An Interview with Pastor Petr Dudnik

Petr Dudnik leads Good News Church in Sloviansk [Russian: Slaviansk], a city with more than 100,000 residents in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk Region. Formed as a youth group in 1980, Good News is now one of approximately 100 Pentecostal congregations in mostly central and eastern regions of Ukraine that are affiliated with the World Assemblies of God Fellowship. 

Pastor Petr was raised by devout Baptist parents in the town of Oleksandria [Russian: Aleksandriia] in the central Kirovohrad Region. Now aged 50, he is among the last generation of Protestants who were barred from higher education in the Soviet Union. Following military service, he was touched by the sparks of spiritual awakening apparent in 1989 and made a personal dedication of his life to God. He has lived in Sloviansk since 1991. 

Sloviansk was held by pro-Russian separatists for three months during 2014. While it has since remained under Ukrainian government control, the front line is only around 50 miles away. The editor of the East-West Church Report met Pastor Petr at Good News Church in the city in midOctober 2018. The interview took place in Russian. 

What is your experience of the Donbass conflict?

On 12 April 2014 war came to our city. Sloviansk was the first city to be seized by pro-Russian separatists and Russian military personnel. Today the war has gone on for nearly five years, but back then it was a shock to everyone. We were forced out of our church building; 100 fighters lived here, where you are sitting. There is a film on YouTube shot by the separatists, showing them firing tanks from the church’s territory in the direction of the Ukrainian army. The narrator of the film says, “Look how Russians fight!”1 These are the people who killed four of my brethren. These are the people who led members of my own church out to be shot. Last week we buried one of our people, a musician in the church named Nikolai Simakov. He worked as a security guard at the conscription office. When they decided to shoot him, the gun kept misfiring. They said, “God is preserving you,” and let him go. He died due to all the stresses of these past four years. He was around 60 years old. In total, four members of our church were held captive, including our bishop, Aleksei Demidovich. They tried to shoot another of them, and the gun also misfired. 

Who were the four who were killed? 

They were from a neighboring Pentecostal church, the Transfiguration of the Lord. Two deacons—Volodya [Volodymyr] Velychko, who was married with eight children, and Viktor Bradarsky, who was married with three children— and two of the pastor’s sons, Ruvim and Albert Pavenko. 

 Why were they targeted? 

There is a whole host of reasons. The first and main one is that the war which is going on now in Ukraine, in my view, is an absolutely religious war. Radical Orthodoxy is among the rebellious demons—along with Communism and the spirit of hatred—shaping the ideology and strategy of the people who seized our city. For example, their Constitution—quite short—said that we were to have only one Church, Orthodoxy of the Moscow Patriarchate. All others were excluded.2 They defined us this way: “You are the American faith. Americans are our enemies. Enemies must be destroyed.” All very simple. So we should be killed, although we did not do anything bad. We did not show ourselves when they came, but we were defined as enemies by default. The people who killed those four wore patches saying “Russian Orthodox Army.” I myself saw these people. I was here in the city, and some of the people running around with assault rifles were wearing those patches.3

Back when the bombing began here, gas stations closed, and there was no fuel in town. The stores began to close because there were no deliveries, and the bakery stopped working. Earlier that year God had warned us prophetically of a difficult time coming. In my first sermon of 2014, I gave some practical advice about keeping a store of food because it would be needed. I did not want to sow panic. I did not know there would be war, but I received a revelation in the Spirit about the coming turmoil. When the war came, I managed to buy 1,000 loaves of bread—we were always oriented to serve people, and we had an idea of how to help the city. Downstairs in the church foyer around 60 people began preparing this bread. They cut and dried it, and made simple soup and tea. We were sitting up here in the office discussing how and in what neighborhoods we would distribute this food. From where I was sitting I had a good view out of the window, and I suddenly saw two cars approach and stop. Masked men in military uniform jumped out, and snipers took up position. They seized this building and started searching for inflammatory material. Everyone—including children and teenagers—was made to lie face down on the floor. Several of our pastors were hit with rifle butts. 

I had no idea what they were looking for because we had no connection with the military. Finally, they left us alone, and we showed them out. Then they seized the church a second time, and a third. Then they said, “You can’t gather here,” and the arrests started. Our bishop, Aleksei Demidovich, was arrested and put in Girkin’s cellar.4 I do not know what his fate would have been if God had not intervened. He was freed by a miracle. 

