Our partners have been updating us about the challenges facing evangelical churches in occupied regions which Russia is trying to annex.
Churches have evacuated 70% of their people from the four regions of Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhya. Believers who decided to stay will face the aggression of the Russian military. There are numerous testimonies of our ministers who suffered even physically at the hands of the Russian military who tried to persuade them to cooperate with the Russian government plus the mobilization of all men for the military.
Freedom of religion is under threat as the experience of the occupation of Lugansk and Donetsk shows, as well as during the temporary occupation of the Kharkiv region.
Evangelicals are looked on with suspicion. They are considered as secret agents for the west. In some of the occupied territory evangelicals are accused of sheltering an extremist organization and so are banned from church activities. Believers gather illegally and secretly. Registration and official ministry of churches is impossible there. In another occupied region none of the evangelical churches have received registration and exist illegally.
In some cities of the Zaporizhzhia region, prayer houses have been closed and declared that there will be nothing but Orthodoxy there, because everything else is a sect.
There are known cases in one region when the Gospel of John was recognized as extremist literature because it was published in the West.
