Kremlin Lies Target Evangelicals
Reflections on Ukraine, Russia and the United States: March 16, 2024
My family lived in the Washington, D.C., area for more than 55 years and, during the 1970s and 1980s, I was asked to help host foreign guests attending the President’s Annual Prayer Breakfast. This was the beginning of what would become a lifelong relationship for me with Russia and the Russian people, both personally and professionally. In 1990, I began 25 years of commuting back and forth more than 100 times between Moscow and our nation’s capital, and the opportunity to host and subsequently build long-term friendships with many Russians and Ukrainians proved to be a life-changing and deeply meaningful experience for me.
Once my work ended in Russia, following the Kremlin’s decision to close down the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) in 2014, I gradually reduced my involvement in the National Prayer Breakfast, though I still have a number of friends who remain engaged. I was deeply troubled when I received reports that at this year’s National Prayer Breakfast and several related events (the International Religious Freedom Summit and “Ukraine Week”), Russian disinformation – let’s just call it “lies” – was seriously undercutting support for Ukraine in its struggle for survival against Russia’s brutal invasion. At these events, there were rumors being spread about Ukraine as an “egregious violator of religious freedom.” Among Evangelicals, this charge could seriously damage efforts to win Congressional support to fund weapons and ammunition. Support was being blocked by a small group of right-wing Republicans, despite the fact that the majority of Congressional members favored our government’s continuing support. The current dysfunction in the House of Representatives has made this blockage of the majority of the Congress’ support for Ukraine possible.
We now know the principal source of this disinformation. Robert Amsterdam, a paid lobbyist for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (the Russian Orthodox Church’s Ukrainian subsidiary) is spreading these false charges. He claims that Ukraine has no religious freedom because of its efforts to break the ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and its subsidiary in Ukraine.
Amsterdam is not currently registered as a lobbyist for either of the two entities who fund his work. The first entity is the Moscow subsidiary of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine, and the second entity is Vadym Novynskyi, a wealthy Russian oligarch who obtained Ukrainian citizenship in 2012 through a former pro-Russian President. Novynskyi became a member of the Ukrainian parliament, where he represented Putin’s agenda while securing over $6 billion in assets. Forbes described him as one of Ukraine’s “most Putin friendly billionaires.” Having fled Ukraine, Novynskyi now resides in Zurich, Switzerland, where his church supports the war against Ukraine, and where the members are told that Patriarch Kirill tells Russian soldiers that all of their sins will be washed away if they die fighting for victory for their Russian motherland.
Despite his lack of credentials, Amsterdam has a number of media outlets for his disinformation, one of which features his interview with Tucker Carlson in a video “Christianity Under Attack in Ukraine.” He urges Americans, especially Evangelicals who he knows are sensitive about religious freedom, to lobby against funding for Ukraine. He and his colleagues continue to make the assertion that “Ukraine is now one of the least tolerant places in the world for religious freedom” and my contacts tell me that many of the guests at the National Prayer Breakfast and its related events were being convinced by him.
This is an outrageous charge, as anyone who works in Ukraine today knows. Not only is it simply not true, Ukrainian churches and religious orders are being brutalized by Russian forces as you read this essay, while these churches continue to support each other in wartime. After several trips to Ukraine in the 1990s, when I returned again in 2016 and 2017, I discovered an exciting religious environment nurtured by the Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, which represents around 95% of the people of faith in Ukraine. The leaders of these different religious communities, whom I had the privilege of meeting, were unanimous in their enthusiasm for the freedom they had and the support of their government. Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Greek Catholics, together with Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists, and Charismatic Christians, celebrated the equality of all religions, faiths, and religious organizations. I never experienced this religious freedom in Russia, except in the early 1990s before it shifted as the Russian Orthodox Church became the state church under Putin.
When the Russians invaded Ukraine in February 2022, religious communities were systematically targeted, seized, and destroyed and religious freedom was severely restricted, especially in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. In the first two years of the conflict, 630 religious structures were damaged or destroyed, which included Ukrainian Orthodox churches and 206 evangelical houses of prayer. Churches were looted, deliberately vandalized, and often turned into facilities to be used by Russian forces. Through it all, these churches helped each other and reached out to the needy, especially the elderly, orphans, and displaced families.
The disinformation distributed by Amsterdam and his colleagues, with the support of the Kremlin’s propaganda outlets, is outrageously false, yet Evangelicals in particular have latched on to these falsehoods and are repeating these themes to their families and friends without checking their veracity. The Kremlin is at work undermining our democracy and we need to be aware of Putin’s lies and those of his well-paid American, Ukrainian, and Russian publicists in the States.
Helpful Resources:
Religious Freedom Initiative of Mission Eurasia, USA, “Faith Under Fire: Navigating Religious Freedom Amidst the War in Ukraine,” (Mission Eurasia, November 2023 – www.MissionEurasia.org).
Lauren Homer, “What’s Wrong with Robert Amsterdam’s Analysis of Ukraine,” (March 12, 2024). Law and Liberty International’s Lauren Homer is a religious freedom and human rights lawyer; my essay is partially based on her detailed critique of Amsterdam’s falsehoods (lawandlibertytrust.org).