Only the liberation of Ukrainian territories can stop the persecution of Ukrainian priests and the faithful, said the Ukrainian official responsible for issues of ethnic policies and religion.
Viktor Yelenskyi, the head of the State Service for Ethnopolicies and Freedom of Conscience, who is in Washington on a visit, says that freedom of religion can be restored only by liberating the occupied territories of Ukraine and by stopping Russian shelling of the rest of the Ukrainian territory.
“This liberation, as we see, can only happen in a military way. Therefore, military aid to Ukraine is, in essence, a struggle for religious freedom. And the more believers in the United States realize this, the higher the level of religious freedom will be in the world,” Viktor Yelenskyi said in an interview with the Voice of America’s Ukrainian service.
After meetings at the U.S. State Department, Congress, and the Commission on Religious Freedom, Yelenskyi said that in America there is “a very high awareness that there is a struggle going on between good and evil in Ukraine.”
Yelenskyi is in Washington for meetings with representatives of the American government, Congress, and the expert environment, as part of the third annual Ukrainian Week, which began on January 29 and will last through February 3.
According to Yelenskyi, the Ukrainian delegation is paying the main attention this year to meetings with Protestant churches across the USA.
“These are people who are very sensitive to issues of religious freedom. We would like to convey to these people what Russia is doing in the occupied territories with the people of the same faith,” said Yelenskyi.
He emphasized that a delegation of Ukrainian Protestants who are members of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations met with the Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson and other Congressmen from the Republican Party, on whom the allocation of additional military aid to Ukraine in the amount of more than $60 billion depends.
According to the organizers, more than 150 meetings at various levels are scheduled for several dozen members of the Ukrainian delegation within the Ukrainian Week.
According to a joint study by the Eurasia Mission and the Ukrainian Institute of Religious Freedom, during the large-scale aggression, as of November 2023, more than 630 churches and prayer houses were completely or partially destroyed in Ukraine, dozens of priests were arrested, abducted, or deported. At least two priests were killed, two are in Russian captivity.
