To listen to some news reports today, most of our leaders are resigned to the probability that within two weeks Russia will have captured Kyiv and set up a new government in Ukraine, one loyal to Russia. They are hopeful that most of the invading Russian military will withdraw, and things will “calm down.” Any spike in gas or food prices for Americans will return to more normally (inflated) levels, and the stock market will bounce back to pre-invasion numbers.

But the nightmare will only be beginning for the people of Ukraine–loss of Western freedoms and the expansion of Russia’s FSB security service that will surveil and punish any who resist will be the new daily reality. What will this mean for the Ukrainian leaders, Christians and families? How can we pray for them?

What will a new government mean for Ukrainian leaders?

Kyev monastery and church ht Marc Rattray

Even if they must flee the capitol of Kyev, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his cabinet vow to continue governing. One US Official has been quoted as saying, “Russia intends to decapitate the Ukrainian government.” But Zelensky has refused to leave Ukraine. He has called his people to fight, issuing guns to everyone who is willing to use them, and inspired his people saying, “We have no need for another Cold War, or a bloody war, or a hybrid war, but if we are attacked militarily, if they try to take away our freedom, our lives, our children’s lives, we will defend ourselves,” he said. “When you attack, you will see our faces and not our spines, our faces.”

Our Ambassador to UN organizations such as the Human Rights Commission has delivered an intelligence report about a “kill list” of persons to be killed or detained in re-education camps prepared long before the invasion. “Likely” targets are those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, as well as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ persons.”

Any one who has read A Day in the Life of Ivan Desinovich knows something of what may be in store for Ukrainian leaders. Written by Russian Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn and based on his own experience in the Gulag, it details the daily reality he endured in the camps: They worked 14+ hours a day in a Siberian winter, unless the prisoners were saved by a blizzard that would sink the mercury south of forty degrees below zero. They prayed for blizzards.

Beyond the long days of work they had 10 minutes at breakfast, 5 minutes at lunch and 5 minutes at dinner. An hour between reveille and lining up for work. Forty-five minutes after dinner. Sundays they might have off, but would probably work at least one, maybe two Sundays a month. The only physical enemy more “vicious” than the cold was hunger. Most of the men ate their thin gruel “chasing bits of rotten fish among the cabbage leaves and spitting bones out on the table.”

We can hope that conditions would not be so bad 70 years later, but indications of a “kill list” and instructions to use deadly force on Ukrainians who protest indicate Putin’s will to crush any resistance compares favorably to Stalin’s. As Putin has prepared to devour Ukraine, he has also clamped down on Russia. Throughout 2021 he imprisoned or exiled all his political opposition.

The only way Russian socialism survives next door to the freedom and prosperity of the West, so visible to Russians watching Ukraine, is through surveillance, murder and re-education camps or prisons. Resistance will be so costly.

What will happen to the Christians?

Voice Of the Martyrs has been reporting on atrocities against Evangelical Christians in Ukraine ever since Pro-Russian rebels took over parts of Donatsk and Luhansk in 2014. When the rebels approached Elena’s Valichko’s hometown in early April of 2014 her husband, “Vladimir, told her to take the kids and leave the city. ‘He took us to the train station and we said goodbye,’ she explains. ‘He said, “I love you.” He kissed me and the children, and left.’”

“Several days later, Elena’s life, and that of her eight children, ages 2 to 16, suddenly turned upside down. Vladimir had been murdered for his faith.” You can listen to her 4 ½ min story here.

The Evangelical Baptist Church in Ukraine reports 113,000 members, and there are many other Evangelical churches in Ukraine. At a recent Sunday night service in the Kyev suburbs, one Baptist pastor challenged his people, ““I do not know in what mood you came here, but I know for sure that if you open your heart to the Lord, you will come out renewed, strengthened in Jesus Christ, and ready for anything that is challenging our life.” Jesus please protect your people as the tanks roll in.

What will happen to families and children?

