BEING HUMAN

[in English] #BeingHuman. Morning existential reflection and confession… My daughter Tetyana came from Washington, D.C., to visit our family in Ukraine, and brought our first grandson, Wesley. This morning the two of them walked the Alley of Heroes in the center of our city, past so many hundreds of portraits of fallen defenders, all of them killed by ruzzians. Wesley was looking at the portrait of Andriy, my younger brother, killed in July 2024… He is too small to understand what he was looking at…

He will know his uncle Andriy only for as long as we, the family, keep telling him, and only as much as we tell him. The same holds for Melisa, Olga’s daughter, and for every child born into our family after this war. That is the whole thing about memory. It survives only one way, by being handed over, and it ends the moment a generation decides not to bother. Nobody has to destroy it. Silence is enough… And silence is what so many of our former friends and colleagues in ruzzia would like from us. Not totally all of them, but still the vast majority.

“Do not mention it. Do not speak about it. You may remember, but quietly in your thoughts, because otherwise our feelings might be offended. And if you do remember out loud, then you are not a peacemaker, you are not healed, you are even flaming hatred by speaking of memory and justice.” – “Sorry, Andriy, for the sake of the feelings of ruzzians, I have to stop remembering you, I have to hide all your photos and never mention that you existed in my family and were killed by ruzzians…”

It gets very complicated indeed when the side that is at peace with the aggression and the murder of Ukrainians is the same side that reads our memory as hatred and our search for justice as a refusal to reconcile… Yes, as I often say, memory is a gift of God. Especially when what it asks of me is a confession…

Our family knows the cost of the other choice… We lived eleven years in the Donbas, serving at Donetsk Christian University. Tanya grew up there. Nazar was born there and grew up there. That was our home, our work, our neighbors, our students, our church, our city… In 2014, it was all taken, and the university with it (although we moved a couple of years before 2014 as I joined to work with the Eastern European Institute of Theology).

What I remember from the years that followed is not censorship. Nobody directly forbade us anything. We were asked, gently, by “soft hints” and by people we liked, not to raise it just now, not at this meeting, not in this speech, not in front of this group, not today, not at Moscow Theological Seminary… Crimea was a “complicated question.” The Donbas was a “conflict.” Occupation was an unhelpful word for “brotherly love.” What happened to our students was “the events in the East of Ukraine.” Two nations were “brotherly peoples.” A seminary was “not a political platform.” And every request that we soften it came wrapped in “let us not lose each other,” “let us keep Russian-Ukrainian evangelical brotherhood in unity,” but with your, Ukrainians, silence, and mostly in the Russian language (surely, it is not an exaggeration)…

All for the sake of the partners in ruzzia, the joint mission and seminary projects, their feelings, and what was called “unity and peace of the brotherhood.” We paid the price by blood, but every time we agreed, the agreement was praised by ruzzian “brotherhood” as our maturity… because it was not about them, as they were saying to us, but only about us, “stubborn Ukrainians”…

Then came the accounting. Eight years of that carefulness produced February 2022, and not one of the partnerships it was meant to preserve survived the first week, including Euro-Asian Accrediting Association. Ukrainians paid the price of silence and received nothing we had been promised for it. No brotherhood… because overnight we became for them people that need to be denazified and eliminated…

What we understand now is what the silence had been doing the whole time. It was buying them time and teaching us to treat our own reality as an awkward topic, but for their sake and well-being. It was not keeping the peace… All our, Ukrainians, missional intentions for the sake of spreading the Kingdom of God in ruzzia were annihilated…

A people that learns to describe its occupation in soft words is already halfway to accepting it. The words go first. The territory follows… Something I beg “romantic peacemakers” – who still write me emails even up to date, or publish articles in well-know evangelical journals from time to time with the call to understand the ruzzians and their public complicity with the “ruzzian world” – to understand… By the way, now I call the Slavic Bible Commentary a monument on the grave of the “Russian-Ukrainian evangelical brotherhood”. And I do not regret being its project manager and helping to install that monument (it is the whole another issue, not for this post)…

Thus, we learned after 2022 not to be silent, and we accept what plainness costs. Some partners left. Some conversations ended. More accusations came from some. But it is a smaller loss than the one we took by staying quiet… We also have a place at the Throne of God among other peoples and nations, not only ruzzians… and the crowds, described in the book of Revelation, gathered around the Throne of God, not the feelings of ruzzians, or “ruzzian world”, or “ruzzian nation as the nest of the Kingdom of God and His traditional values”… Ruzzian Christians should learn that when other, what they call “minor nations of great ruzzia”, want to have a church service, sermons, Bible study, mission in their own language – it is not breaking the unity of brotherhood, it is not “nationalism”… it is the missional mandate from the Throne of God for the Church… not to melt every “minor nation” into the “ruzzian world”, but to protect its identity, language, existence from being melted just into ruzzian imperialism, under the umbrella of “protecting traditional Christian and family values” and now false-brotherhood…

Do I regret my and our mission work in ruzzia? No, like so many missionaries who dedicated their lives working in many other countries with oppressive, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes… I do not regret, because we and I did it for the sake of the Kingdom of God… But ruzzia is still the dry land and desert for the Gospel, and the revival and awakening should start with the repentance of the church in ruzzia first… like the Reformation started with the awakening of the church, not the society…

So… Not one name will be forgotten in our family. We remember and speak instead of, and on behalf of, all six killed in our immediate and extended family: Sashko in 2014, shot by pro-ruzzian snipers, and five more – Andriy, Roman, Pavlo, Maksym, Ihor – since February 2022. Wesley, Melisa, and the others will grow up knowing all six, knowing where their family once lived and ministered, and why we cannot go back “for a visit.” A child who knows what was paid for their freedom learns to understand what they have been given, and what it cost. So that – “Never Again,” not – “We Can Repeat” (the slogan of ruzzian murderers about 1945 and their war of terror against Ukraine)….

Thank you for your prayers. Keep your children away from war. Keep your memory, which is the gift of God… Please, keep praying for, keep supporting and keep donating to the defenders of Ukraine… Our Mission has not changed… Taras D, Ukraine (1626th day of the ongoing full-scale ruzzian war of terror)