#BeingHuman. A late sleepless night, and theological reflections on historical amnesia. “And pray that your flight may not be in winter” (Mark 13:18, NKJV).
Russia commemorates the siege of Leningrad, from September 1941 to January 1944, as sacred trauma: 872 days during which Nazi forces encircled the city, cut off electricity and water and food, and starved more than a million civilians to death. Every 27 January, and it falls in a week from now, officials lay wreaths, schoolchildren recite poems about the nine hundred days, and state media broadcasts documentaries condemning fascist brutality against a defenseless population. The lesson drilled into every russian is that deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in order to freeze and starve people is the ultimate war crime.
And since October 2022 russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s electrical grid, heating systems, water infrastructure, hospitals including maternity wards, schools and churches, through wave after wave of missile and kamikaze drone strikes. Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Odesa and Lviv have endured rolling blackouts through sub-zero winters, along with hundreds of smaller cities and towns and villages. Engineers and emergency crews work around the clock to repair damaged substations, only to watch them destroyed again days or weeks later. Hospitals run on generators. Families huddle in one room for warmth, or in subway stations.
Russian officials express theatrical horror at historical sieges while their forces replicate those tactics in real time. This is deliberate moral inversion rather than cognitive dissonance, and it comes packaged, in their own words rather than ours, as Christian. The call by prominent russian evangelical leaders to stop the persecution of Christians in Ukraine, alongside their inability, or rather their choice, not to recognize genocide and the destruction of an energy system, testifies to exactly that.
By monopolizing victimhood, by insisting that only they truly suffered, russia claims moral exemption from the very rules it invokes against Ukrainians. Leningrad became a license rather than a warning, a template rather than a tragedy to be prevented. The siege killed through calculated deprivation: cut the supply lines, destroy the infrastructure, and let winter finish the work. Today’s drones and missiles achieve the same end more efficiently.
The only real difference is documentation. In 1941 the world learned of Leningrad’s suffering through delayed reports and the testimony of survivors. Today Ukrainian cities live-stream the blackouts, the frozen apartments, the children doing homework by flashlight, the seminary students studying practical theology in winter coats, the pastors serving the wounded, as we record in our own war diary.
We suffered worse, therefore we will inflict worse, because it works. Trauma turned into a weapon. The suffering was real, and the lessons drawn from it are conveniently shaped, since they remember the dying and forget the principle. Every Ukrainian child, every disabled and elderly and sick person shivering in the dark this winter, at home or in a hospital, is living the lesson Leningrad was supposed to teach. The question is whether the world, watching in real time what previous generations documented only in photographs, will prove equally selective in its memory.
So what? I pray for russian memory to be healed, and healing requires truth, which is what gets forgotten or deliberately ignored, evangelicals included. There is no reconciliation built on denial, though denial is mostly what we are called to, and no peace constructed on the propaganda of a russian Christian civilization. Forgiveness that skips over justice is not grace, human or divine, but chosen amnesia in spiritual packaging. Only by accepting what was done, naming it honestly and pursuing a just peace can russian memory become something other than a weapon: stop the war, pay reparations, ask for forgiveness. I am praying, and I am not naive enough to believe it will happen with russian pastors and seminary leaders in my lifetime. And still I pray.
I pray as much for the memory of Ukraine, that it does not curdle into revenge because we suffered. And I pray that we do not grow tired of telling the truth and calling the world and the global church toward a just peace, out of moral clarity rather than weakness, since that clarity belongs to the Gospel itself. I pray that our bleeding wounds teach us vigilance rather than hatred, painful as that is.
The Gospel addresses more than the vertical relationship between God and an individual soul, since it speaks to the horizontal as well, person to person and nation to nation. Truth-telling is not optional in biblical faith, because it is the ground on which any lasting peace, any divine shalom, has to stand.
Many russian pastors have quoted Matthew 7:1 to me: “Judge not, that you be not judged” (NKJV). Yet they judge Nazi crimes against Leningrad without hesitation, as they should if they take that verse seriously. Christ’s command was never meant to silence moral discernment, since it forbids hypocrisy rather than clarity. To condemn the siege of Leningrad while blessing the destruction of Mariupol and Kherson and Kyiv is selective blindness dressed up in Scripture rather than obedience to Jesus.
“These are the things you shall do: Speak each man the truth to his neighbor; give judgment in your gates for truth, justice, and peace” (Zechariah 8:16, NKJV). And again: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Exodus 20:16, NKJV).
Never again was meant to be a Christian practice rather than a slogan about traditional values, a practice of remembering what is true rather than what is convenient, in every dimension and for all people, until memory itself becomes a form of justice, without which no lasting peace is possible.
“And pray that your flight may not be in winter.” Jesus was warning about the coming destruction of Jerusalem, and He understood that fleeing in winter compounds the suffering with cold and exposure and death on the road, so He told His followers to pray against it. Russia times its heaviest strikes on civilian energy infrastructure for the coldest months, and this is a strategy rather than a coincidence, designed to maximize precisely what Jesus asked His disciples to be spared.
Taras D., Ukraine
1428th day of the ongoing full-scale russian war, and of the institutional silence of russian evangelicals
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