KYIV — For more than six months, Ukraine was waiting for the U.S. to commit to more financial support for its military. To convince the local establishment, to gain support from completely different groups of influence and ordinary voters, they resorted to active advocacy and lobbying.
Ukrainian government officials and Ukraine’s friends from other countries have built communication networks to make their case; later cultural figures, academics and other public figures got involved in the process.
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And yet for many years, there has been one line of advocacy that has produced consistent results, even if it is not very publicly visible: Ukrainian Protestant groups.
We decided to look into the nature of this phenomenon: why and how it is happening. Who are Ukrainian Protestants, and are they really that influential?
We turned to Pavlo Unguryan, the leader of the National Prayer Breakfast in Ukraine and coordinator of the Christian Platform of the Ukrainian-American Partnership, to help understand how Protestants in Ukraine have helped fortify the Kyiv-Washington alliance.
Unguryan is a former member of the Ukrainian Parliament; at the time of his first election in 2007, he was the head of the youth movement of the Baptists of Ukraine. He is a fourth-generation evangelical Christian. “My grandfather was a pastor of a Baptist church in the south of Odessa region,” he said.
20th Century in hiding
The history of Ukrainian Protestants goes back hundreds of years. The first evangelicals appeared on our lands at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. Back then, Ukrainian territory was part of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the ideas of the Reformation, especially popular among the nobility, were actively spread. The Ukrainian nobleman Stanisław Orikhowski, a well-known polemicist, was one of the favorite students of Martin Luther, the ideological inspirer of the Reformation.
Baptists actually appeared on our lands in the 19th century – in the south of Ukraine: Odessa, Kherson, then Elisavetgrad (Elisavetgrad is now Kropyvnytskyi), towards Tavria, Zaporizhzhia region.
Soviet authorities actively persecuted them. Evangelicals, just like representatives of the UGCC (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church), spent most of the 20th century in hiding. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, there was a rapid revival.
At the beginning of independence, there were 800 evangelical churches in Ukraine. Now there are thousands of Baptist churches alone. In total, there are about 8,000 Evangelical Protestant churches, with another 2,000 in the currently occupied territories.
Protestants, here and there
Protestants is a general name. What are they and what is the difference between them?
The main Protestant denominations of Ukraine (Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, Charismatic churches) share common theological foundations and have minor doctrinal differences, mainly in the form of liturgy and worship practice. Almost all profess autonomy, meaning that the community can self-organize and join the movement of its choice.
Is it the same in the U.S.?
Today, Protestantism is the most numerous denomination in the United States and covers 48.5% of the population. Of the 205 million Christians in the United States, Protestants make up 141 million.
How are our Protestants connected to them?
During the Soviet period, when evangelicals were persecuted, American believers supported them in every possible way. With the opening of the borders, they actively travelled with Christian missions, developing horizontal ties. International cooperation also developed. In fact, these are the same long-term horizontal ties based not on who holds what position, but on a common faith.
Faith-based U.S. aid
Faith-based diplomacy and American aid. How does it work?
There are three directions in faith-based diplomacy. First of all, all churches communicate with each other. Catholics with Catholics, Orthodox with Orthodox, various Protestant denominations in Ukraine – with their co-religionists in the United States. Everyone has done and is doing a great job.
The second is organized institutional groups. This is the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches, which has travelled many times, advocating for Ukraine on behalf of all faiths – Christian, and even those who profess Judaism or Muslim. This is also the Council of Protestant Churches, which has made more than one visit.
And the third is us, the movement of the Ukrainian-American Christian Partnership. Since we have experience of how management models work, we have begun to develop our communication platforms.
What happened in the last six months?
Several meetings of the President of Ukraine and his team with leaders of evangelical denominations in Ukraine and the United States. During intensive visits to Washington in November-December 2023, the head of the President’s Office and other representatives of the Ukrainian authorities began to actively draw the attention of partners to the religious aspects of the war waged by Russia.
Convincing the Americans
Over the past few months, there have been several closed meetings with Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson. Heads of Ukrainian Protestant churches met with him during Ukrainian Week in Washington in February 2024. Together with Ambassador Oksana Markarova, they managed to distribute a letter from the entire Protestant community of Ukraine to every American congressman and senator.
It is clear what important messages we need to convey to American society. First and foremost, it is what Russia is doing to Christians in the occupied territories: destroying churches, persecuting priests and pastors, kidnapping children, killing, threatening, forcing them to enter structures controlled by the occupation authorities.
On the frontline territories, they completely destroy churches, regardless of patriarchies, whether they are Protestant or Orthodox houses of worship. The figure reaches 700.
It is very important for Americans to hear these things because the First Amendment to the Constitution is freedom of religion. It is in the DNA of Americans to protect the free choice of their faith. And when we say that Russia is committing this crime, it falls into a context they understand and accept.
The second important narrative is that the axis of evil is uniting against our Western Christian civilization. Behind the fake narrative that Russia is such a conservative ‘defender’ of everything Christian, there is simply the ideology of the ‘Russian world’ that was recently announced at the so-called People’s Council. Their partnership and cooperation with Iran and North Korea confirms this. Iran hates Israel, while Americans see Israel as a holy place for Protestants. North Korea is a threat to the South Korea, which is very pro-Christian and strongly oriented towards the evangelical Protestant track. And when the average American connects the dots, a different picture of the world emerges, in which Ukraine is the eastern stronghold of Christians.
We also definitely talk about abducted children, raped women, psychological violence in those special camps where they break our children mentally in the best traditions of Nazism, the KGB, and the Gulag. Children and saving children is also extremely important.
Opponents in Congress
What is Iran’s role?
Iran’s attack on Israel had an impact. It mobilized many American politicians. The thesis of an axis of evil uniting against Western civilization was clearly illustrated. The same Iranian “shahed” drones flying into Israel are used to kill Ukrainians every night.
In particular, such a “shahed” destroyed a multi-story building in Odessa, killing the daughter of a Baptist pastor, Hanna Haydarzhi, and her four-month-old child. Her husband and older daughter survived. After the tragedy in Odessa, many citizens came to clear the rubble, including members of the Baptist community who knew that their brothers and sisters lived in the house. They gathered toys, children’s clothes, clothes and shoes that had been blown out of the house by the shock wave.
With all this and a photo of Hanna with her little son, I arrived at the Congress for President Joe Biden’s annual state of the union address. I just laid it all out – showed it to them. The reaction was very emotional. When Speaker Mike Johnson and his wife Kelly saw it, tears came to their eyes because they are good people, Christians. They have four children themselves.
There were 111 members of Congress from the Republican Party who voted against aid to Ukraine. Each had their own reasons. Ukrainian diplomats immediately analyzed the voting pattern and came to the conclusion that those who did not support the vote could be divided into three groups. The first is those who fear a negative reaction from their constituents. The second is Biden’s ardent opponents (on any issue). The third is ideological. According to those in diplomatic circles, it is possible and necessary to work with everyone, including on religious grounds.
