Remains of a destroyed building stand near the village of Preobrazhenka in southeast Ukraine in February 2024. Chris Herlinger

The idea of pro-Russian arsonists targeting cars on the streets of Kyiv was once inconceivable—but nothing surprises Ukrainians these days. Andrusiv, like other members of her Ukrainian Catholic order, has been a cherished source and help during my three years of reporting about Russia’s full-scale invasion. I spoke with her not long after a chaotic news week in late February that was alarming to Ukranians.¹

As I write this in mid-March, there appears to be a rapprochement between Ukraine and the US, with Ukraine saying it could agree to a 30-day ceasefire with Russia, and the US resuming assistance to Ukraine. But given the volatility of the situation, it is difficult to discern where all this goes by midyear.

A Ukrainian soldier I know who is stationed on the Ukrainian-Russian front is skeptical. The day after Ukraine announced it would be open to a ceasefire, he texted me two photos: a before and after of an apartment complex that had been damaged by a Russian rocket attack. “This is the ceasefire,” he wrote.

Andrusiv took in the Oval Office episode between Trump and Zelenskyy as theater—though deadly serious theater that, at the very least, was puzzling and confounding: “We don’t know if we should be shocked or worried—or not.”

“When something bad happens, people make a joke of it and continue to fight,” she said. “After three years, we have learned that God can protect us.”

Amid messy geopolitics, violent Russian aggression, and existential uncertainty, the evocation of God and the resulting religious narrative about the war among Ukrainian Catholic sisters and clerics—my most important sources and guides in covering the war for Catholic and religious media since 2022—is common, and it’s a narrative I have heard countless times over three years.

For them, it is a Calvary and resurrection narrative in which an oppressed people are fighting for their freedom and independence in the hope that they will ultimately be victorious, freed from the prospect of Russian repression.

An abandoned Russian tank just off a highway near the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Chris Herlinger

The repression is keenly felt from the brutality of the current Russian onslaught but also keenly remembered after seven decades of Russian domination during the Soviet era, perhaps most damningly in the 1932–1933 famine known as the Holodomor. Millions of Ukrainians died in what has been called an act of Kremlin-imposed genocide. And, as Ukrainians are always quick to point out, the war actually began a decade ago with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Donbas region in 2014.

Such history is experienced as a living presence in many Ukrainian families, both inside and outside the country. “All that repression is remembered,” said Sister Ann Laszok, a Ukrainian American who immigrated with her parents to the United States in 1949 and whose mother, a physician, once faced the unwelcome prospect of working in Siberia.

Memories of the Soviet era haunt Ukraine. Ukrainians don’t want a return to a life in which you can’t trust your neighbor, Andrusiv told me—a culture embodied by the KGB, the institution that nurtured and produced Russian President Vladimir Putin.

With all of that history as a backdrop, the current war is not an isolated event. But the reality of war still commands—it suffocates, dominates, torments. In experiencing just a tiny bit of the Ukrainian reality, I have thought often about Simone Weil’s reflections on the power of force in her study of Homer’s Iliad, in which she argues that “the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force employed by man, force that subjugates man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away.” Force that enslaves, force that deforms all it touches, “turns anybody who is subject to it into a thing.”²

In Ukraine the unwelcome power of force by an outside invader is evident everywhere, and not just when you see or hear the results of a drone attack. “You live with depression about the war,” Andrusiv told me. “I’m only a nun. I don’t fight in the hotspots. But, yes, I am tired. Even when I am not thinking about the war, I know it is always there, the reality.” And yet, as a Christian witness, “you also live into hope,” she said.

Hope is seen as a real prospect, even in Lent. And in contrast to the Russian Orthodox Church’s embrace of the Russian invasion as a holy war to save Russian and Christian values, the vision shared by most Ukrainians is for an independent, pluralistic, multireligious country—which is essentially what Ukraine is right now. As has been pointed out many times, in a country that is 72 percent Eastern Orthodox, 10 percent atheist, 9 percent Catholic, and 2 percent Protestant, Ukraine has a Jewish president.

The vision remains intact, but the fight to sustain it has come at a steep cost.

Until recently, Dominican Father Petro Balog, in this 2024 photo, headed the Institute of Religious Sciences of St. Thomas Aquinas in Kyiv, Ukraine. Chris Herlinger

“Hundreds of thousands have been killed, even more wounded, millions have become refugees, and thousands of Ukrainian cities and villages have been destroyed,” Dominican Father Petro Balog, who until recently headed the Institute of Religious Sciences of St. Thomas Aquinas in Kyiv, said in anticipation of the three-year mark of the full-scale invasion.

It is a strange life now, Balog and Andrusiv told me—of drone attacks, of constant worry, of mourning losses for fallen soldiers and family members, of cynicism about how war corrodes society. “Where there are weapons, there is money,” Andrusiv said.

The worry is felt not only in Ukraine. On the same weekend in March that I spoke to Andrusiv, I talked to Laszok, whose ministry is based in Philadelphia. The day before my interview, Laszok had traveled to Washington, DC, to a “Don’t Abandon Ukraine” rally in front of the White House to show support for the Ukrainian cause. Hundreds attended; among the centerpieces of the event was the unfurling of an enormous yellow and blue Ukrainian flag, said to be the world’s largest.

