GERALDINE FAGAN

In the areas of Ukraine under separatist control since early 2014, religious minorities face harsh restrictions. To the south, the Crimean peninsula falls directly under Russian jurisdiction, and thus the strict requirements of the so-called Yarovaya legislation of 2016, which punishes the unauthorized sharing of religious ideas.1 In March 2021, for example, Crimean Baptists were fined for keeping books and brochures in their church that were not marked with the name of their religious organization. This literature was destroyed.2 

Yet believers in Crimea have one—at least theoretical—advantage over those in the breakaway parts of eastern Ukraine, Maksym Vasin of the Kyiv-based Institute for Religious Freedom tells the East-West Church Report: “Russia de facto controls these territories, but has not taken any legal responsibility for them. In Crimea, Russia took on this responsibility—if illegally— and believers can appeal to the European Court of Human Rights or the United Nations. But in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine, no one is responsible for human rights.”3 

Indeed, over the past seven years the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk [Russian: Lugansk] People’s Republics in eastern Ukraine have adopted their own legislation on religious activity. Initially, this overtly privileged Orthodox Christianity of the Moscow Patriarchate. This faith, the 2014 Constitution of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) declared, was “primary and prevailing,” repeating legal terminology from the late Russian Empire, when apostasy from Orthodoxy was treated as a criminal offense.4 In its early days, the DPR also boasted a Russian Orthodox Army, with its own crossemblazoned banner and rap anthem.5 Yet even in the Army’s promotional material, its soldiers professed almost no religious dogma.6 The more Sovietized eastern parts of Ukraine are characterized, after all, by a large discrepancy between declared allegiance to, and involvement in, the Orthodox Church. In polling prior to the 2014 conflict, 72 percent in Ukraine’s five easternmost regions (including Donetsk and Luhansk) described themselves as Orthodox, whereas only 17 percent said they attended worship weekly. This is half the rate of church attendance polled in the seven westernmost regions of Ukraine.7  

Religion laws

Religion laws The focus of subsequent separatist legislation on religion has shifted away from explicit preference for the Moscow Patriarchate. Both the current constitutions of the DPR and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) claim that religious associations are “separate from the state and equal before the law,” and that no faith may become the state religion or compulsory.8 In practice, however, this pledge is undermined by the unrecognized entities’ own laws on freedom of conscience and religious associations. 

Adopted in June 2016, the DPR’s law contains echoes of Russian legislation. Congregations registered with the authorities and so holding full legal personality status are termed “religious organizations.” As an alternative to registration, communities are permitted a limited existence conducting religious rites and teaching their current followers, but such “religious groups” must still notify officials of their activity.9 According to the same law, congregations wishing to retain full legal status as “religious organizations” had to re-register by 1 March 2019 or else were banned.10 Unlike Russian legislation, the local Moscow Patriarchate diocese was recognized separately, and a special process created for its legalization.11 

Adopted in February 2018, the LPR’s religion law is significantly more restrictive. Thirty members—rather than the DPR’s ten—are required to form a local religious organization, and there is no provision for an informal religious group: all must register with the authorities.12 Not only does the local Moscow Patriarchate diocese have its own, separate recognition procedure, but only Orthodox communities affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate are permitted to register.13 The re-registration deadline was extended by two months to 15 October 2018, following which any congregations failing to have passed were “considered to have ceased their activity.”14 

Re-registration outcomes 

Details of precisely which religious communities have successfully re-registered have not been made public. The DPR’s Culture Ministry—which handles the registration process—has stated only that during 2019 it accepted 61 religious organizations’ applications while rejecting 31, and lodged 39 religious groups’ notifications of existence while rejecting 28. At the same time, it accepted 254 annual notifications of continuing activity from entities of the Moscow Patriarchate.15 In a similar report for 2020, the Ministry noted that it had received 28 applications for registration from religious organizations and/or religious groups’ notifications of existence, but did not specify the outcomes.16 

In the LPR, re-registration lies within the purview of the Department for the Affairs of Religious Organizations and Spirituality within the Ministry for Culture, Sport, and Youth. In December 2019 the Ministry claimed that 188 of 195 registered religious organizations belonged to the Moscow Patriarchate, with the remainder being Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Old Believer.17 Yet the structure of the Ministry’s website allows only for Orthodox, Muslim, and Jewish organizations, which are also the only ones in schedules of routine inspections spanning a year from September 2020.18

