Little forgiveness for Russia on ‘Forgiveness Sunday’ in Ukraine

“What they [Russians] are doing is awful,” said Sus, who presides over services at Saints Peter and Paul Garrison Church in Lviv’s historic old town.

“We have to forgive — not because we are weak, but because … it is very important that we are not poisoned by this evil,” he told CBC News.

The historic church was unusually full on Sunday, with hundreds standing shoulder to shoulder in the ornate building as Sus delivered his plea to defend Ukraine, but not at the cost of dehumanizing the enemy.

“Despite all the terrible things that have happened in the war, our soldiers are keeping their human face — they want to respect the prisoners and our enemies — and they are doing that to try to stop this war immediately.”

It’s unknown how many Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the fighting, but the United Nations claims that as of Saturday, there have been more than 364 Ukrainian civilian deaths — a number that observers say is conservative.

‘I can’t forgive Russians’

On Sunday, during an attempted evacuation of the besieged southeastern city of Mariupol, Ukraine’s government said Russian troops fired on and killed many civilians, including children.

The downtown areas of entire cities, such as Kharkiv, have been demolished by Russian artillery shells. And while the core of the capital Kyiv remains largely intact, suburbs have sustained immense damage, mostly to residential buildings.

At the Lviv church service, one middle-aged woman wearing a Ukrainian military uniform identified herself as Alexandra and said she was 52 years old.

She said she joined the army three years ago because she was so fearful that Russia might attack further into her country, beyond the regions of Donbas and Luhansk, which Russia-backed troops have controlled since 2014.

Alexandra said she had just finished a 24-hour shift helping newly enlisted soldiers begin their training and adjusting to life in the army and decided to stop at the church on her way home.

But she said that after listening to the bishop’s call for forgiveness, she could not do as he asked.

“It will be a sin for what I will tell you next,” she told CBC News outside the service.

“I will forgive them [Russians] only if they will be in the ground,” Alexandra said, implying the only Russian soldiers worthy of forgiveness are dead soldiers. “Only then I will forgive them. Now, I can’t forgive Russians, it’s impossible.”

A family divided

Lviv is several hundred kilometres from Kyiv and further still from the encircled and shattered Ukrainian cities that are closer to Russia.

The city has become a key transportation link for people from across the country trying to flee to Poland, and there are 20-kilometre-long lineups at the nearby border crossing.

Among those listening to the sermon outside the church was 26-year-old Anastasiya Solomko.

She had come on a train with her two-year-old son, Bogdan, from Kharkiv a few days earlier to stay with friends in Lviv. She said her husband, Yaroslavl, stayed behind in Kharkiv to help with evacuation efforts.

“We were in my mother’s house, which is close to a kindergarten, when artillery hit the kindergarten,” Solomko said.

She said two shells struck the building next to the one they were in, destroying all of the windows in her mother’s apartment, but the family wasn’t hurt. They decided to get out the next day.

Kharkiv is a short drive to Russia’s border, and Ukrainians and Russians share many family connections, which Solomko said makes the pain and hurt from Russia’s invasion all the more unbearable.

“I talk to people in Russia, but they are living in another reality,” she said.

“They don’t understand what is going on with us.”

Solomko said even her father, who lives in Russia, refuses to believe her when she tells him about the devastation from the Russian bombing campaign and how it is reducing Ukrainian cities to rubble.

“He wrote me, ‘Don’t worry, they will come and save you from the Nazis,'” she said. “He doesn’t understand what the war is.”

‘I believe the war will stop quickly’

Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented the attack on Ukraine as a “special operation” to rid the country of Nazis and to free it from the domination of the West.

The Russian government is attempting to hide the truth about the brutality of the Russian invasion from its population — banning practically all independent media outlets in the country, instigating possible 15-year prison sentences for anyone who protests and making it illegal to refer to the conflict as a “war.”

Ukraine claims that as many as 11,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, although the Kremlin has publicly acknowledged only a few hundred casualties.

Solomko said her husband wants her to cut her father out of their lives for his stubborn support of Putin, but she says she clings to hope that eventually he will see the truth.

“We talk to him, but it’s difficult to explain.”

Ukraine’s army has performed better than many Western analysts expected and has succeeded in preventing Russian troops from capturing many of their objectives.

Many Ukrainians expect their country will eventually defeat the Russian army, although at a very heavy price.

Solomko told CBC News that she refuses to accept that she and her family will ever have to live under Russian rule.

“I believe the war will stop quickly,” she said. “It can’t be any other way because our soldiers are doing everything they can.”