Church Without Walls: Post-Soviet Baptists after the Ukrainian Revolution, 2013-14, Joshua T. Searle, 2016

13, has now been turned into a military base, home to around 400 militants. I was not on the DCU campus at the time, but I heard tearful accounts from friends and former colleagues, who told me that the militants arrived on campus on a sunny afternoon, armed with Kalashnikov rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. ° See “The London Consultation: Resolution on Ukraine”. Online: http://www.bmsworldmission.org/news- blogs/archive/the-london-consultation-resolution-ukraine. ' For a detailed and moving account of the involvement of Christians in the demonstrations on Kyiv’s Maidan, see Anexceii Popzees, Llepxoes ua matioane (Kyiv: Knigonosha, 2014). Speaking with pure Russian accents, these armed men threatened the staff and students who were on campus at the time with “court martial” (i.e. summary execution) if they did not comply fully with their orders. In an instant, these armed men forced them out of their homes and deprived them of their livelihoods. Reporting on this takeover, the former Baptist Rector of DCU noted recently that, “The academic buildings and dormitories have been converted into warehouses. Hostages are being held there and the dormitories have been transformed into torture chambers. A classroom of a private Christian school on the university campus has been turned into a shooting range where rebels shoot at Ukrainian symbols and children’s drawings. These activities are recorded and exhibited like trophies. Where my children once planted trees, now there are trenches and guns.””' Given my personal experience, part of the aim of this lecture will be to focus the attention of readers on the humanitarian catastrophe that is taking place in the Russian- occupied areas of Ukraine. Many people in the West do not know about Russia’s undeclared, “hybrid war” against Ukraine. Russian soldiers and their terrorist proxies in Donetsk and Luhansk are unleashing a reign of terror on the occupied territories.'* The situation is particularly desperate for Christians in Ukrainian Crimea and the Eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Baptists, in particular, are suffering disproportionately, because they are regarded as dangerous “sectarians”, “schismatics” and even as “Western spies”. The hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church is suspicious of Baptists, whom it regards as a destabilising influence in its “canonical territory”. As a result of the Russian occupation of these regions of Southern and Eastern Ukraine, the Baptist presence in Crimea and Donbass has been effectively eliminated, as Baptist and other evangelical leaders have been arrested, tortured and, in some cases, even murdered.'? In June 2015 Vice President of the Evangelical Baptist Union of Ukraine, Igor Bandura, reported that in the Donetsk region there are 56 Baptist churches that remain under Ukrainian control and 44 churches that are occupied by pro-Russian separatists. In the "' Mykhailo Cherenkov, “Reconciliation Begins a