The Ukrainian colors have become a beloved symbol throughout the world, and with them, a commemoration of something hopeful (resistance, victory) but also mourning (loss of life, particularly of soldiers.) “I pray for the soldiers, the defenders,” Laszok said. “I think it’s the soldiers who are keeping up the spirit of Ukraine because of their willingness to die for their children and for their countrymen. They are martyrs, whether they are Christian or not.”

The soldiers, the national colors—all have solidified national identity, though as Laszok makes clear, a war is an awful way to solidify an identity.

Of course, there are many pieces and elements to this story. Laszok said she knows her fellow sisters in Ukraine were initially paralyzed with fear when the full-scale invasion began. But acts of international solidarity and mercy, particularly the help from other sisters in her order, including in the United States, spurred them into action. St. Basil sisters in the US sent eight shipping containers of humanitarian supplies to the sisters in Ukraine.

I saw these acts of solidarity and mercy myself during my assignments from 2022 to 2024. Catholic sisters in Poland welcomed Ukrainian refugees at Ukrainian Catholic parishes in Krakow and Warsaw. I first met Andrusiv in Lviv, in western Ukraine, where she showed me the convent where she and other sisters had welcomed and hosted displaced families. On a later assignment, Andrusiv showed me a residence in Kyiv that her order plans to convert into a rehabilitation center to help soldiers and their families recover and heal from the war’s trauma and wounds, both physical and psychological.

A memorial in central Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, commemorates fallen Ukrainian soldiers who have died since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Chris Herlinger

And not far from the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia—a city close to the front that has been bombarded by Russian forces—I witnessed the life-giving work of St. Basil Sisters Lucia Murashko and Romana Hutnyk as they distributed humanitarian supplies to people in forgotten rural villages like Preobrarzhenka, a small hamlet an hour’s drive from Zaporizhzhia where the roads are unpaved and muddy, and whose remaining residents are predominantly elderly, among Ukraine’s poorest.

Most people there are still determined not to leave their homes and small plots of land, where for decades they have quietly eked out sustenance, planting gardens and raising cows, chickens, and other livestock. Living within earshot of artillery bombardments—one resident laconically compared them to the sounds of birds chirping—they are both the victims of war and among its most gallant survivors. They continue hoping for the best, and they remain where they are because they see no other alternative.Even those who eventually felt they had to leave see a bigger picture than their own experiences. Their lives are part of the larger Ukrainian tapestry, its historical narrative.

“We won’t give up,” said Diakova Lubov, a cancer survivor I met in Zaporizhzhia in 2024. “We wait for victory.” Lubov had been displaced from her home not far from Preobrazhenka. When I spoke to her, she was living in a dormitory residence in Zaporizhzhia, the recipient of aid from Murashko. She was thankful for the assistance.

Ukrainians wait amid exhaustion. “We’re all tired of the war. Our first wish is to have peace,” Murashko told me the afternoon I joined her for the distribution of cleaning kits for the villagers. “But it doesn’t mean we give up.”

What giving up means is hard to gauge right now. Ukraine is under great pressure from the US to accept a peace agreement that will officially cede the territory it has lost to Russia since 2014. Will Ukrainians accept that as the cost for ending Russia’s unprovoked full-scale war of aggression—a war that the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security rightly notes continues by “deliberately targeting civilians and committing grave abuses”?

Andrusiv, Laszok, Balog, and Lubov—displaced from her small home and living in a crowded dormitory space—recount this reality with uncommon resolve and great passion. They are not likely to support any “peace” that accedes to Russian demands. “I can’t accept that we’d be giving up. It’s not OK, it’s not OK,” Andrusiv said emphatically. She believes that would cause an outcry in Europe: “Europe knows what will happen if Ukraine just gives up.”

Balog frames the current situation in terms of civilizations acting, or not acting, well. “We cannot allow an uncivilized world to defeat the civilized one, for evil to triumph over good, for diplomacy and geopolitics to distort truth and trade away millions of human lives and entire nations,” he told me. “That is certainly not God’s will.”

Among the Ukrainian and Ukrainian American religious I have met, there is a quiet confidence at work, especially as a hard, harsh Ukrainian winter ends and spring promises renewal and hope.

For her part, Andrusiv says Ukrainians should be proud: They have resisted an old foe, and they have protected their land. “We’re still alive,” she said. And something of the resurrection narrative “is still alive.”

“Everything goes to God,” she said. “The world is so loud, and events are moving so quickly. It is important to find peace, the quiet. God is like a doctor, he is talking when we’re quiet. He is the doctor of our minds, our souls, our bodies.”Laszok finds in the Psalms the wisdom and support she needs amid the daily heartbreaks of Ukraine’s challenges, including these words from Psalm 31:

In you, O Lord, I seek refuge;
do not let me ever be put to shame;
in your righteousness deliver me.
Incline your ear to me;
rescue me speedily.
Be a rock of refuge for me,
a strong fortress to save me.

“If I didn’t have hope in eternal life I would be depressed, even suicidal. It’s hard to understand how people can be so cruel,” Laszok said. And yet, speaking of Ukrainians everywhere, she said, “We are beloved children of God, experiencing Calvary, Gethsemane. He is with us in our suffering.”