Russia Is Bombing Churches. People Are Coming Back to Worship Anyway.

On April 16, during a prayer meeting at the House of the Gospel Church in Zaporizhzhia, Russia dropped a bomb on a congregation of 300 people. At least one person was killed – Ruslan Utyuzh, a minister – and at least eight others were injured. The Ukrainian Embassy called it “a deliberate attack on people of faith, those who gathered peacefully to pray.”

The bomb used was a KAB-1500L laser-guided precision weapon. This was not a stray strike.

Nine days later, on April 25, a Russian guided bomb destroyed most of the windows and significantly damaged the roof of the Transfiguration of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Sloviansk – a congregation the pastor’s family has served for decades, the same place where his two sons were kidnapped during a service, tortured, and killed in 2014. The congregation boarded up the windows and patched the roof with whatever materials they had. The next morning, 170 people came for Sunday worship.

This is who Russia is bombing.

Since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russian forces have damaged or destroyed at least 737 religious buildings – churches, mosques, synagogues. Of those, around 450 were Baptist churches. Baptists represent only 1–2% of Ukraine’s population, suggesting these are not random casualties of war.

In occupied territories, Russia has shut down any church not directly controlled by the Kremlin. Those permitted to remain must have leadership loyal to the regime, register every member with the government, and cannot hold services unless 30 Russian passport holders are present – presumably to ensure someone reports any dissent.

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers has introduced the “Countering Russia’s War on Faith Act,” which would require the State and Defense Departments to report on Russian violations of religious freedom and impose sanctions on those responsible. One sponsor stated plainly: “Russia targets and kills persons of faith as a matter of policy wherever it invades.”

Presiding over all of this is Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who has used theological language to justify the war and preached that Russian soldiers who die in it will have their sins washed away.

A church that blesses a war against worshippers is not a church. It is a weapon.

After the Zaporizhzhia bombing, the congregation held services as normal the following morning. Two hundred people came forward to be baptized.

Russia can destroy the building. It cannot destroy what meets inside it.

Sources: Christianity Today, Baptist Press, Christian Daily International