Friends and partners in the West, you are probably tired of our Ukrainian testimonies. I know that, and I am sure some of you even find them toxic. But if you have been following our lives for the last four years, I would ask you to read this. And if you do not, nobody takes offense, since we all have our limits.
Let me clarify why I write at all. Some people asked me a while ago: Taras, why do you write about the war so often, what is the purpose, do you want to fuel hatred toward russians, are you not becoming toxic by speaking about it daily? My answer is that I am writing a testimony against the future use of peace as a weapon.
One. I am writing because I know we will be forgotten, and because we will be asked to forget as well. Not immediately, of course. First, when the war stops, whatever that will mean, there will be commemorations and conferences and lessons of history. And then the peacemakers will arrive, and I do not mean the peacebuilders who genuinely care about just peace and restorative justice, which are the foundations of any reconciliation, whether evangelicals like it or not. I mean those who will look for people on both sides ready to forgive on behalf of the rest, without asking the victims of an unprovoked war of terror, and who will tell us, the widows and the orphans and those who buried brothers and nephews and those whose family members are missing or in captivity, that our pain poisons the reconciliation process, and that they had better find people who will reconcile in our place.
Two. I am writing because my brother Andrii was a military medic, and russians killed him along with four other members of our family since 2022, and my nephew Oleksandr Khrapachenko was killed on the Maidan in 2014. Five relatives are on the front lines now. I write their names, the dates, the circumstances, because I know that in a few years someone will say that both sides suffered, that time heals, that we must move forward and behave as though nothing had happened to us. We will be, and many of us already are, inconvenient Ukrainians. It will be safer, the peacemakers will decide, to speak instead of us than to give us equal time and an equal stage, since we might say something that does not fit a Ukrainian case study at a round table. So I write down the names and the dates while waiting for a just peace and a restorative justice that may still come.
Three. I am writing because the Bible is a book of testimonies, of concrete stories and names and dates and places rather than of abstract truths. In the days of King Herod. In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Scripture insists on historicity because historicity is the only defense against those who want to turn your suffering into a metaphor, your Gethsemane into a symbol, your loss into a pedagogical moment, your grief into material for someone’s ministry of reconciliation and a motivational story about easy forgiveness.
The Book of Lamentations does not end in reconciliation. The psalms of rage have no happy ending. Job receives no answer to his why. And their words are recorded, their pain documented, their anger canonized, forgive me, evangelical peacemakers, which is to say included in the Word of God. Why? Because God knew that Job’s comforters would come, and they always do, accusing us, as has already happened to many Ukrainian Christians, of insufficient compassion for russians who suffer because of Ukrainian aggression. They explain your suffering, demand your silence, and offer a theological framework in which your wound can be repaired. The only defense is to write it down, to document, to testify, and to leave evidence of what happened and how and who did it.
Four. I am writing because alongside my job description I work as a volunteer with many people who live with the consequences of this terror, and I have been documenting their testimonies since 2014. And I see how even now, during the war, some evangelical leaders in the West, and I will not name them, though none are from our own circle of partners, speak about a ministry of reconciliation. How they call on us not to hate and not to escalate. How they propose biblical models of forgiveness and accuse us of radical nationalism simply because we want to worship God and teach theology in Ukrainian, among the people we are called to serve.
These comforters do not understand, or prefer not to, that forgiveness offered while the murder and the rape and the torture continue is not forgiveness. It is submission to a rapist by someone who refuses to stop him. It is a betrayal of the fallen, of defenders and civilians, of our colleagues and friends and church ministers and students and neighbors. It is theological violence against victims, peace used as a weapon, where the victim is instructed and the aggressor appeased. Biblical peace becomes possible only after the crime is acknowledged, the violence ceases, and justice is restored.
And what are they offering us? Let us find russian brothers and sisters in Christ who support the war, as you say, but are ready for dialogue. Fine. Let them first find the ones who will return Andrii. Roma. My four relatives and my nephew. The twenty thousand Ukrainian children abducted to russia. No? Then what dialogue are we talking about?
Five. I am writing because I know what comes next, since it already happened to us between 2014 and 2016, when Ukrainian Christians were largely silenced for the sake of russian feelings and the great russian culture, and for the sake of those russian evangelicals who supported our annihilation and called us a fake nation with a fake language even then.
I have read the literature and studied the patterns. After Rwanda. After Bosnia. After Northern Ireland. After every genocide and every ethnic cleansing, the international community arrives with its programs and grants and experts who have worked in conflict zones and are ready to instruct the victims. They will look for Ukrainians and russians ready for dialogue, and they will find them, because they always do: those who need the money more than the memory, those who want recognition in peacebuilding circles more than fidelity to the murdered, those who want to turn a biography into a success story of reconciliation, a motivational case study worth more than fifteen minutes. And the rest of us, hundreds of thousands of families not ready to move on, not ready to let go, not ready to betray our dead, will be called obstacles to peace. Inconvenient people. Toxic people. Our memory will be called toxic and our fidelity an inability to forgive.