God warned me that I should leave Sloviansk. The following day, as I was driving out of town, they came to arrest me. They said, “Where is the pastor? We have an order to arrest him.” When our caretaker replied that the pastor had left town, one of them said, “If he returns, he will never leave town again.” The other Pentecostal church, Transfiguration of the Lord, continued to hold services as if nothing was going on in the city. Their philosophy was, “This is politics. We are not politicians, we are independent.” Their pastor is a businessman with a staff of some 700, and he taught people how to work below the bullets. But on 8 June 2014—it was Pentecost [most Protestants in former Soviet states celebrate  Easter on the same Sunday as Orthodox]—masked militants approached their building at the end of the service and waited until people started to leave. They said, “You, you, and you.” They knew exactly who to seize, and they put these four into their cars and left.

Was it the people in that church who saw those militants were wearing “Russian Orthodox Army” patches?

It was a person from our church, my deacon. I had left town before that. Our church had been seized, and so when Sunday came—the Pentecost holiday—he went to the service there. He saw people with those patches seize these four and drive them away. Everyone thought they had just been taken captive, to a cellar, but in fact they were taken to a neighborhood of Sloviansk called Artema. There is a fire station there, and the militants beat them up—tortured them—in this fire station. Six months later one of those who took part telephoned the brother of one of those who was killed aiming to extort money out of him. He said, “If you give me money, I will tell you who these people were who killed your brother, and where they are now.” He was thinking that the brother would want revenge, and he wanted to make money. But the brother said, “We won’t take revenge. We are interested in only one question: Why did you do this?” The answer, word for word, was: “We wanted to demoralize the believers in the city.” I heard all this directly from Oleksandr Pavenko, the pastor of that church. 

So that is one reason why they were killed. But there were others. As I said, they were engaged in business. Someone said they were unloading metal from a truck, someone later said this was probably weaponry coming in—there were all these rumors. Plus, Girkin-Strelkov’s senior bodyguard—who organized the whole thing and was later killed in a tank— went through an addiction rehabilitation program that was run by that church. He was quite a scandal-prone guy. He also worked for Oleksandr Pavenko and was fired, so there was a personal grudge there. That is why I say there was a whole complex of reasons.

The one who telephoned also said, “Your lads were brave; when they were beaten, they sang hymns and prayed.” And this is how the shootings happened: The four were released at night. Once they got into their car to drive away, they were escorted along a particular route, and in another part of town a mortar was fired at their car and it caught fire. Volodya Velychko was sitting in the front and was killed instantly. Ruvim and Albert tried to get out of the car, but were shot at close range. Viktor Bradarsky was killed by assault rifle fire as he tried to crawl away. This was evident when their bodies were found later on.5

What was the response of Good News Church to being in a city under siege?

We looked for ways to help the people of the city, because that is our theology—to respond to people’s pain. We evacuated 16,000 people—4,000 from Sloviansk itself and 12,000 from other parts of Donetsk and Luhansk Regions. Every day we evacuated 150-200 people. 

It was very dangerous and complicated. People were going hungry. When we visited homes, we found three people who had starved to death. It was a very difficult and frightening time. But our challenge was to save people physically and to help them spiritually and emotionally. At first people came to our church, and there we put them on buses and drove them out. Then, once the church building was seized, we understood that we could not invite people here. We identified two locations in the city—next to the central swimming pool and the Décor Service store—where we hung up notices advertising daily evacuations from those points at 9 am. We evacuated free of charge; church members who were still permitted to enter Sloviansk took people as far as the Ukrainian checkpoint. From there, we transferred people onto buses and took them further. If people had somewhere to go, we took them to the city of Izium, 30 miles away. The infrastructure in Izium was still working, and so people could  travel onwards from there. The bedridden and disabled were taken to Kharkiv and transferred to volunteer caregivers. If people had no money or nowhere to go, we took them to Sviatohirsk [Russian: Sviatogorsk], 20 miles away. We had our own base there, a camp where we housed and fed people and generally took care of their needs. 

How did the siege end?

The Ukrainian forces did not liberate Sloviansk. It was truly a miracle. Around 40 militants had entered the city on 12 April, but by 4 July there were around 2,000 of them. They had tanks, heavy artillery—it was a huge army, and they controlled the whole of Sloviansk. The city was surrounded by the Ukrainian army. There was shooting from the city at the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian army shot into the city. Many homes were wrecked. Despite opposition from both the separatists and the Ukrainian military, we were going into the city every day, and we could see that everything was getting worse and worse. Along the roads there were concrete blocks and trenches every few hundred feet, and every street was covered in fallen trees. It was impossible to move about. There was no electricity, gas, or water. Tanks appeared on the streets. We understood that if the Ukrainian army started an attack on the city, it would not go smoothly. A portion of the Ukrainian forces would be killed here, and the Ukrainian authorities would say that the city should therefore simply be rained with shells. Sloviansk would be like the pictures of the city of Aleppo in Syria. That was our future. 

