A lot can happen in nine months. A baby grows from a tiny fleck invisible to the naked eye into a full-size infant and is born. A school year begins and ends. Winter, spring, and summer pass by, giving way to fall. Crops are planted and a harvest is gathered in. And for one Ukrainian city, Kherson, this was the length of occupation by Russia in 2022. What difference did these nine months make for this city and its inhabitants, especially its Christian community?
Early in the morning of February 24, 2022, Russian tanks rolled over the Ukrainian border and the invasion began—and continues yet. News coverage has given attention to the relentless shelling and the brutality of Russian attacks that have specifically singled out civilian targets like hospitals, apartment buildings, and schools. But the media coverage has largely left out one category of Ukrainians and their experience in the war: Christians. In his book, Serving God Under Siege: How War Transformed a Ukrainian Community, first published in Ukrainian and Russian and now newly translated into English, one Ukrainian evangelical pastor and seminary president, Valentyn Syniy, is eager to share this often overlooked side of the story: “The book was conceived as an honest account of what it is like to be displaced during a war in the modern world, very often a world of lonely people. This is the view of an ordinary person, a displaced person, who was not a soldier but served as a pastor of a church and was the president of a seminary in the south of Ukraine.”
Several prominent Ukrainians have already written memoirs of their experience of the invasion. The Kyiv-based novelist Andrey Kurkov wrote Diary of an Invasion, documenting his steady realization from a few months before the war’s outbreak to the months after that Russia really did want to attack Ukraine and that it was not going to stop. The horrors of this war shattered his dreams for peace right away, and his writing turned from fiction to documenting atrocities, spelling them out for what they are—genocide. A fellow Kyivan, journalist Illia Ponomarenko, wrote a similarly hard-hitting diary of the first year of the war, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv. Last but not least, novelist and poet Victoria Amelina pivoted upon the war’s outbreak from writing children’s books to documenting war crimes—until she herself was killed in a missile attack on a pizzeria where she was having dinner with friends. Her striking book, Looking at Women, Looking at War, combines her own reflections with unflinching investigative journalism.
Syniy’s book is different. Unlike Kurkov or Ponomarenko or Amelina, he was not a writer or a journalist before the war—he was a very busy pastor and a seminary president. Tavriski Christian Institute (TCI) is located in Kherson, and 2022 was supposed to be a special year—its 25th anniversary. But early in the new year, instead of planning anniversary celebrations, Syniy and his colleagues wisely decided to formulate a detailed evacuation plan. By then, invasion seemed a matter not of if but when. Ponomarenko and Kurkov both document in their respective memoirs of the beginning of the invasion how an air of uncertainty hung over the few months leading up to February 24. During that time, Putin vehemently denied any plans of invasion, while aerial surveillance revealed Russian tanks inching ever closer to the Ukrainian border. Ordinary citizens and military personnel alike could track those movements—and did.
For Syniy, the planning process was heavy but necessary, all of it hanging on the question of what might happen if the Russians occupied Kherson and took the seminary campus. A quarter century’s worth of paper records was a priority to destroy or pack to take away—after all, in the wrong hands, information about pastors and missionaries could have put these individuals in harm’s way. Plans for evacuating individuals were also set, so every single member of the faculty and staff associated with TCI knew what they were supposed to do when the invasion began.
Through this process, as with every other development he describes in the book, Syniy interweaves theological and biblical reflections into his narrative. He considers, for instance, the worth of spending months on the evacuation plans instead of regular ministry work: “All the first apostles had one thing in common when it came to ministry: they waited for the Lord himself to guide them. But Paul made a plan and worked on implementing it. Thus, he remains in history as the most productive minister, and the key to his success is his strategy.”
The preparations turned out to be key. The morning of the invasion, many things still went wrong, and the sister of Syniy’s wife, located an hour away from Kherson, was not able to join them in the evacuation, because the Russians had occupied her village already. Still, the vast majority of those who had planned to evacuate were able to make it out of Kherson, driving to Ivano-Frankivsk, in the far west of Ukraine.
The ordeal of the evacuation, however, was only the beginning. Once arrived in a new city, in a new and unfamiliar part of Ukraine, Syniy and his church members collaborate with local churches in Ivano-Frankivsk to find housing, jobs for the transplants, and ways to serve their new church home. They also throw themselves into humanitarian aid efforts. They help those who want to leave Ukraine for good get across the border into Poland—the number of these refugees includes one of Syniy’s brothers and his wife’s sister. And then there are the exponentially more difficult efforts to bring food and life-saving medications to the parts of Ukraine that are occupied—and to get people who want to evacuate out of there.
Indeed, some of Syniy’s worst nightmares about Kherson came true. The Russians took the city, destroyed its airport on the first day of the invasion, and turned TCI’s campus into their local base of operations, looting anything and everything, and destroying the seminary’s library, the product of a quarter century of hard work. But Syniy doesn’t have time to worry about it—instead, even while a traumatized evacuee himself, he works along with other pastors and churches to help refugees, whether Christians or not. And while not a journalist, he keeps communicating with news outlets outside Ukraine: “I will never forget how touched I was by the sincere compassion and support of the journalists of Christian Standard. I also recall long conversations with Christianity Today: they could not believe that Russians invaded Ukraine and kept asking me the same question over and over again.”
The outsiders’ shock over the Russian invasion is understandable—Putin’s war seemed from the beginning so senseless, cruel, unnecessary. No wonder some around the world couldn’t believe it was happening. Less understandable is the shock of Russian Christians, who repeatedly denied the atrocities that the Russian military was perpetrating in Ukraine, even trying to argue that perhaps Putin had his reasons. Ultimately, after difficult conversations, Syniy and his Ukrainian colleagues end up breaking ties with Russian missionaries and pastors. War, he realizes, shows you who your true friends are. But there is much sorrow in such discoveries, when the ones who turn out not to be true friends are former partners in ministry and who had been dedicated first and foremost to advancing the gospel.
But there is little time for processing difficult feelings and sorrows—life goes on even in wartime. Syniy’s daughter and her fiancé decide to get married shortly after the evacuation instead of waiting until they have completed college. Besides such ordinary celebrations, there’s much work to be done. And if there is one point that Syniy wants everyone to take away from his book, it is this: “The Evangelical Church of Ukraine has always been quick to respond to the problems. Believers have never remained indifferent to the events happening in the country.”
And then, after seemingly interminable nine months, while on a brief trip to the U.S. to report to ministry partners and to visit his siblings, Syniy is shocked to hear the news in the middle of one night: Kherson has been liberated. And so, in the concluding chapters of the book, back in Ukraine, he makes the drive to check on the city he loves, where he had lived the first 46 years of his life, where his aged parents still live and his dad pastors a church, where the house in which he himself had raised his kids still stands, now quiet and abandoned, with the little lines on one wall where he had marked each year the height of his children as they grew.
There is no real closure by book’s end—nor can there be. When first published in the original languages, it documented only the first nine months of the war. Yet now, the time of its American publication, the third anniversary of the invasion’s onset is fast approaching. This timing gives perhaps a different sense to the war than its author intended originally. Losses of four years, as opposed to just nine months, weigh much heavier. Questions about how to continue, how to provide humanitarian aid, how to serve God under siege require different answers now than they did at first.
Jesus is the same, Syniy is convinced. God cares about Ukrainian Christians and wants them to continue as the hands and feet of Jesus, serving their country under siege. No war can change this mission. And yet, the undeniable truth is that war is a thief—of joy, of home, of ordinary lives lived safely together with those one loves. Hearing explosions from afar, Syniy reflects at the end of the book, “Somewhere out there, the war was robbing other people, just as it robbed me.”
