BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. “Love your enemies”? [Part 1] … No verse of Scripture is quoted to Ukrainian Christians more often by well-meaning believers abroad and by Russian-speaking Slavic communities than the command of Jesus: “But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44, NKJV). It arrives in our inboxes and messaging apps, in comments and in conversations, as if it were obviously an argument for laying down the weapons we defend ourselves with, for muting our grief so as not to hurt the feelings of russian Christians, for granting our attacker the moral standing of a fellow seeker of peace while we are asked to hand our people over to occupation, and for treating an invasion as a quarrel between two reasonable parties, as though Abel and Cain shared equal guilt for their so-called conflict.

But the command assumes a symmetry that this war has broken. If we are someone’s enemy, then somewhere there is a “brother” (and russians often call Ukrainians a brotherly people) for whom we are the one to be loved or hated. So I want to ask the question almost nobody asks: who is preaching Matthew 5:44 to russian Christians? Who stands in a Moscow pulpit and tells a russian evangelical that he is commanded to love the Ukrainian his army is torturing and killing?

The answer is the unbearable part, because their own institutions speak about the opposite. Every year the Russian Baptist Union sends a public letter to Putin, wishing him health and praising what it calls his wisdom and efforts for peace, as it did long before 2022 and even before 2014. A Pentecostal chief bishop declares that he and his church have nothing to repent of. They publish all of this on their official websites and Telegram channels for anyone to check. And many who do not bless the killing aloud have chosen the silence of betrayal instead (which is never neutral), because in the presence of a victim, silence always stands beside the rapist or the one holding the knife. So the command to love the enemy is enforced by them in one direction only: downhill, onto the wounded, and almost never uphill, onto the one who made the wound and keeps it open, or is silent about it.

This is the real polarization. And it differs from what the world imagines it to be. The issue is not that two Christian peoples disagree about politics; it is that a single word, love, has split into two languages that no longer translate into each other. On our side, loving the enemy is pressed to mean: stop naming the wound and the Russian atrocities; forgive Russians before any repentance is offered; stop asking the Russians about their support of Putin and the war for the sake of peace; restore the Russian-Ukrainian evangelical brotherhood with a photo on a stage and a romantic story of reconciliation; and call the result peace. On their side, love is performed as blessing and supplying the occupiers (they often receive the awards from Putin for that) who suffer and die in Ukraine, and as praying for the president’s long life. The same Scripture and the same vocabulary are bent toward two opposite acts under one holy word, and that is the fracture; no reconciliation laid over it will hold.

And yet we do not forget the few on their side who refuse the script: the russian believers who call this a war of terror and repent where their leaders will not, and who pay for their honesty with their freedom, often with exile. They are a small minority, and we know what their courage costs them, because even from here we know their names. We hold them in our prayers and ask God to strengthen and protect them in a place where telling the truth is dangerous. They are the ones keeping the word love honest in the russian language, and so, even now, they give us reason to hope that this fracture will not have the final word.

All of that is the diagnosis… I want to state precisely the harder claim, and I make it from living and serving inside a country invaded in 2014 and at full-scale war since 2022: the sentimental reading is more than unfair to us… because it misreads the command itself… What Jesus actually said is harder and costlier than the romantic version of false peace, forgiveness and reconciliation pressed on us.

The deepest assault of this war falls not only on the bodies of our defenders and civilians but on the soul’s capacity to keep seeing. The ideology that justifies this invasion, the so-called “Russian World,” is at its root a denial that Ukrainians are a real people, and in the end that they are human beings at all. It is a nationalism both imperial and ethnic that baptizes our erasure, exactly the kind of theology that sound Christian bodies around the world have rightly called contrary to the Gospel, the Gospel of the same Jesus who commanded us to love our enemies.

But the ideology that dehumanizes us also tempts us, its direct targets, to answer in kind. Russia made itself our enemy by its own choice, and the first casualty it seeks in us is our ability to look at a Russian soldier in a trench and still confess that he is a human being.

I do not write this from above that temptation but from inside it… Six members of our family have been killed (one in 2014 and five since 2022), among them my brother Andrii in July 2024, and seven more are at the front now, defending our land and our people with their bodies. I name this because it is a matter of what we remember, and our memory is part of a just peace (under the pressure of Russian Christians and Romantic peacemakers to forget to forgive).

So when I say we have to keep the Russian human, I am not reciting a principle… I am resisting, every day, the pull in my own heart to do the opposite, and I will tell you why… It would be easier to call them a swarm, a horde, a faceless evil, orcs, and all the other names, because a swarm or an orc cannot be held guilty and has no name to answer to at the judgment. But that easier path is exactly the one that lets the murderer off, because only a human being can be a murderer. Only a person made in the image of God and accountable to Him can be charged with the terror he commits, which an animal or an abstract enemy never can. To insist that the man who killed my brother is a human being does not mean to ignore or cancel what he did to my brother, parents, and our family… it is the only way to name it a crime of a human being and hold him responsible… rather than call it a mistake and dissolve his guilt in a euphemism. In part, I keep him human so that he cannot escape what he must answer for.

