Amid ideological hurdles facing Russia in occupied regions in Ukraine, evangelical churches are targets for Russian soldiers to allegedly root out anti-Russian sentiment, if not levy allegations of American havens for "spies."
"You don't run a church: You run a nest of American spies," Russian soldiers who stormed Melitopol's Church of God's Grace told its Baptist pastor Mykhailo Brytsyn during interrogation after an armed takeover, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The evangelical churches are being targeted by Vladimir Putin's invasion because the ideology is not in line with Putin's favored Russian Orthodox Church as Putin attempts to turn contested regions into full-hearted Russian territories after his years long war on the South and East of Ukraine.
Ukraine and American officials told the Journal there have been dozens of evangelical pastors abducted, tortured, exiled, and killed in an attempt at a religious whitewashing of ideological diversions from Russian orthodoxy.
There have been at least 30 Ukrainian clergy killed, 26 taken as hostages, according to a February report by the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance.
"They have to control everything," Ukrainian-American Baptist pastor Dmytro Bodyu, who was a hostage for eight days but lived to be returned, told the Journal. "If you're a Christian, you are freethinking, and can discern what is good and what is bad.
"In a country like Russia, they don't like that."
Russian denies targeting churches for religious persecution, countering it is a Ukraine narrative for its own religious war on the Russian Orthodox Church in contest regions, according to the Journal.
The evangelical church rose to be influential in eastern Ukraine after its breaking from the former Soviet Union, another mark that might create Russian animosity.
"The fear of America disappeared, and it happened very fast," Hennadiy Mokhnenko, a Ukrainian Baptist pastor told the Journal. "The doors opened from the East and the West, and a breeze passed right through Ukraine."