Numerous congregations have certainly lost legal status. Just six weeks before the LPR’s adoption of the 2018 law, its chief religious affairs official announced that there were 346 religious organizations on the territory belonging to 11 different faiths and/or denominations, including approximately 197 Orthodox churches.19 Six months later, the Expert Commission for Conducting State Religious Expertise attached to the LPR’s Ministry for Culture, Sport, and Youth announced that it had considered 230 religious organization applications, of which 173 were successful.20

John’s Gospel “extremist” 

Following the established Russian model, both selfproclaimed republics have also banned items of religious literature deemed “extremist.” The DPR’s list includes six books by Pastor Aleksei Ledyayev of the Latvia-based New Generation Charismatic Church, three texts published by a local Muslim organization, and 11 Jehovah’s Witness texts, as well as the Jehovah’s Witness website.21 In September 2018 the DPR also banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ organization as “extremist.”22 

The LPR’s list of banned “extremist” literature similarly contains six Jehovah’s Witness titles. It also features two items identified as circulated by the Ukrainian Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union: the magazine Evangel’skaia Niva [Russian: Gospel Field] and Hitler’s Cross: The Revealing Story of How the Cross of Christ Was Used as a Symbol of the Nazi Agenda by U.S. Protestant pastor Erwin Lutzer.

A short video posted in July 2018 on the website of the LPR’s Ministry of State Security [Russian acronym MGB, analogous to the KGB] shows the raid on a Baptist Union congregation in Luhansk city that uncovered these two items. In the video, worship by approximately 20 adults is halted by a man wearing a balaclava, who demands documents and to know on what basis the meeting is being held. “On the basis of faith in Jesus Christ,” the visibly shaken young pastor replies.23 

The LPR’s list of “extremist” literature also contains 12 titles published by the local branch of the International Union of Evangelical Christian-Baptist Churches. The IUECBC broke with the main Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union in the 1960s over how to respond to new Soviet restrictions and continues to refuse onerous registration requirements. Remarkably, their 12 banned titles include hymnbooks and a 2015 edition of St. John’s Gospel, even though this is the same 19th-century Synodal Russian translation made and used by the Russian Orthodox Church.24 

In July 2021 a local court in the LPR ruled “extremist” another four titles circulated by the IUECBC: Cursed to Be? by German Christian publicist Wolfgang Bühne; Jesus Our Destiny by Wilhelm Busch, a German Lutheran pastor in the anti-fascist Confessing Church movement in Nazi Germany; Born to Die by U.S. evangelist Billy Graham; and The Door is Open by 19thcentury English Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon.25

Repression in practice 

These legal limitations are not just on paper. “From our monitoring, it seems that believers now suffer from religious persecution much more than in Soviet times,” notes Maksym Vasin of the Institute for Religious Freedom. “There are many closures of places of worship, arrests— even murders.” Indeed, during the few months in 2014 when separatist forces gained control of the city of Sloviansk [Russian: Slaviansk], now again in independent Ukraine, four Pentecostals were captured by separatist militia and killed when they tried to escape.26 In similar circumstances in 2014, Anatoly Anishchenko, a Pentecostal pastor from Krasny Luch [Ukrainian name: Khrustalnyi] in the LPR, was nearly executed on two occasions.27 

More recently and routinely, minority congregations are prevented from worshipping publicly. In the selfproclaimed DPR, for example, houses of worship seized by the authorities since late 2016 have included two Orthodox churches under the Kyiv Patriarchate in Donetsk city,28 two Baptist churches in Makeyevka [Ukrainian: Makiivka] and Novoazovsk, and a Seventh-day Adventist church in Gorlovka [Ukrainian: Horlivka].29 Religious leaders may also be fined for leading unauthorized worship, as when the pastor of Ark of the Covenant Pentecostal Church in Makeyevka was fined  the equivalent of approximately $50 in December 2019, a significant sum in the region.30 

In the self-proclaimed LPR, the MGB security police are particularly powerful, according to Petr Dudnik, a Pentecostal pastor in Sloviansk. He described to the East-West Church Report their August 2018 raid on Grace Church of God, a sister congregation in Alchevsk: “Armed men in balaclavas entered and searched the property” before detaining Pastors Viktor Koval and Timofei Biryukov until evening.31 

With no Protestant communities proving able to retain legal status in the LPR, the Seventh-day Adventists decided to halt public worship following the re-registration deadline. According to Forum 18, Baptist Union congregations were similarly forced to halt public worship in March 2019.32 Forum 18 also reports that Luhansk’s Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Grzegorz Rapa, had to leave the region in February 2020 and has not been permitted to return; Mass was last celebrated  there by a Greek Catholic priest in April 2020. Local clergy of the newly formed Orthodox Church of Ukraine have likewise been barred.33 

