Crosshairs: A Christian fighter in Ukraine, and the question of God in war

It has commonly been argued that there are no atheists in foxholes facing an oncoming enemy assault. Equally interesting is who is behind the machine gun, driving the tank, flying the drone—or looking through the scope of a sniper rifle?

The horrors of war, the blood-soaked fields of battle, sadly make fertile ground for philosophy, particularly discussions concerning God.

Ukraine is a religious country. In 2022, 85% of Ukrainians saw themselves as Christian and 10% identified as atheists. It would be fascinating to see whether war has changed these demographics at all. My intuitive observation from a short time there is that it is indeed a religious country but in a way where religion is traditionally infused throughout society. It is not so much a modern Protestant phenomenon that is clashing with social and moral evolution in the culture wars we see in the US.

I was privileged to speak to a number of soldiers and civilians in my 10 days traveling a loop of the front lines. I was afforded the privilege of sitting down with one soldier to formally discuss ideas of God and belief in the context of fighting a defensive war against an aggressive invader. I cannot reveal too much about him for reasons of operational security. My discussion was revealing and it gave me an insight, from a liberal atheistic point of view, into the mind of a deeply religious man fighting a war for his own existence and for the future of his country.

It seems that belief in God can very comfortably coexist with the notion of killing people and committing acts of at least a defensive war. For example, there is a theologian called Yuri Chornomorets who is deeply involved in training snipers and fundraising for equipment for them. His Twitter bio is an interesting one:

Ukrainian volunteer, sniper, theologian, philosopher. I help highly professional Warriors of Light!

I have reached out to him previously and asked for an interview but although he was willing, he felt his English was not up to scratch. That is a discussion waiting to happen!

While that conversation is yet to happen, the following one did. In this case, the soldier I spoke to (Dmytro, though I have changed his name), was very open in his answers to me. I'm incredibly grateful to him for the time we spent together.

We sat in a dark room guesthouse very close to the northern border of Ukraine. It would otherwise be a beautiful area to visit in peacetime but now there is very little scope for enjoying the scenery. At night, it is essential to keep the lights at a minimum to avoid unwanted attention from drones circling in the sky. This is something I have experienced elsewhere in Ukraine.

Between Dmytro and me was Zhenya, himself a minister in Ukraine who was escorting me around the country with his American pastor charity partner Greg. We made an interesting team trying to raise awareness on behalf of the Ukrainian nation, and delivering aid to frontline troops and units. Zhenya kindly translated what Dmytro, call-sign "Snake," told me.

What I was not in a position to do, nor did I want to, was to challenge the answers and get embroiled in a theological debate. My place here was privileged, and I was interested more in understanding than challenging.

Justifying the killing of the enemy

The easy icebreaker I had lined up for him was how he justified the killing of Russian enemy soldiers, and how he rationalized going to war in light of his faith and belief in the Bible. Of course, the Bible has no shortage of descriptions of war. It is arguably a bellicose book, at least in the Old Testament, so there is a lot of source material to draw from if you wish to justify violence.

"In the first few weeks," Dmytro started, "we saw what they were doing in Bucha and in Irpin [places where Russian soldiers committed well-documented war crimes]. When they raped a three-year-old boy and young girls, doubt didn't even touch me. They showed their nature, who they are here in Ukraine."

Dmytro then showed me pictures of his family, of his young daughter, of his beautiful wife. Images of happier times. Images of peace. Of course the desperate actions of the Russian forces would instill in him a burning sense of injustice and a desire for vengeance.

"I had these pictures back then realizing that those soldiers would do the same to my family," Dmytro explained. "If you were to read the Bible in a one-sided way, if someone slaps you on the left cheek, then you would put forward your right one. To do it this way would be just to watch them, to let them do these things."

As an atheist with my own family, there is nothing here that I would disagree with. This is, as far as I'm concerned, a very human reaction.

"What I see in the Bible," the soldier expanded, "but also in world history, is fighting like this in a foreign country. Maybe outside I am "Snake," but inside I am a lion. I have to be, in order to protect."

In protecting Ukraine, these soldiers are valiantly protecting their loved ones, their families and friends. The desire for Putin to eradicate Ukraine's identity, its culture, its language, its history, is at best to revise people's sense of who they are and where they come from, and at worst to outright eradicate them.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, I said. Was this something that spoke to him?

"We are living in New Testament times. If you use the Bible in a primitive way, then this is how you think. But the truth is not so primitive."

