Putin Demands Believers in Ukraine Pray His Way

Pastor Vladimir Ryitkov was leading Sunday mass in Russian-occupied Luhansk, Ukraine when Russian military and police officers burst into his small Baptist church. Armed with assault rifles, “they brusquely entered the hall of the prayer house and ordered all the men to stand up,” Ryitkov recounted. The authorities hauled Ryitkov to a Russian police station and offered him an ultimatum: register the church with the Russian government or stop practicing. Registering a church with Russia isn’t a banal bureaucratic process; it comes with many strings attached by the Kremlin.

The scene in Luhansk is a stark reminder: in occupied Ukraine, if you pray to God, Russian President Vladimir Putin must also get his due.

Ryitkov’s experience is by no means isolated. In February 2024, Russian troops tortured a priest of the independent (autocephalous) Orthodox Church of Ukraine in Russian-occupied Kherson region to death for refusing to switch his parish’s allegiance to the Moscow Patriarchate. (Patriarch Kirill, in turn, owes his own allegiance to Putin). Nearby, in Nova Kakhovka, people discovered the bodies of a Baptist deacon, Anatoliy Prokopchuk, and his 19-year-old son in a forest in November 2022 — shot and dumped after Russian soldiers abducted them for their evangelical activities.

Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine nearly four years ago, Putin has targeted non-Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) religious spaces; so far, Russian troops have killed more than 67 clergy members and destroyed more than 630 religious sites. The victims’ creeds range from Orthodox to Protestant to Catholic, as well as many other denominations. 

Not every persecuted Christian in occupied Ukraine is killed by the Russians; many endure intimidation, legal harassment and exile. Unregistered churches face constant “inspections” that function as raids, with masked men in camouflage halting services and rifling through religious literature. Ordinary acts of worship are criminalized: holding an unapproved prayer meeting could incur a 10,000-ruble fine or worse. In one town, Russian officials went as far as to allegedly plant “extremist” literature in a church so they could then “find” it and arrest the pastor as a supposed extremist.

Through raids, fines, brutality, and trumped-up criminal cases, Moscow has systematically worked to intimidate Ukraine’s faithful into compliance with the Kremlin and ROC.

Though Russia paints itself as a traditional Christian society, this is a lie: Putin has, quite blasphemously, merged church and state in a pact to bolster his power and legitimacy. Moscow’s persecution of Christians is not driven by militant atheism or a hatred of Christianity itself. Rather, it flows from a cynical belief that religion is a tool of state control and that any faith not under the Kremlin’s thumb is a threat. And this practice is not unique to Putin: Stalin famously resurrected the ROC to lend divine legitimacy to his rule.

Today’s Patriarchate serves a similar function as a tool of Russian ideological and state power. Kirill has been an ardent cheerleader for Putin’s war, casting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a holy struggle and branding opponents as heretics. Under Kirill’s leadership, the ROC has become a willing instrument of Kremlin policy, lobbying for bans on rival denominations and blessing the suppression of “cultists.” And there are benefits for the Church, too: as the Kremlin removes potential centers of resistance in occupied areas of Ukraine, it clears the field for the Moscow Patriarchate to consolidate religious authority.

Even as Russian troops pillage religious sites across Ukraine, Putin has had the audacity to falsely claim the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church is persecuting the ROC. 

Far from being the pious Christian society Russia portrays itself as, it is one of the worst global abusers of religious freedom and is currently launching an assault on religious freedoms in Ukraine. The Trump administration has already made protecting Christians worldwide a foreign policy priority, and Washington cannot turn a blind eye to Russia’s abuses. The United States must act.

Global Magnitsky sanctions, which are sanctions put in place to punish human rights abusers and corrupt actors, should be placed on the Russian police forces in occupied territories. Often, anti-terrorism police officers are mobilized along with Moscow’s Federal Security Service (FSB) to conduct raids and disappear Ukrainian Christians. These sanctions would show that the Trump administration is aware of Russia’s religious abuses and is committed to combatting them. Washington can also rally its European allies in this effort to coordinate messaging arguing that the Russian state is a systemic abuser of religious liberty.

Samuel Ben-Ur is a research analyst focusing on Christian persecution, Venezuela, and other areas at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Dr. Ivana Stradner serves as a research fellow.