankets — from a bus, with help from a hotel maintenance man. I went down to assist and learned they had been evacuated from a specialized hospital in Chernihiv, after a column of Russian tanks fired on it, killing several residents and making the building uninhabitable.

“For no reason,” said the man in charge, a nurse who spoke English. “They knew we are a hospital. I saw them — heads sticking out of hatches. They laughed. For them, fun. Boom-ba-boom-ba-boom — and they laughed more. Vandals.”

Echoes of History

Two winters ago, I went with Vita Datsenko and Olena Andrushchenko — two women from the same network as Lena Dudchenko — to the Holodomor-Genocide Museum in Kyiv.

The centerpiece of the museum’s outdoor plaza is the 100-foot-tall Candle of Memory, adorned with crosses in the style of Ukrainian embroidery. Along the walkway to the monument stands Bitter Childhood Memory — a statue of an emaciated little girl, affectionately known as Oksana, clutching small strands of wheat.

Crowds gathered around the statue to lay flowers and light both electric and wax candles. On the hill of a man-made overlook, organizers had posted large white numerals — “1932” and “1933” — and Ukrainians climbed the steep incline to fill it with candles.

Inside the museum, Datsenko and Andrushchenko flipped through the pages of long ledgers, thick as phone books, tracing the alphabetical lists of names with their index fingers, looking for surnames in their own family lines who had starved to death under Josef Stalin’s collective farming policy. Ukrainians farmed, and Stalin collected — leaving people with so little to eat that some turned to cannibalizing the dead. About 5 million is the number of Ukrainian deaths scholars and historians have settled on, though some put it higher.

Stalin’s mass murder of Ukrainians — and his desire to erase their culture — neither began nor ended with the Holodomor.

The population of Ukraine declined from 40 million to 20 million during World War II. Stalin ordered millions onto boxcars, sending them to his expanding Gulag system, never to return. When the Nazis took Kyiv, the Red Army detonated radio-controlled explosives throughout the city’s downtown, killing thousands of innocent civilians.

Hundreds of thousands disappeared during NKVD secret-police roundups after World War II. Outside Kyiv lies the Bykivnia forest, where as many as 200,000 executed Ukrainians are buried.

Datsenko summed it up that night at the Holodomor Remembrance — shortly before air-raid sirens went off and explosions overhead, from Patriot inceptor missiles hitting Russia’s incoming assault, sent glowing red fragments down to earth like firework sparklers.

“It is simple math,” Datsenko said. “Every living Ukrainian today has a relative in the lineage of their immediate family who died at the hands of the Russians. This is why we all fight Putin.”

The Present and Future of Ukraine

Now comes this war. Putin’s atrocities are not in the rearview mirror of a distant past. The massacres at Bucha and Izyum happened within the first seven months of the war. Putin bombed maternity wards and children’s hospitals, schools, crowded shopping centers, and train stations crowded with people trying to escape the war. 

Russian missiles and drones and artillery reduced cities like Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar to skeletal remains of buildings, or piles of concrete and rebar. Putin threatened nuclear destruction, but delivered the same result with conventional weapons.

There is real fear among the volunteers I worked with that, should Russia overtake the country, Putin would hunt them as enemies of the state, label them treasonous collaborators, and send them to prison as a warning to others. There is precedent. 

Ksenia Karelina, who holds dual Russian and American citizenship, donated $51 to Razom for Ukraine — a political and humanitarian nonprofit — while living in Los Angeles. On a visit to Russia to see her family, Russian police arrested her, and the courts handed down a 12-year prison sentence. She was released in April in exchange for a man accused of smuggling U.S. microelectronics to Russian factories that produce weapons used in Ukraine.

As courageous as Ukraine’s soldiers have been, their civilian supporters are equally brave. The group I worked with maintains secrecy about their warehouse location — as do other nonprofit groups — out of fear that Russian missiles or drones would target them. But they remain active on Facebook and other social media, continuing to raise money, gather equipment and thank contributors.

“We do this to keep momentum,” Datsenko said. “We need to find strength among ourselves to fight these devils on earth — because only then will we finally have democracy and freedom.”