Zhenya interjected at this point with his own thoughts, explaining that he had known Dmytro for most of his life and knew where he was coming from. "Jesus says that there is no bigger love than giving your life for your friend. Paying with your life. In this way, this is an understanding of what love is. You may talk a lot, but your actions will show your real attitude to those around you."

Dmytro adds some further thoughts. "We are people who are able to analyze. It wasn't me who came to them to rob them. I am protecting my family. I see those forests and the fields and I don't care what region it is, from Khmelnitskyi to Sumy, it's mine. It's ours. This is my inner nature that has made me come and fight."

This fascinated me as there was a real sense of humanity—dare I say humanism—that was underwriting his behavior. I wondered whether the religious justification came as a post hoc rationalization, coming after the fact. I guess I'll never know for sure.

It is at times like these that I am often left ruminating over our commonalities and not stewing on our differences. There was a strong sense of moral intuition here, an indignation of a gross unfairness exhibited by a narcissistic dictator ordering an aggressive invasion of a peaceful neighbor for no good reason. And I felt that too, and still do. Deeply. Goodness, it is why I was there. Someone with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, struggling with their mobility, was so obsessed with this war for almost two years that they were inspired to travel to that warzone in that war-torn country to experience that terrible war.

Our fires, it seems, burn with the same fuel, though the blazes may be separated by vast distances.

Right then, though, those flames danced together.

Who is to blame?

I proceeded to discuss with him how he sees Russians and whether he sees the people as somehow categorically different, somehow a totally separate cultural species. So often in my discussions about the war, and seeing so much written and spoken concerning the two nations, I often hear "Russians are this" and "Ukrainians are that." We seem quite able to paint entire nations, entire peoples, with broad brushstrokes of traits. This can make me feel uncomfortable.

Preaching to the (de)converted, he pointed out that the Russian mentality is that Russia is the older brother to Ukraine. Russians, with all their "stupidity and problems"—"these alcoholics who have pissed their pants"—feel they can do anything they want with Ukrainian lands. "'It's our rights, our territories because we are the older brother,' they think. This is a big difference. Propaganda made them all think like that and believe that and feel like that."

Although we were moving away from the topic of religion for the time being, this was a rich seam of thought. I was interested in who he blamed for the actions of the Russian soldiers. Was it the people, or Putin, or politicians?

"It is rooted in their imperial history," he said.

Perhaps Putin is as much a victim as anyone else to grandiose and rose-tinted imperialistic thinking from a culture that has not come to terms with its own history. I was reminded, then, about a term so relevant to the Russian sense of self-awareness, or lack thereof: the German word Vergangenheitsbewältigung. This can be translated as the "struggle of overcoming the past" or the "work of coping with the past" such that collective guilt and responsibility can be understood, accepted, and worked through. For Germany in the post-war period, there was the need to come to terms with the activities of Nazis, of their own, of their administration and people.

Germany has worked through their problems to be in a position of greater confidence born from a mature sense of self-awareness.

But Russia's idea of its present self is distorted beyond any semblance of reality by its manipulation of the past. As George Orwell so concisely put it, "Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future."

For Russians, there has never been a collective therapy for the ills of the past. It is hard for Russians to accept what their own people have done in the past since the levels of disinformation are so far-reaching and their history is so revised that few accurately know enough to acknowledge the past horrors. The activities of Stalin, such as the Holodomor genocide that wiped out millions of Ukrainians, remain suppressed echoes of memories in the mind of the Russian Federation.

A divine blame game?

This was my segue to delve into ideas of explaining the war in light of God's will and God's love. arguably a difficult question. Ideas like this have delighted me for many years and have spurred me to write books concerning reality in light of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God. It is always a risk when asking questions, which are for me delightful intellectual playthings, to someone who either takes them deadly seriously or doesn't consider them at all.

"It's a provocative question," Dmytro told me. I agreed and implored that is all in good faith, so to speak. "I'm a philosopher!" I quipped.

"As a believer, I think that God will help Ukraine. But the war is not God's will. It's people who have created this situation. We choose by God and have success in a lot of areas, and the Russians feel it on a spiritual level. Their jealousy has made them want to destroy all of this. God is not about that. God is up there, and this here is a thing of people's relationships."

Concerning his talk of jealousy, there is something to be said about that. There are many who think part of Putin's motivation for invading was that Ukraine represented the green grass on the other side of the fence for the Russian people. Dictator Vladimir Putin is the richest human on planet Earth. He has only ever been a state employee as a KGB agent, Mayor, Prime Minister, and President. All of these jobs should enjoy at best a wage at the upper end of the public sector wage scale. It is quite something to become the world's richest man from public sector work.

