BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. Dear friends, greetings from Lviv. Roman, Oleksandr, and I are deep in the work now, going through the chapters with the authors. It is humbling to edit a book on pastoral ministry during war, while the war is still being fought around the very people writing it. Some of our authors serve in the Ukrainian army; a few are writing from the front line itself, sending paragraphs between “duties,” in the gaps that combat leaves… We keep that in front of us whenever we are tempted to treat any of this as merely “academic.” It is not. For us, the desk and the trench turned out to be closer than anyone would have wished… 

One of the authors is writing the chapter on pastoral care for the families of the missing and those held in Russian captivity. As the chaplain, he has already performed over 700 funerals of the fallen (murdered by Russians). As of 23 February 2026, the Unified Register of Persons Missing under Special Circumstances holds records on roughly 92,000 people – the most recent verified figure from Artur Dobroserdov, the commissioner for persons gone missing. The register counts children among them: 2,740 of those being searched for were minors when they disappeared. It also holds data on more than 3,200 unidentified bodies…

What unsettles me is not only the figure’s size but also its motion. On 3 February 2025, the register listed 62,948 people; by 2 May 2025 it had passed 70,000; a year on, it has grown by nearly a third…

Since February 2025, on average, at least 70 (!) people have been declared missing each day (!). Seventy families a day cross into a particular kind of waiting with no natural end… 

And alongside the missing are the captive. As of May 2026, around 7,000 Ukrainian servicemen are held in Russian captivity – a figure President Zelensky gave in February 2026, and Deputy Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Olena Kondratiuk confirmed in May. Russia is also holding some 20,000 Ukrainian adult civilians, in addition to over 19,000 kidnapped children… 

Working through this with the author, we kept returning to a distinction that runs through much of our project… There is a difference between grief and what these families endure. The bereaved bury someone and, however slowly, begin to mourn; grief at least has an object and a place to start. The families of the missing have neither, because they do not know whether there is anyone to bury. Their grief cannot begin, and it cannot end, so it simply continues. Any pastor who has sat with such a family knows that the usual consolations do not merely fail here – they wound. 

“He is in a better place” (what so many evangelicals like…) is unsayable to a mother who does not know whether her son is in a grave, a prison cell, or on his way home. The families of the captive carry a kindred weight: their person is most likely alive, but beyond reach, beyond protection, beyond any timeline they can hold to. The author is right to insist that this is its own pastoral category and not a subset of bereavement, and that our inherited scripts, written as so much of our pastoral tradition was for peacetime (or proposed now from peace-dominating contexts), simply do not reach it… 

I write this down because of where it leaves the church. Behind every figure in that register is a household, and a growing number of those households are sitting in our pews or have stopped coming, because no one knew what to say to them… As the full-scale Russian war of terror grinds on, our congregations are not only losing members to the front, to emigration, to the grave… They are also filling, week by week, with people who are neither widowed nor reunited, who live in the long grey middle of not-knowing. Such families are not reached by programs or formulas. 

They are reached, if at all, by a community patient enough to wait alongside them without hurrying them toward a resolution that may never come (regardless of possible “forced” faith-based counseling)… one able to hold lament and hope together without letting either swallow the other… That is precisely the ministry of Holy Saturday, the work of a church in Ukraine that still lives between cross and resurrection, although we are so often pushed to Sunday and Monday… 

If this book does one thing, I hope it helps our pastors and our churches (and pastors in global evangelicalism, should they be interested in reading it) keep that vigil well: to be, for the families of the missing and the captive, a place where someone stays. We stay, and usually we do not write about the cost… Keep your children away from war.. Taras D, Ukraine