Imagine the situation. The city was occupied. We were being oppressed as believers, even held in cellars. As we were evacuating people and entering the town every day, we could see what kind of heavy artillery was standing on the outskirts. We could see that the fate of the city was decided. It would be razed from the face of the earth. So in Sviatohirsk, where we had our camp, we gathered for prayer three times a day. One of the conditions of staying in that camp was that everyone had to attend those prayers. It did not interest us whether or not you were active in our church. You might not pray—that is your right—but you had to be present.

Thirty years ago God gave us a prophecy about our city: Sloviansk is a town of refuge. We never fully understood the essence of this, but we understood that God had a particular affair with our city. If you know the story of Israel, there were six cities with the title “city of refuge” [Joshua 20]. And so we prayed: “God, you told us Sloviansk is a city of refuge. A city of refuge means that we should be receiving refugees. But we are fleeing. We are evacuating people. This is all wrong; it shouldn’t be this way.” We prayed and prayed, and nothing good happened. Everything just got worse and worse. Then a group of people started to pray at night. And on the night of 4 to 5 July 2014, God sent such fear into Girkin and his whole band that they left everything; stores of weapons, medicines, food. They just fled town. The Ukrainian army entered an abandoned city.

Our caretaker, who lives opposite the church, telephoned me at 5 am that night. I was in Sviatohirsk, because by that point I was not allowed to enter the city. He said, “Pastor, there is no one in the church anymore!” Up to that point, there had been around 100 militants living here. The first group of around 15 was Russian secret services— they were easy to distinguish by their behavior. The second group, which came later, was around 40 Don Cossacks, hardcore guys aged around 50 with their own weapons. The third group was local criminals. I asked the caretaker, “What are you doing right now?” He said, “I’m walking around the yard picking up weapons so that local people don’t take them away.” I said, “It’s suspiciously quiet in the city. Why don’t I come by the checkpoint and see what’s going on?” He said he would call back, got on his bicycle and rode past multiple checkpoints. After 40 minutes, he called me and said, “There’s no one here!” He’d seen discarded weapons, half-drunk cups of tea, jackets left behind. 

I called the headquarters of the Ukrainian army. At first they had not allowed us to go past their checkpoint into the city. They thought that we were bringing groceries to the separatists, when in fact we were bringing them to starving people. That meant I had had to forge a relationship with their lieutenantcolonel. We would submit the license numbers of our cars every morning, and those vehicles were permitted to enter. So at 6 am I called this lieutenant-colonel and said, “Vitaly, Sloviansk is free. There is no one there.” He said, “That can’t be true!” That is, there was no operation by the Ukrainians; it was something miraculous from God. I repeat, God drove such fear into the militia that they left everything.6 

Afterwards, we brought out three truckloads of weaponry from our church basement: boxes of mines, RPGs, and ammunition. It was all discarded when they fled.7 But that isn’t the end of the story. Today, Sloviansk has around 55,000 registered displaced persons. That means our city has truly become a city of refuge.8 

How did your church’s response to the situation develop after the siege was lifted? 

We have been engaged not only in the physical restoration of the city, but in its emotional and psychological restoration. There are different kinds of people in Sloviansk. For instance, if a husband went to fight with the separatists in Donetsk and his wife remained here—and there are many such cases—it is obvious that they support Russia. Pro-Ukrainian support also rose sharply. It was an explosive situation. 

God revealed to us some very simple things that should be done. We understood that we needed to reduce the level of hatred. For that, the Word of God is needed. So we put the Word of God on more than 20 billboards in the city. These were texts encouraging people to soften their hatred, such as, “Forgive, and you will be forgiven” [Luke 6:37] and “Do good to one another” [1 Thess. 5:15]. 

We also brought assistance—such as a roofer or carpenter— into neighborhoods where homes had been wrecked. We would say to people, “We are ready to help you on one condition. We will give you extra construction materials to help your neighbor, an old lady. The condition is that you help to replace her roof first, and then you fix your own. If you agree, we will give you the materials.” Of course people agreed, because they never expected to receive anything. But when they did, and went to help the old ladies, their hearts became softer. They began to relate to one another differently. In this way, through the Word of God and good deeds, the level of hatred began to go down. 

What is your Frontline Mission and how did it come about? 

After 2014 we started helping along the front line, for instance, in the area near Debaltseve, where there were huge battles in early 2015. In Svitlodarsk, [Russian: Svetlodarsk, five miles from Debaltseve and now on the Ukrainian side of the front line] we found people living in cellars. We brought bread, water matches, and a generator. However, we could see that while we were helping them, these people still had a dependent way of thinking. 