Of course, it is well documented that Putin has been creaming off the top of the already financially distilled oligarchy. His country is a kleptocracy whereby corruption and helping yourself to the benefits of a wealth of natural resources is a resourceful path to ostentatious wealth. All the while, the common people of the Russian Federation struggle to get by. There is no redistribution of wealth in modern Russia. Wealth is stolen here, not earned, and it is stolen from the people.

Putin could not afford to let that downtrodden population glimpse what democracy might achieve for its people. He could not let a neighboring country and former Soviet state become the green grass to his onlooking citizens.

Something had to go.

Unfortunately, that "something" was, in Putin's eyes, Ukraine's sovereignty.

Back to more theological topics, my interlocutor expressed how God cuts through the Russian BS. "God is for justice, God is for truth. There are some qualities and values that he respects and those that he hates." For Dmytro, Ukraine embodies the good values of justice and truth, but Russia is consumed by those capital vices, the seven deadly sins.

"Let me clarify by taking God out of this equation. There are a lot of Ukrainians who live in Russia in their villages, and when you go through those villages, you can see those houses all around where Ukrainians live. Ukrainians have a greater work ethic than the Russians, something with its roots in history." The cardinal sins and their opposing characteristics featured strongly here for Dmytro. "And with this," he continued, "bringing God back in, we love God and respect him. There are God's laws, which are objective. And if you respect them, then the consequences are objective: good things come to those who follow the laws."

This is close to the notion of "True Christianity," whereby Dmytro conceivably believes that Ukrainians have the right kind of Christianity, that they are the ones with God on their side. So I ask him about this. If the Russians are justifying what they do as being part of the Russian Orthodox Church, how does Dmytro argue that God favors the Ukrainian flavor of Christianity?

"This is a manipulation of the mind. People unconsciously, automatically think that God is on their side. A person who smokes knows that it is harmful. But this person tells himself, makes him believe, that it's not so bad. This is an example of a person lying to themselves."

Dmytro seemed to be appealing to the idea that Ukrainians are more generally a genuine God-fearing people or that they have the right kind of Christianity compared to Russians. Unpacking religious demographic data for the Russian Federation is an interesting project. There is this modern belief that Russia is a nation that is re-embracing religiosity after a long period of state atheism. Indeed, Putin's courting of the Orthodox Russian Church is something that has attracted the fawning attention of many conservative Christians around the world, particularly in the United States.

However, the reality within Russia is perhaps a little more nuanced. Various surveys over the last 10 years have found that anywhere between 60% and 73% of Russians declare themselves as Christian. This appears very high given the recent Soviet history. And yet, using the principle of religious observance, things look a little different. Very few Russians would be religious using this criterion.

It has been found that between 0.5% and 2% of people in big cities attend Easter services, and overall just between 2% and 10% of the total population (3 to 15 million people) are actively practising Orthodox Christians. Religion in Russia, Wikipedia

Inviting God in

The Russian army has shown itself to be proficient at bashing down doors, toppling buildings, and smashing roofs. It is hard to justify such naked aggression in any reasonable way, whether one invokes God or not.

Dmytro lamented how at the beginning of the war, Ukraine was minding its own business, building roads so that you would come to our country. Not so you would help because we weren't worried about expending too many artillery shells. We were a people doing normal things: talking about nature, having relationships, wearing our vyshyvanka [traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts]. But that nastiness came. Russians came to our villages and took everything from them."

Whenever I spoke to soldiers or civilians in my time in Ukraine, this raw emotional incredulity that a modern nation could do such things to a people minding their own business was always simmering. It is a wonder that every Ukrainian wasn't just a seething mass of righteous rage. Two years is a long time to be at war, and fatigue can take the edge off the best of us.

One sentiment that I thought played well was as follows "God says, in the Bible, 'I'm there in those places where I am respected and honored.' So we have this ability in our hearts where we are creating this place for him. He is like a gentleman. He doesn't break down doors to get in, he waits to be invited."

Talking to a soldier like Dmytro in a guesthouse that was within Russian artillery and drone range was a risky affair, and probably not the place for long and challenging philosophical ramblings. All things considered, I was grateful for the time and attention given to my intrusive questions. While there is scope for much intellectual sparring here, I would prefer just now to open my own door to Dmytro, and to welcome him in. For we are brothers, united by much more than divides us.

After all, divided, the kingdom will fall. United, atheist and Christian alike, humans driven by a moral clarity of vision, we can (and must) stand strong against the encroaching rancor of a brutal tyrant.