
‘Protect Ukraine, keep her in your care’
Andrew Kelly watched as a boy, no older than 12,…
In the northern Polish city of Sopot, a group of Ukrainian Christians joined their fellow refugees in the town square.
As the Ukrainian anthem played from a loudspeaker, a solitary blue and yellow flag was hoisted above the small crowd — many of them women and children. The attendees watched in silence, some filming with their cell phones. City leaders made brief speeches in support of their Ukrainian guests.
Ukrainians gather in Sopot, Poland, on their country’s Independence Day.
“It was a special gesture from a group that has worked very hard to take care of their neighbors,” said Brandon Price, an American who lived with his family in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, until this February. That’s when Russia, which annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, amassed tanks and artillery along its Ukrainian borders as it prepared to invade the Eastern European nation.
Now, six months after the war began, Price and his fellow believers gathered to recognize the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. Price, director of the Ukrainian Bible Institute, lives in Sopot, where the meeting place of a Church of Christ has served as a temporary home for as many as 50 refugees.
Among them are members of a Church of Christ in Mariupol, where he once served as a missionary. For 51 days, as many as 33 members took shelter in the church’s meeting place, just a few miles from the Azovstal steel plant where the three-month siege ended on May 20 as the city fell to the Russians.
Near Lviv, Ukraine, Alexander Rodichev takes a photo of the Christians who participated in Camp Amerikraine, an annual gathering of believers from the Eastern European nation and the U.S. This year church members from Alabama helped to organize camps for refugees in the Warsaw, Poland, area and in Lviv.
Across Europe and Ukraine, Christians took part in ceremonies marking the somber Independence Day.
“As we were walking down to the event with some of our friends, I overheard someone comment that they never really celebrated Independence Day before this year,” Price said, “and how it never really meant too much to them before.
“How much this year has changed everything.”
Following are links to stories in The Christian Chronicle’s ongoing coverage of the conflict in Ukraine and its impact on people of faith.
Dima Grischuk, left, and fellow drivers with the Let’s Love ministry prepare for a journey to eastern Ukraine to distribute aid and to ferry back the displaced.
In Chernivtsi, Adi Voicu of Romania and Dennis Zolotaryov of Ukraine load Ukrainian- and Russian-language Bibles from Eastern European Mission for transport to Romania. The Bibles will be given to Ukrainian refugees.
Yulian Parfenenko, 6, helps his mother, Alyona, with grocery shopping at the free resource center run by the Cluj-Napoca Church of Christ in Romania. The Parfenenko family fled Odessa, Ukraine, at the beginning of March.
As they get ready to watch a movie in the hotel, Ukrainian children make shadow puppets on a projected computer screen that reads “Pray for Ukraine!”
The Kościoł Chrystusowy w Warszawie (Warsaw Church of Christ) meets in a rented facility in the Polish capital. Most of its members are refugees from Ukraine.
Only a few images from the church members’ seven-week ordeal remain, including this picture of one of the countless times they took refuge in their building’s hallway. As an evacuation corridor opened, most of the members deleted photos and videos of the siege from their phones, fearing that Russian soldiers would confiscate them.
Viktoria Oshurko works as a translator in a Košice relief center. In the early days of the war, 2,000 Ukrainians per day came through the center. A native of western Ukraine, Oshuko came to Slovakia to study public administration at a university. “Mentally, it’s hard,” she said of the weight of the war.
A long line of Ukrainians walks toward the Polish border checkpoint, fleeing the war in their homeland.
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