With Open Doors persecution analyst Rolf Zeegers
Ukraine doesn’t feature on the World Watch List, but Russia has in the past. In 2022, it landed outside the top 50 countries, but it still classified as a place where Christians experience high levels of persecution. For the church in Ukraine, this is reason for concern – and they need look no further than Crimea. This region in southeast Ukraine, taken under Russian control in 2014, saw at least 10 Protestant Christians receive fines for exercising their faith last year.
After a decrease in prosecutions during the first year of the pandemic, Protestant and other minority faith groups experienced an increase in pressure last year, said Oslo-based news service Forum18.
The news site documented 23 administrative prosecutions under the Yarovaya laws, also known as an “anti-missionary law”, imposed by Russia after it first occupied Crimea.
Four cases involved members of the House of the Potter Protestant Church in Sevastopol, a city on the Black Sea coast. The pastor, Evgenii Kornev, and a church member were fined for leading church services and another church member was fined twice for actively participating in the services. Charges were partly based on evidence gathered from the church’s social media channels.
It’s not the first time the church clashed with authorities. Over the years some of its members and the pastor have been charged under the law that criminalises “Russians conducting missionary activity” for speaking with people, distributing leaflets and singing at a bus stop.
In February Russia’s security service raided a small Protestant church in Kerch, a town in eastern Crimea, allegedly to make sure the community was operating in compliance with Russia’s Religion Law. In the end one church member was accused of, and fined for, handing out leaflets to two women who were not members of the church.
The situation in Crimea in addition to what is happening in the eastern Donbas region and the rest of Ukraine, said Rolf Zeegers, Open Doors’ World Watch Research analyst. Protestant churches in Donbas have been under increasing pressure since 2014 after rebels, backed by Russia, established self-proclaimed independent republics in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces.
“While Russia affirmed the independence of both the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, it has not yet annexed them and therefore the Russia’s Religion Law, including the “anti-missionary laws, do not apply here,” said Zeegers.
“That said, authorities in these republics can make their own religion laws and reports from last year show that they sometimes go further in their actions against certain denominations than Russia itself.”
Russia vs the USSR
Zeegers echoes what many analysts have surmised, that Russia is working towards the restoration of its former empire that was lost to them when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. “In the aftermath, Ukraine and 13 other former Soviet states gained independence, but over the years Russia has slowly started to chip away at this, for example in Georgia and Belarus, obviously willing to go to war to achieve this,” said Zeegers.
The vision, however, is not to re-create what the former Soviet Union was, he said. “We will not see a full revival of the USSR including its atheist ideology that caused severe persecution of churches, including the Russian Orthodox Church. The current regime is nationalist and wants Russia to return as a world power and restore the national pride that was broken in 1991,” Zeegers said. “Putin is building a close relationship with the Orthodox Church, as was the case under the tsars. So also there is a difference between USSR and the new Russian world.
But there are also resemblances, and human rights and religious freedom violations remain of concern, he said. “The USSR was a totalitarian state and Russia has increasingly moved in that direction over the past years. No independent thinkers are allowed – think of the case of opposition leader Alexei Navalny – and, as in the old USSR, the levels of surveillance and monitoring are high.”
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