And this is what the command of Jesus actually requires. It does not ask us to pretend he is not our enemy, or to stop resisting his violence, rape, looting, destruction, killing by every legitimate means, including force. It asks us to refuse to let him cancel, in our own eyes, the dignity that belongs to him as a creature of God, a dignity his own actions cannot revoke, a dignity that includes responsibility… This is the love Bonhoeffer practiced when he conspired against a regime whose leaders he also prayed for.

I also observe a strange habit in where the command is aimed. When a Ukrainian speaks, the verse arrives almost at once, often as the first word offered to someone in grief, but… almost never as the first word offered to the Russian who caused or supported that grief either by their acts or silence. Parts of the global Christian conscience still reach for “love your enemies” before they reach for the victim standing in front of them, as though the widow or the child at a fresh grave were a case of insufficient forgiveness rather than a person to weep with… The order is backward: before anyone instructs a bereaved mother on loving the man who killed her son, someone should sit with her, let her weep, and call what was done to her child by its name, murder.

Scripture does command us to love our enemies, and we try to carry that command… You may not believe it, but… it was never meant as a tool for hurrying and pressing the wounded past their wound… and when it is used to silence the victims of this Russian war of terror rather than to convict those waging it, it stops being the word of Christ and becomes a manipulative “pastoral” instrument against the very people Christ stands beside.

Everything here turns on a distinction the global Church still often overlooks: to affirm an enemy’s dignity is not to affirm any moral equivalence between him and his victim. The image of God in a man is ontological, a fact about his being, while the justice of his cause is an entirely separate matter, a fact about his actions. Otherwise, why would you call the police if you were robbed or raped? To be consistent with that reading of love for the enemy, you would have to surrender and refuse any court. A Russian conscript and a Ukrainian defender are equal in dignity, but… completely unequal in the moral standing of what they are doing… and this has nothing to do with who is holier… When believers merge these two truths into one, reasoning that since all are sinners, all sides suffer alike and must be treated alike (claiming only a sin to be guilty, but not a human being that commits that terrible sin), they have not risen above what they still call “the conflict.” With such an attitude, they abandon the victim and call it peacemaking: they abandon Abel and call it peacemaking, because Cain’s feelings matter more to them… Dignity without equivalence is the narrow path, but… the only honest one…

Loving the enemy does not mean silencing lament either… The Psalms that God’s people have prayed for some three thousand years are full of grief that names its cause and anger that asks God for justice. We do not view ourselves as more spiritual than David when we suppress our cry, but only less honest… A peace that requires the bereaved to skip their lament and go straight to forgiveness is not the peace of Christ but a second violence dressed in the fake language of peacemaking. The freedom to lament, to be angry at evil, to ask God how long He will allow this, and to grieve on no one’s schedule but our own is part of what keeps us human while we resist.

We are slow to say the next thing plainly (which many of you may not like), but I will: stopping the aggressor is itself a form of loving him. When God confronted Cain, He set limits on him, leading him out from the land where he killed his brother and marking him (a mark that was visible to everyone he met) so that the killing would not keep multiplying (Genesis 4:10–15)… There is a love that consoles and a love that intervenes… putting its body between the raised hand and the one cowering beneath it and refusing to let a man complete the evil he has begun. To stand unarmed and watch a brother being murdered (when you can do at least something) is not spirituality and peacemaking but the abandonment of two people at once: the one being killed and the one being allowed to become a killer. Sin is not only suffered by its victim; it first deforms the one who commits it, hollowing out the image of God in him blow by blow, and to stop his hand is to refuse him the final ruin of his own soul.

So when Ukrainian Christians defend their families and their land against rape and looting, murder and torture, and stop the occupier at the cost of everything, they are not suspending the command to love the enemy; they are living one of its hardest forms. We love the wounded by sheltering them. And we love the aggressor, strange as that sounds at the edge of my brother’s grave, by denying him the unhindered freedom to go on destroying his victims and, in the end, his own soul. Love that will not protect your neighbor from rape and murder is no love at all, only a wish to keep your own hands clean while another’s blood soaks the grass nearby.

What, then, do Ukrainian Christians at war have to offer the worldwide body of Christ on the question of peace? We have no model of serene detachment to give yet (we are working on it, although). What we can still offer is a discipline: the daily, difficult refusal to dehumanize anyone, including the one who is killing us, held together with an equally firm refusal to call his injustice justice or to mistake his attempt to erase us for a disagreement between equals. We hold to the first for our own sake and for the just peace Ukrainians long for. To remain human under these conditions is itself a confession of faith, and in our context it is what it means to be a peacemaker who has not first become a liar.

This, I think, is what genuine Christian witness must mean with regard to Russian aggression against Ukraine: not neutrality between the wronged and the wrongdoer, which is itself a religious-political act on the side of the strong, but refusing to let war strip the image of God from any face, our enemy’s or our own. Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war. Taras D., Ukraine