To my mind, one of the reasons for this whole situation is the very low spirit of entrepreneurship here. The east of Ukraine is a highly industrialized region. In Kramatorsk, a city very close to us, there might be 10,000 people working in a single factory. In Mariupol, there is a factory with 100,000 workers. People’s thinking is shaped by the fact that someone else directs them, decides for them, and so they do not take responsibility for themselves. If something does not turn out, this thinking pushes people to blame someone else, and also to invite others to solve the problem. And so we have “Putin, come and help!” Or, “the West, come and help!” 

We had an idea—“What if our people lived in these towns?” We organized a missionary school, Frontline Mission. People from all over Ukraine study intensively here and also in the city of Pokrovsk [60 miles southwest of Sloviansk] for a month, followed by five months’ practical work; the school requires a commitment of six months. This project has been operating for a year, and we already have had 15 such schools, so around 400 missionaries have studied with us. Besides the theological component, there is special training on how to give first aid to the wounded, how to evacuate yourself and others, how to be safe during bombing and near landmines. We currently have 32 missionary teams, usually of five people, working in every major settlement along the whole front line, from Luhansk to Mariupol. That is a very powerful force. 

I believe that in the future the separatist-controlled areas will return to Ukraine. But very few people in Ukraine— civilian or military—appreciate what is happening there. In five years of war, a whole generation has grown up—a child of 12 is now 17. Very many people have taken up arms. Some have smelled blood—they have killed—and children have grown up with all this. People are saturated in hatred. There is no army in the world that can deal with this, except for the Church of Jesus Christ. This means that missionaries will have to go there who are able to answer blows with love and to reduce the level of hatred; who are capable of working with this population and bringing them to a state in which they are able to receive the Word of God. These are our challenges ahead.

Notes:

1. The tanks have “To Kiev” [Ukrainian: Kyiv] and “To Lvov” [Ukrainian: Lviv] painted on the side. The video also features men praying aloud from Orthodox prayer books outside the entrance to Good News Church. “NONA strel’ba iz tserkvi,” YouTube, 7 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foD-oNFpZyo.
2. No longer online, the 2014 Constitution of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic declared Orthodoxy to be that territory’s “primary and prevailing” faith—using the same terminology as the late Russian Empire—and endorsed opposition to “religious sects.”
3.  A video made in support of the “Russian Orthodox Army” may be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT9y3Tkk59U. The Army’s allegiance to Orthodoxy appears superficial. See Geraldine Fagan, “Ukraine’s Rebels Worship the Past, Not God,” Moscow Times, 13 August 2014, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/ukrainesrebels-worship-the-past-not-god-38317.
4.  Russian military veteran Igor Girkin (also known as Strelkov) led the rebel operation to seize Sloviansk. Girkin is also one of four men indicted by international prosecutors on 19 June 2019 for the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014. See Andrew E. Kramer, “Four to Face Murder Charges in Downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,” New York Times, 19 June 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/world/europe/mh17-ukrainerussia-suspects.html.
5.  According to the Ukrainian government, the four were executed on Girkin’s orders and torched in their vehicle to obscure evidence. See [in Russian] “Stali izvestny detali ubiistva pastora i ego detei v Slavianske, InVictory, 20 July 2014, www.invictory.com/news/story52179-Александр-Павенко.html. In July 2014 Vice News reported from Sloviansk on the exhumation of civilian bodies—including the four Pentecostals—from a mass grave. At that stage, members of Transfiguration Church believed the four had been killed for their cars. The dispatch includes graphic footage: “Missing Civilian Bodies Found in Mass Graves: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 63),” YouTube, 31 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBsEkF_GY0E. 
6. Contemporary on-the-ground coverage of the Ukrainian recapture of Sloviansk by Vice News also notes the absence of a battle. See “Ukraine Recaptures Sloviansk: Russian Roulette (Dispatch 54),” YouTube, 8 July 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMBvMuuTOWU. 
7. Footage of this weaponry may be viewed (from 03.44) in a film made by Good News Church: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdn82DBsayI.
8. According to 2017 Ukrainian government statistics, more than 63,000 displaced persons have moved to Sloviansk district. [In Ukrainian] “U Slov’ians’ku prozhivae bil’she 30 tisiach peremishchenikh osib. Stala vidoma statistika po oblasti,” 6262.com.ua, 21 August 2017, https:// www.6262.com.ua/news/1768323/u-slovansku-prozivae-bilse-30- tisac-peremisenih-osib-stala-vidoma-statistika-po-oblasti.