Russia struck a Baptist church in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, killing at least one person, a minister, and injuring at least eight others.
The Embassy of Ukraine in the US gave the casualty figures in a public statement issued while rescue workers were still on the scene at the church, which had served the community for years, according to Baptist Press.
The embassy called the strike a deliberate attack on people of faith who had gathered peacefully to pray.
Promoters of “A Faith Under Siege,” a documentary series reporting Russia’s persecution of Christians, identified the man killed as Ruslan Utyuzh, a minister at the bombed church. Utyuzh is survived by his wife and two children.
Baptist Standard quoted Pavel Unguryan, a former Member of the Ukrainian Parliament, as saying that several church leaders were inside at the time of the attack to celebrate Easter on Thursday, and that seven or eight people were seriously wounded.
More than 300 people had called the building their spiritual home, Unguryan said, adding that up to 700 churches have been destroyed since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. He called the attack a direct assault on people of faith who had gathered peacefully to worship God, and appealed for prayer and action.
Unguryan served as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament until 2019 and was appointed to the Order of Merit of the III degree in 2017, according to the US-Ukraine Business Council.
Mission Eurasia, a Gospel-based humanitarian group with offices in Franklin, Tennessee, has a close, longstanding relationship with the congregation, Kate Akers, the group’s director of marketing, was quoted as saying.
The church started as an underground congregation, Akers was quoted as saying. One of its members is a key leader at Mission Eurasia.
Akers said churches like this one are often targeted, especially when they are serving their communities in times of crisis, and that this was one reason Mission Eurasia had devoted significant attention to documenting religious persecution and attacks on churches in Ukraine.
The strike was neither an accident nor an isolated incident, Colby Barrett, producer of the documentary “A Faith Under Siege,” was quoted as saying. He added that Russia had reportedly used a KAB-1500L laser-guided precision bomb in the attack.
Barrett said the churches being hit were not only places of worship but lifelines providing humanitarian aid and hope to their communities, and that this was why they were being targeted.
He said Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to strip communities of the faith and support systems that sustained them, but predicted that Ukrainians would prevail. He added that Russia has increasingly been striking churches and other sites while Christians are gathered there, killing at least 58 priests and pastors and damaging or destroying more than 700 churches in Ukraine.
Barrett recounted an attack last September on a megachurch he attends in Kyiv, where the congregation had built a 4,500-person worship hall and was holding the opening ceremony.
Hundreds of pastors from all across Ukraine were in the complex the night before the hall was due to open for a pastors’ conference. Russia sent two Shahed drones to the complex, Barrett said, and both narrowly missed, by about 3 feet, destroying cars in a nearby parking lot instead.
Had the strikes been successful, at least 20 pastors could have been killed while lodging in advance of the conference, and the church would have been destroyed, Barrett said.
Despite the attack, the congregation held services as normal the following morning with a large turnout, and 200 people came forward to be baptized.
