A journey to Kyiv, in solidarity and, once back, to bear witness. I was with a group of religious leaders. “Most of my family were murdered at Babi Yar,” we heard from members of the Jewish community there. “Who’d have thought two generations later we’d be at war again?” They told us their stories: tales of trauma and humanity. “I help traumatised people, rescue abandoned animals,” said one resident. “The sirens, especially at night, get to us all.”
Though recently the world marked the first anniversary of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, like so much else in this conflict, that landmark wasn’t entirely accurate. Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression began nine years ago with the seizure of Crimea. Crimean Tatars are the largest Muslim group in Ukraine, Mufti Sheikh Aider explained to us. The Russians cut off electricity and water from non-compliant mosques, fingerprint believers, desecrate graves, torture leaders into signing agreements, and make martyrs of those who resist.
It’s clear this is not just a war for Ukraine’s rich earth, sea coasts and mineral wealth. It’s a war against freedom, history and truth.
After we prayed together – one imam, two rabbis and four Christian leaders – by the frozen ravines of Babi Yar, we were shown small pieces of metal, fragments of the Russian bombs that killed five people here last March. It’s the third attack on the place where Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen (often called his mobile killing units) murdered tens of thousands of Jews in 1941 while attempting to hide their own crimes, and where the Soviets caused a disastrous landslide through deliberate flooding in 1961. This latest assault seems to be one of many by the Russians on sites of religious and national identity, and a strangely perverse part of the lie that Ukraine and its president are today’s Nazis.
In the small town of Borodianka outside Kyiv, next to Bucha and Irpin, where well-documented war crimes have been committed, we saw the charred statue of the poet Taras Shevchenko opposite bombed-out blocks of flats. Shevchenko is considered the founder of modern Ukrainian literature – but evidently he, like his nation, isn’t meant to have existed.
Russia’s continuing attack on Ukraine is not only a war of tyranny against freedom, but of myth versus truth. The price of losing is the eradication of memory and identity, and of everyone and everything that fails to comply with the desired narrative. At Babi Yar and Borodianka, I felt I was witnessing a perverse continuation of the 1930s and 1940s in present time: Stalin’s attempt to starve the people of Ukraine into non-existence, and Himmler’s murderous war to rid it of its population and turn it into Lebensraum for Volksdeutsche farmers.
Our group, organised by Europe, a Patient Association – a pan-European, non-partisan coalition of leaders in economics, politics, culture and faith – met Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the head of the Greek Catholic church of Ukraine. A leader of profound faith and courage, he was on the hitlist of people the Russians planned to kill when they captured Kyiv. “In the days after Russia withdrew from Bucha, I saw so many dead people in the street, so many men and women in mass graves.” He was left with questions. “Why was I still alive?” he asked. “Had God forgotten us? Where is religion in this war?”
It’s a challenging question. The day before the Russian attack, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox church and an ally of Putin, placed a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Kremlin, saying that “our military servicemen must have no doubts that they have chosen a very correct path in their lives”. Maybe his God – like so many of those soldiers sent mercilessly to their deaths in a war they don’t understand – is a conscript too, co-opted into a godless cause?
In the face of such suffering, what could we say to Archbishop Shevchuk in Kyiv as he questioned the role of God? I could only think of the words of the 13th-century rabbi Moses ben Nachman, himself an exile like so many Ukrainians today: “God sees the tears of the oppressed, whoever they are, and weeps with them.”
Jonathan Wittenberg is rabbi of New North London Synagogue
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