In the LPR, minority religious leaders may also be fined for leading unauthorized worship. Among multiple instances documented by Forum 18, Vladimir Devyanin, leader of an Evangelical Christian-Baptist Union congregation in the town of Kirovsk [Ukrainian name: Holubivka], was fined the equivalent of approximately $100 in summer 2019.34 In 2019 Vladimir Rytikov, an IUECBC Baptist pastor who spent several years in jail for his faith during the Soviet period, had items of his property seized after he refused to pay earlier fines totaling approximately $110 for leading his unregistered congregation in Krasnodon [Ukrainian name: Sorokyne].35 

During several hours’ detention by the MGB in January 2020, Pastor Rytikov was verbally threatened with prosecution for his “extremist activity.” The warning referred to his circulation of “extremist” literature, given that items distributed by the IUECBC were proclaimed “extremist” by the LPR authorities in November 2019.36 

Baptist pastor Vitaly Sorokun anticipated such an escalation when the author met him in October 2018 in the city of Kharkiv [Russian: Kharkov] in independent Ukraine. The LPR and DPR authorities “are trying to do in an extreme way what Russia is doing slowly,” he suggested. “Russia’s Supreme Court already ruled that the Jehovah’s Witnesses are ‘extremist.’ Theologically, I do not agree with them—but they cannot practice. So basically you have to think, ‘Who is going to be next?’ And you pretty much know.”37

Notes:

