Russian air strikes hit the patriarchal cathedral of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church on 25 November, during the largest drone attack on Kyiv since the Russian invasion last February.
The Ukrainian authorities claimed to have shot down all but one of the 75 drones which attacked the capital overnight, injuring five people.
The cathedral reported that one drone crashed near the cathedral and the impact broke doors and windows, and furnishings in the residence of the head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Galych.
Church members collected fragments of the drone from around the cathedral. “In exchange for gifts from St Nicholas, we will receive original souvenirs,” commented Archbishop Shevchuk.
The attack came on the evening of the ninetieth anniversary of the Holodomor, when Ukrainian officials and Church leaders commemorated the victims of the deliberate starvation of Ukraine by the Soviet Union in 1932-33.
Millions of Ukrainians died in the man-made famine, which the Vatican and 16 other states recognised as a genocide in 2019.
Archbishop Shevchuk joined the official remembrance service in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra – the “Monastery of the Caves” confiscated from the Moscow-linked Ukrainian Orthodox Church earlier this year.
The Synod of Bishops of the Ukrainian Catholic Church issued a statement for the anniversary, calling on “our faithful and all people of goodwill to solidarity and mutual assistance in confronting the fierce enemy”.
“We ask for a more active dissemination of the truth about the war in Ukraine around the world so that the enemy’s propaganda falsity does not find a place in the hearts of people,” it said.
In his own message, Shevchuk said that the Russian invasion “displays all the characteristics of genocide” and urged Ukrainians not to lose hope in their “spiritual struggle”.
“The enemy wants to debilitate us, sow despair, and want us to lose heart, but the Ukrainian Church, our churches, and religious organizations are preachers of hope,” he said.
In a public address on 28 November, Vladimir Putin appeared beside two enlarged Orthodox icons to warn the West against interference in Russian elections in March next year.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow said he would pray that Putin would continue to work for the country’s “benefit”.