It’s hard to wrap our minds around how life will change for Ukrainian families and children–losing the freedoms of the West and going back under the totalitarian rule of the communists. But novelist James Michener gives us a glimpse in his book, The Bridge at Andau, which documented the stories of Hungarians who fled their country after a failed attempt to throw off the communist yoke in 1956. Boys and girls and teens and college students had helped lead the revolt. Michener interviewed girls like 13-year old Vera Hadjok who described the overwhelming propaganda effort and the power of the communist culture taught in their schools and how they resisted it.

As Vera told Michener, “In school we were taught the Russian language and Russian history and how great the Russian communist state was. But we all sat there very still and bitter inside. We despised the teachers who told us such lies. Neither Russians nor the communists in Hungary could ever make us believe the lies they told us.”

How did Vera know they were lies?

Because, explained Vera’s mother, “at night after we had put out the lights upstairs we would gather in the cellar, I would teach the children the true history of Hungary. We would discuss morality and the Catholic religion and the lessons of Cardinal Mindszenty. We never allowed the children to go to sleep until we had washed away all the evil things they might have heard that day.”

Another Hungarian father told Michener, “When we watched our children growing up there were moments of unbearable anxiety. We would see our sons come home from school…repeating communist lies. When we asked them who they loved they would say, ‘Mama, and Papa, and Brother Stalin.’ They would bring us pictures of Stalin to put in our living rooms and we would know that their teachers would ask them each day, ‘Do your parents love Comrade Stalin?’ And we would have to make believe that we did.

“And almost every night when we went to bed we would whisper, ‘Do you think they are old enough yet to know?’ You see this family had to know the exact moment at which a boy could be saved from communism and yet not too soon for fear the child might inadvertently blurt out the truth and destroy the whole family. Because if the AVO [the Hungarian KGB], suspected, they simply came around one night and took the father away. Sometimes he was never seen again.

“More whispering. More consultations. I myself…three times have participated  in the first family meeting. It was almost always at night, and the parents would bring the children together and they would ask casually, ‘What did you learn in school today?’ And the child would explain how Russia and Stalin were the only things Hungary could trust in and the father would say simply, “That’s all a lie, son.’

“It was a terrifying moment. You could feel death in the room, and then usually I would speak and I would say, ‘Istvan, do you know what death is?’ And regardless of what Istvan replied, I would say, ‘And if you tell anyone about tonight, your father will die.’

“Always the children understood, and they would begin to ask questions, and pretty soon the mother would say, ‘We want to give you certain things that will help you.’ And usually it would be a part of the Bible or a poem of Petofy’s.

But the moment always came when such a father would have to discipline such a son. Then the father would take down the strap with the certain knowledge that if the son wanted revenge on his family, he could have it…I remember when I had to discipline my son. When I was through he stood looking at me, and he knew that I was afraid. And he also knew that…more than my own life I wanted to see him to grow up to be a good man. Out of such moments our family life was built.

Vera’s Mom said, ‘That was a chance we had to take.”

This is what it means to take out the Western democratic government of Ukraine and install a Russian puppet government—the kill lists for leaders, the persecution of dissidents and minorities in the camps, and knowing the schools will be teaching your children to love “Brother Putin,” among a host of other changes. Imagine having to submit to all the surveillance, cultural pressure, propaganda and lies, or be crushed by the new government.

The courageous Ukrainian response  we are seeing today challenges us–what are we prepared to do for Ukraine? We can read these stories of socialist oppression, as well as Orwell’s Animal Farm, tell these stories to our children and grandchildren, showing them the evils of communism.

We can pray mighty prayers of solidarity with the Ukrainian people. May God help them defeat the communists, expose the lies of the Russian propaganda machine, and stand firm in their love of freedom and the Lord Jesus. And may God help us to stand firmly for truth, freedom, and Jesus Christ here.

As you watch the missiles fall and the tanks roll into Ukraine, what are you thinking and praying?