After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, interest in Christianity grew in areas of Eastern Europe previously behind the Iron Curtain. During the ‘90s and early 2000s, Khalil served as a missionary in Russia. She witnessed how, after Russian President Vladimir Putin came to power, Protestants’ religious freedoms in Russia began disappearing. Then, in 2014, when Putin annexed Crimea and other parts of Eastern Ukraine, he brought back Iron Curtain-levels of persecution to those areas.
Such oppression is evident in the Ukrainian territory Russia has occupied in the last three years. Websites like RussiaTorturesChristians.org, run by the same team that runs the U.S.-based nonprofit Ukraine Freedom Project, publish evidence of such mistreatment.
The reality is different outside of Russian-controlled territory. Jeff King, who has worked as president of the nonprofit International Christian Concern for more than two decades, said the “government is not hostile towards Christians.” Christian Concern workers “deal with heavy persecution. And Ukraine overall does not match that. It doesn’t really show up on our radar,” King told WORLD.
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