BEING HUMAN

[in English] #BeingHuman. Morning existential reflections and confession… My daughter Tetyana came from Washington, D.C., to visit our family in Ukraine, and brought our first grandson, Wesley to meet the local family members. 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. Wesley was looking at the portrait of Andriy, my younger brother and also his uncle, killed by Russians in July 2024… Although he is too small to understand what he was looking at…

I think that he will know his uncle Andrii only for as long as we, the family, keep telling him about him, and also only as much as we tell him. The same is true for Melisa, Olga’s daughter, who was born on the day when Andrii was fatally wounded, and for every child born into our family during or after this war of terror. That is the whole thing about memory: it survives only one way, by being handed over by those who remember, and it ends the moment a generation decides not to bother. Nobody has to destroy it; silence is enough…

And such silence is what so many of our former friends and colleagues in Russia would like from us (no, not totally all of them, but still so many).

“Do not mention it. Do not speak about that. 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; your emotions are not healed. You are flaming hatred by speaking of memory and justice.”

Should I say: “Sorry, Andrii, for the sake of the feelings of Russians, I have to stop remembering you, and hide all your photos and also never mention to Russians that you existed in my family and were killed by Russians…”

It gets very complicated indeed when the side that feels at peace with the unprovoked aggression since 2014, and especially after 2022, and with the murder of Ukrainians is the same side that interprets our memory as hatred and our search for justice and just peace as a refusal to reconcile… Yes, as I often say, memory is a gift of God… Especially when it asks me to confess my sins or fallacies…

We lived eleven years in the Donbas region, when I served at Donetsk Christian University. My daughter Tanya grew up there. My son Nazar was born there and grew up there. That was our home, our work, our neighbors, our students, our church, our city… In 2014, the city and a big part of the region were occupied by Russians, and the university with it (although we moved to Rivne a couple of years before 2014, as I joined Overseas Council in 2011 and the Eastern European Institute of Theology in 2008).

What I remember from 2014 to 2022 was not censorship. Nobody directly forbade us anything. People that we respected asked us, gently, by “soft hints, ”not to raise it just now, not at this specific meeting, not in this speech, not in front of this group, not today, not at this seminary… The annexation of Crimea was a “complicated question.” The occupation of Donbas was a “conflict,” and the word “occupation” was a hostile word for “brotherly love.” What happened to our students and faculty was “the events in the East of Ukraine.” Two nations were “brotherly peoples.” A seminary was “not a political platform,” because “we must be apolitical.” And every similar request to soften our language 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 Russia, our joint mission and seminary projects, but their feelings (not ours), and what they called “unity and peace of the brotherhood.” At the same time, we paid the price in blood, and every time we agreed, Russian “brotherhood” praised the agreement as our maturity… because it was not about them, as they were saying to us, but only about us, “stubborn Ukrainians…”

… Eight years of such carefulness led to February 2022, and not one of our partnerships (except for extremely few) that it was meant to preserve in Russia survived the first week, including the Euro-Asian Accrediting Association (voluntarily dissolved in May 2022). Ukrainians paid the price of silence and received nothing we had been promised: “brotherhood…” Because overnight we became, for them, people who need to be denazified and eliminated…

What we understand now is what the silence had been doing all that 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, not ours. It was not keeping the peace… Almost all our Ukrainian missional intentions for the sake of spreading the Kingdom of God in Russia were annihilated…

A people and a church that learn to describe their occupation in soft words are probably already halfway to accepting it. The words go first, then the mind, and then the territory follows… Something I beg “romantic peacemakers” (who still write me emails from time to time or publish articles in well-known evangelical journals with the call to Ukrainians to understand the Russians and their public complicity with the “Russian world”) to understand… By the way, I now call the Slavic Bible Commentary (a great, timely, and needed project indeed) 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, at least to remember that there was a “brotherhood” (it is a whole other issue, not for this post).

So, after 2022, we learned not to be silent, and we accept what our plainness cost. Some partners left; some criticized or accused us of breaking “the brotherhood,” and some conversations ended. But it is a smaller loss than the one we took by staying mostly silent, refusing the just peace, and participating only in pacification… Now we are confident that we also have a place at the Throne of God among other peoples and nations, not only Russians … and the crowds, described in the book of Revelation, gathered around the Throne of God, not around the Russian World or Russian nation as the “nest of the Kingdom of God and His traditional values…”

Russian Christians should learn that when others, whom they call “minor nations of great Russia,” want to have a church service, sermons, Bible study, evangelism in their own language – it is not breaking the unity of brotherhood, and it is not “nationalism”… but it is the missional mandate from the Throne of God for the Church… not to melt every “minor nation” into the Russian World, but to protect its identity, language, existence, worship from being melted just into Russian (or any other) imperialism, even if this temptation comes under the umbrella of “protecting traditional Christian and family values.”

Do I regret my mission work in Russia and that of my family members (like my brother, who served there for seven years, and about ten others altogether)? No, like so many other missionaries who dedicated their lives working in many other countries with oppressive, authoritarian, or totalitarian regimes. I do not regret it, because we and I did it for the sake of the Kingdom of God, first of all…

But Russia is still dry land and a desert for the Gospel, and I believe revival and awakening should start with the repentance of Christians in Russia first… as the Reformation started with the awakening of the church, first, not society…

Therefore… not one name will be forgotten in our family. We will do our best to remember and speak instead of, and on behalf of, all six already killed in our immediate and extended family: Sashko in 2014, shot by pro-Russian snipers, and when the first invasion happened… and five more – Andriy, Roman, Pavlo, Maksym, Ihor – since February 2022, when the full-scale war of terror started. Wesley, Melisa, and the others who will be born will grow up knowing all six, knowing where their family once lived and ministered (including Russia and the Donbas region), and why we still cannot go back “for a visit.”

A child who knows who paid for their freedom, and how much (“life for life,” as my fallen cousin Roman used to say), learns to understand what they have been given and what it cost. So that – “Never Again,” not – “We Can Repeat” (the slogan of Russian murderers about 1945 in Germany, and of 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 Russian war of terror)