Six. I am writing because the ministry of presence is the only honest ministry while violence continues day and night into a fourth consecutive year. Not advice. Not answers. Not biblical principles of reconciliation. Simply being here. Listening. Giving space for anger and tears and for the question of why, God, even in the presence of Job’s comforters.
Christ in Gethsemane did not preach about forgiveness. He cried out that the cup might pass from Him, and sweated blood in terror, and His prayer was human and desperate and honest rather than theologically correct. And the Father did not tell Him to calm down, that everything would be fine, that He should forgive His executioners in advance. The Father was silent. Present in silence. Allowing the cry.
Seven. I am writing because Andrii and four other members of our family no longer can. Their silence is not consent. Their death is not a metaphor for someone’s sermon about reconciliation. They are dead: concretely, irreversibly, unjustly. I write in their place and for them.
Eight. I am writing because I know which theological language will be used against us, since it was used from 2014 to 2016. They will quote Scripture: love your enemies, forgive seventy times seven, blessed are the peacemakers. They will not quote the other half. “Cursed is he who does the work of the Lord deceitfully, and cursed is he who keeps back his sword from blood” (Jeremiah 48:10, NKJV). “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10, NKJV). “Do I not hate them, O Lord, who hate You? And do I not loathe those who rise up against You? I hate them with perfect hatred” (Psalm 139:21–22, NKJV).
The Bible contains both halves, and the peacemakers will quote only one: the half that makes demands of victims, and never the half that makes demands of perpetrators, russian evangelicals included. That is why I write, to preserve the whole testimony, including the inconvenient parts, the parts that do not fit a reconciliation workshop.
Nine. I am writing because existential honesty requires admitting what we know and are not supposed to say aloud, whether for the sake of the peacemakers or the feelings of the russian evangelical majority: most of those who promote reconciliation have not lost what we have lost, have not buried what we have buried, have not waited months in silence imagining a brother freezing in a trench, alive or dead. They have never urinated into a bottle or used a plastic bag for a toilet in a basement, as people did in Mariupol, Borodianka, Bucha, Izium and so many other places.
They arrive with their theories and their best practices, and they speak in the passive voice: mistakes were made, cycles of violence, both communities traumatized, the situation happened, the Ukrainian crisis. You probably hear this more often than I do. But violence is not passive, since it has agents. Cain killed Abel; the text does not say that Abel died. It has perpetrators, those who gave the orders and those who pulled the triggers and those who voted for the leaders who started the war and those who go on legitimizing our annihilation. A reconciliation that does not name perpetrators is erasure rather than reconciliation, and it demands that victims carry the whole burden of peace while perpetrators carry none of it, because their feelings matter. That is why I refuse to be silent, and why our dead refuse.
Ten. I am writing because in a few years someone will sit in a comfortable office in Geneva or Brussels or Washington and say that the Ukrainians need to let go of their victimhood narrative, that they have become toxic. They will say it over coffee, in a warm office, while their children laugh safely on a playground and their parents and siblings are alive. And I want them to have to read these words first. I want them to meet the names of our fallen and missing and captive, and of the millions displaced. I want them to acknowledge that what they call a case study is my brother’s corpse. This is not rhetoric and not a metaphor and not trauma speaking. It is reality refusing to dissolve into theological abstraction.
Eleven. I am writing because every day I do not write feels like a small victory for those who want us to forget. Every blank page is an empty space where memory should be, and every day of silence is permission to say that it was not that bad, that people have moved on, that it is time to reconcile and stop being toxic. No. It was that bad. We have not moved on. It is not time, and we cannot forget. They will have to explain why peace, for the sake of Western and russian feelings, matters more than justice. Why dialogue matters more than truth. Why a career in peacebuilding matters more than our fidelity to the dead.
Twelve. And finally I am writing because this is what remains when everything else has been taken. Not hope, since hope is a luxury. Not faith, since faith is being tested to destruction. Not even meaning, since meaning dissolves somewhere between the last massive strike and the last funeral. What remains is witness, the simple stubborn probably futile act of saying: this happened, these people lived, these people were killed, this is wrong.
The evangelical world in peaceful places may not care, since it is easier to speak instead of us than to let us speak on equal terms, outside a fifteen-minute case study and outside the role of a victim. The peacemakers certainly will not care. But the dead deserve a witness, even if, and especially if, nobody wants to hear it and our longing for a just peace is called toxic.
So I write here and on my blog, daily or weekly. Not because I believe it will change anything, since I no longer believe that, but because silence would change everything for the worse, and I am not ready for that silence of betrayal. Perhaps I never will be. Or perhaps I will break too. So I write. We write. God writes in His book as well. We may break, and He will not.
Peace be with you. Our Mission has not changed. Keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine
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