1. See Lauren B. Homer, “Making Sense of the Anti-Missionary Provisions of Russia’s 2016 Anti-Terrorism Legislation,” EastWest Church and Ministry Report, vol. 25, no. 2 (2017), 1-7.
2. [In Russian] “Tserkov’ EkhB Evpatorii ostrafovana za ‘nezakonnoe’ missionerstvo,” Sova, 18 March 2021, https://www.sova-center.ru/religion/news/harassment/intervention/2021/03/d43878/.
3.  Interview with the author, Kyiv, 10 October 2018.
4.  [In Russian] “Konstitutsiia Donetskoi narodnoi respubliki 14 maia 2014 goda,” Preamble and Articles 9.2, 21, http:// dnr-news.com/konstituciya-doneckoy-narodnoy-respubliki. html (as accessed on 24 May 2014). The text purporting to be the 14 May 2014 Constitution on the latest DPR website differs significantly, http://dnrsovet.su/zakonodatelnayadeyatelnost/konstitutsiya/. The original text may be found at http://worldconstitutions.ru/?p=1094.
5. [In Russian] “Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Armiia DNR,” YouTube, 30 May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQdsGoUDmdA; “Donetskoe opolchenie Russkaia Pravoslavnaia,” YouTube, 25 June 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9L7sUqm9n8
6. [In Russian] “Fil’m o Russkoi Pravoslavnoi Armii,” YouTube, 3 June 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtjQIysnzwc.
7.  Razumkov Center, National Security and Defence, nos. 1-2 (2011) 16, 20. The data were compiled in 2010.
8. Article 9 in both constitutions. [In Russian] https://minjust-dnr.ru/ konstitutsiya-donetskoj-narodnojrespubliki/ (DPR); https://glava-lnr.info/dokumenty/konstituciya (LPR).
9. [In Russian] “O svobode veroispovedaniia i religioznykh ob’’edineniiakh,” 24 June 2016, Articles 7, Parts 2 and 7: https://dnrsovet.su/zakonodatelnaya-deyatelnost/prinyatye/zakony/zakon-donetskoj-narodnoj-respubliki-o-svobodeveroispovedaniya-i-religioznyh-obedineniyah/.
10. Ibid., Article 32, Parts 5 and 6. 
11.  Ibid., Article 31. 
12.  [In Russian] “O svobode sovesti i o ob’’edineniiakh,” 2 February 2018, Article 6, Part 2: https://nslnr.su/zakonodatelstvo/normativno-pravovaya-baza/5741/. 
13. Ibid., Article 34, Part 2.
14.  Ibid., Article 33, Part 1.
15. [In Russian] “Otchet o rabote Ministerstva kul’tury Donetskoi Narodnoi Respubliki v 2019 godu,” http://www. mincult.govdnr.ru/otchet-o-rabote-ministerstva-kulturydoneckoy-narodnoy-respubliki-v-2019-godu.
16. [In Russian] “Otchet o rabote Ministerstva kul’tury Donetskoi Narodnoi Respubliki v 2020 godu,” http://www.mincult.govdnr.ru/otchet-orabote-ministerstva-kultury-doneckoy-narodnoyrespubliki-v-2020-godu.
17.  Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Luhansk: No gas, electricity, water for unregistered communities, Forum 18, 5 February 2020, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2540.
18.  [In Russian] https://www.mklnr.su/religiya; https://www.mklnr.su/plany-proverok.html. In November 2020 Ukrainian parliamentarian Viktor Yelensky noted that the DPR authorities had reversed their hostile stance towards the Jewish community due to outside pressure. See “Humanitarian situation in non-government controlled areas of Eastern Ukraine,” YouTube, 26 November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU-K945o2LE at 1.07.00, also Yelensky’s comments on the general religious freedom situation at 31.00-42.00.
19.  [In Russian] “Vlasti LNR rasskazali o deistvuiushchikh religioznykh organizatsiiakh v respublike,” RIA Novosti, 20 December 2017, https://ria.ru/religion/20171220/1511338260.html.
20.  [In Russian] “Ekspertnaia komissiia vydala zakliucheniia o priznanii religioznymi 173 organizatsiiam,” 26 June 2018, https://mklnr.su/religiya/novosti-religiya/2580-ekspertnayakomissiya-vydala-zaklyucheniya-o-priznaniireligioznymi-173-organizaciyam.html.
21. [In Russian] https://dnmu.ru/wp-content/ uploads/2021/06/Список-экстрем-материалов. pdf. On 16 September it was reported that a court in Russia had ruled extremist Pastor Ledyayev’s New World Order: “Sud priznal knigu piatidesiatnicheskogo pastora Alekseia Lediaeva ekstremistskoi,” Sova, 16 September 2021, https:// www.sova-center.ru/religion/news/extremism/ counter-extremism/2021/09/d44919/.
22. [In Russian] https://dnronline.su/perechenzapreshhennyx-obshhestvennyx-i-religioznyxobedinenij-inyx-organizacij/; Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Donetsk: Places of worship seized, sealed,” Forum 18, 12 October 2018, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2422.
23.  [In Russian] http://mgblnr.org/media/c300a2c3-98eb-4a7d-b302-ebf89b06bf26.
24. [In Russian] https://mu-lnr.su/wp-content/ uploads/2020/02/SPISOK-EKSTR. MATERIALOV-19.02.20.pdf.
25. [In Russian] “Sud priznal rasprostraniavshiesia baptistami izdaniia ekstremistskimi – Genprokuratura,” Luganskii Informatsionnyi  Tsentr, 20 July 2021, https://lug-info.com/news/sud-priznalrasprostranyavshiesya-baptistami-izdaniya-ekstremistskimigenprokuratura; Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Luhansk: More Christian texts ‘extremist,’ Catholic priests banned,” Forum 18, 28 July 2021, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2675.
26.  For a detailed account of these events, see the author’s interview with Pastor Petr Dudnik, East-West Church Report, vol. 27, no. 2 (2019), 6-11. 
27. [In Russian] “Svidetel’stvo Onishchenko Anatoliia g. Krasnyi Luch,” YouTube, 22 December 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Ke_hqsToY.
28.  Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Donetsk: Raid, fine for unregistered worship meetings,” Forum 18, 10 February 2020, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2542.
29. Corley, 12 October 2018, op. cit. 
30. Corley, 10 February 2020, op. Cit.
31. Pastor Petr Dudnik interview, op. Cit.
32. “DONBAS: Luhansk: Re-registration denials, raids, religious communities closed,” Forum 18, 23 October 2018, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2425; Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Luhansk: Baptist Union Churches forced to halt public worship,” Forum 18, 15 March 2019, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2462. 
33.  Corley, 28 July 2021, op. cit.; Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Luhansk: Worship bans, clergy bans, punishments,” Forum 18, 23 October 2019, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2516. For the author’s October 2018 interview with Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, at the time apostolic nuncio in Ukraine and able to make infrequent visits to the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR, see East-West Church Report, vol. 27, no.2 (2019), 12-16.
34. Corley, 23 October 2019, op. cit. 
35.  Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Luhansk: Community work, fines, property seizure,” Forum 18, 16 October 2019, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2514.
36. [In Russian] “OTDEL ZASTUPNICHESTVA MSTs EkhB SOOBSHCHENIE No. 2, 03 fevralia 2020 g.,” 4 February 2020, http://iucecb.com/news/20200204-0921; Felix Corley, “DONBAS: Luhansk: Soviet-era prisoner of conscience to be jailed again?” Forum 18, 4 February 2020, https://www.forum18.org/archive.php?article_id=2539.
37.  For the author’s complete interview with Pastor Vitaly Sorokun, see East-West Church Report, vol. 27, no.1 (2019), 9-11.

Geraldine Fagan is editor of the East-West Church Report.