ROME — Part of the unspoken fallout of Russia’s ongoing military assault on Ukraine is the complete or partial destruction of 173 Christian churches in the country, Spanish Catholic media revealed Tuesday.
Citing the State Service for Ethnic Affairs and Freedom of Conscience of Ukraine, Religión Digital reported that along with the 173 Christian churches, five Islamic sites and five Jewish synagogues have also been severely damaged or destroyed by the Russian offensive.
Religious buildings have become “military targets,” the report stated, and most of the bombed churches are in the regions of Donetsk (45), Luhansk (40), Kyiv (34) and Kharkiv (25) regions.
The bulk of the missile attacks have focused on the Russian Orthodox Church, which officially separated itself from the Moscow Patriarchate at the end of May: 127 of its buildings were totally or partially destroyed.
According to the list released by the agency, the bombed churches also included 22 Protestant churches, 19 of the independent Orthodox Church (autocephalous), and three Catholic churches, including a Greek Catholic church in Irpin, near Kyiv.
File/Shells and shrapnel of Russian bombs and missiles are collected and displayed at the altar during the military funeral for the Ukrainian soldier, Anton, 36 years old from Lviv, killed in Avdiivka, Donetsk region, at Saint Peter and Paul Garrison Church. (Rick Mave/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In March, a mortar shell struck the bishop’s residence in Kharkiv, in the northeast of the country. In the diocese of Kyiv-Zhytomyr, an explosive blast shattered the windows of the seminary, which Russian soldiers reportedly looted.
In that same month, a Russian tank fired on a Greek Catholic Caritas building in the eastern Ukrainian port of Mariupol, killing seven people.
File/A senior woman stands by her bicycle outside the Holy Intercession Church which shows damage caused by the Russian shelling of the central square on March 6, 2022, Malyn, Zhytomyr Region, northwestern Ukraine. (Ruslan Kaniuka/ Ukrinform/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
As the intrepid head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, noted this week, the Russian army even constructed a torture chamber in one historic Orthodox church building near the ancient city of Chernihiv, where Russian soldiers maimed and killed many Ukrainian civilians.
“The real goal of the Russian aggression is the annihilation of the Ukrainian people,” Shevchuk said. “This is confirmed by both the ideological speeches of Putin himself, in which reference is often made to Ukrainian history, and the war crimes committed by his soldiers on our land.”
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