ROME — Ukrainian Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk marked “the 200th day of the great war that Russia is waging against the Ukrainian people” Sunday.
In his video message, the archbishop also noted that it was the 200th day of “national resistance to the Russian occupier” in defense of “our God-given Ukrainian land.”
Over the weekend the Ukrainian army pulled off a “brilliant counteroffensive” against the Russian enemy, liberating important large cities in the Kharkiv region such as Kupyansk and Izyum, noted the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
We thank God and the Ukrainian army for being alive and for “the fact that since the first of September more than 2,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian lands have already been liberated,” he stated.
Nonetheless, “every such step, every liberation, every tear of joy of our people, when they see their army, are watered by the blood of our soldiers, our liberators,” he observed.
This Sunday, “we pray and bow our heads paying homage to those boys and girls of ours who, especially in these days, at the cost of their lives liberate the Ukrainian land from the occupier,” he said.
Moreover, despite Ukraine’s resistance, more than 130,000 residential buildings have been destroyed since the Russian invasion, meaning that some three and a half million Ukrainians have been left without housing, with nowhere to spend the winter and nowhere to hide from the coming cold, Shevchuk noted.
In the context of this war, “the desire for the land of others is the cause of war,” he said, where the desire to appropriate and to enlarge one’s territory becomes a motive for the actions of an entire state that nourishes a colonizing mentality.
In this way, “theft becomes the meaning of state policy,” he said.
“We see how the Russian army, which abandons everything and flees from Ukrainian land, is trying to take away everything it can,” he added.
“God, welcome our fallen soldiers into Your eternal arms,” he prayed, and “grant victory to the Ukrainian army over the Russian occupier.”
“God, help us to overcome evil with good, hatred with love and all corruption with the virtue of Christian altruism,” he said.
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