By Gina Christian, OSV News
OSV News – Four years ago, Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest Father Oleksandr Bohomaz was serving at a parish in the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol, along with his pastor, Father Petro Krenitskyi.
Then Russian forces launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, continuing attacks initiated in 2014 – which up to that point alone had killed more than 14,000.
A week into the 2022 invasion, “repression began,” said Father Bohomaz, speaking in the recently released short documentary “No Priests Left.”
“Priests and pastors were arrested. They were interrogated. They were beaten. They were held in … torture chambers,” said Father Bohomaz, who was forcibly deported from Russian-occupied Melitopol in December 2022.
He added, “People come out of Russian captivity looking like they came out of Auschwitz, from a death camp. And actually many don’t make it out, because they do die there.”
In a June 2024 with the media outlet Ukrinform, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, father and head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, said that as a result of Russia’s war on Ukraine, “There is not a single Catholic priest in the occupied territories today – either Greek Catholic or Roman Catholic.”
That grim reality led to the naming of the documentary, part of the film project “A Faith Under Siege.”
The documentary initiative has resulted in several works examining Russia’s persecution of faith communities in occupied regions of Ukraine.
Spearheading the project are executive producers Colby Barrett, an entrepreneur and former U.S. Marine; Steven E. Moore, a former chief of staff in the U.S. House of Representatives and founder of the Ukraine Freedom Project, a nongovernmental organization bringing humanitarian aid to the front lines of Russia’s war in Ukraine; and Anna Shvetsova, a Ukrainian native and an expert on U.S. policy in that nation.
Appearing in the film along with Father Bohomaz and Father Krenitskyi are Metropolitan Borys A. Gudziak of the Archeparchy of Philadelphia, head of external relations for the global Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church; and Jesuit Father Andriy Zelinsky, deputy head of the Department of Military Chaplaincy for the UGCC.
Both Archbishop Gudziak and Father Zelinsky noted the long historical precedent for Russia’s persecution of Ukrainian Christians not affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church from Russia’s czarist era and into communism.
That repression – which has spanned “the 18th, 19th, 20th and now 21st centuries,” Archbishop Gudziak noted – included the 1946 liquidation of the UGCC by Soviet authorities, driving the Church underground until 1989, ahead of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Russia’s targeting of these Christians – as well as Jewish and Muslim communities – in Ukraine has become a salient feature of its war, which has been assessed as a genocide in two joint reports from the New Lines Institute and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights.
The strategy is part of Russia’s “weaponized” Orthodox Christianity, Moore – who has testified before the U.S. Helsinki Commission in Washington on the issue – told OSV News.
In March 2024, the Russian Orthodox Church declared Russia’s war on Ukraine a “holy war,” with Russia “protecting the world from the onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West that has fallen into Satanism.”
Patriarch Kirill, the Church’s head, told believers in a September 2022 sermon that Russian military personnel killed in Ukraine will have “all sins” washed away by their deaths.
“It’s the same way that the Islamic extremists have tried to create martyrs with religion,” Moore explained to OSV News. “That’s what Patriarch Kirill is doing. Catholics, Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals – these are all people that we’ve met that have been tortured or lost loved ones to the Russians.”
Moore said that “Kirill’s followers and Russian Orthodox soldiers have taken him (Kirill) seriously when he says that he’s declared a holy war.
“They have killed by some counts as many as 80 pastors and priests,” Moore added. “And they’ve shut down every Church in occupied Ukraine that is not controlled by the Kremlin.”
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, some 700 Churches and religious structures have been damaged or destroyed. Catholic Churches and properties have been seized and rededicated for the Russian Orthodox Church, described by UGCC leadership as a sacrilege.
Russian officials in the occupied Zaporizhzhia region formally “banned” the UGCC, the Knights of Columbus and Caritas.
Torture – including beatings, mutilation and burning – and execution are commonplace and systematic in Russian captivity.
Two UGCC Redemptorist priests, Father Ivan Levitsky and Father Bohdan Geleta, were abducted in late 2022 and subjected to torture while held in Russian custody for some 18 months prior to their Vatican-brokered release.
Archbishop Gudziak told OSV News that “global, particularly American, awareness, prayer and action are crucial” to prevent further atrocities.
He encouraged “all bishops and priests” to show “No Priests Left” to the faithful.
Everyone who does see the film “cannot but be mobilized to prayer and action,” he said.
Archbishop Gudziak said it was crucial for people of goodwill “to see what has happened, to realize the biblical nature of this war, and to do everything we can spiritually, socially, or politically to help the innocent victims.”
Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Follow her on X @GinaJesseReina.
NOTES: “No Priests Left” can be viewed HERE.
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