Dear sisters, dear brothers,

“I am trying to remember how it was before the war. It is so hard,” said Father Misha when we ran into each other at the door of our warehouse filled with humanitarian supplies. He seemed to be surprised by his own emotions. It was a beautiful sunny day in Kherson with a chill in the air. Yet as we were unloading multiple tons of flour by hand, we couldn’t feel the cold. Similarly, we didn’t pay much attention to the repeated sound of distant explosions that we could hear from this frontline city of southern Ukraine. The flour we brought was for the bakery and kitchen which supply the people in need and are run by the House of Saint Martin de Porres. Every morning they make hundreds of loaves of bread. The bakery workers had quickly learned to bake the finest bread, rolls, and sweet pastries. We all do everything we can to make sure that what we hand out to the city’s citizens is of the highest quality. I understand what Father Misha means. It is very hard to remember what our life looked like before February 24, 2022 — the day that the first Russian rockets fell on our country just before dawn. Probably everyone who experienced those days in Ukraine has similar difficulties with their memory. Three years is not such a long time, but for us, these three years have seemed like an eternity.

I’m writing to you from Ukraine as we mark yet another anniversary of the beginning of the full-scale war. With every passing month, everyone in the world is increasingly tired of it. This exhaustion is revealed by our numb reaction to the constant stream of information about each new rocket attack, about the tragedy in Kryvyi Rih of a 45-year-old woman heavily wounded by shrapnel who died in the doorway of her own home on January 17, or about the people who burned in their own car the next morning as a result of the explosion of a Russian rocket next to the Lukianivska subway station not far from our priory. Nothing is captivating about this chronicle of war. Ruined residential buildings, schools, hospitals, factories, and bridges do not create a landscape that should grab our attention. Nevertheless, this reminder of the painful wounds inflicted on the nation of Ukraine — and on all who feel connected to this country — by Russian aggression becomes a call for the truth. None of us who are eyewitnesses to what has been going on in Ukraine over the past three years have any doubts about who started this war and who it is aimed against.

Nataliya, who took shelter in our Kyiv priory with her elderly parents during the first months of the war, recently invited us to the launch of a book that she contributed to. One of the Ukrainian organizations had asked twenty-five civilians to share their experiences of life under Russian occupation. Their stories were collected in an extraordinary book entitled: “When They Don’t Knock on Your Doors”. The authors are regular people whose lives were changed by war so suddenly that they didn’t even have time to run from the approaching Russian tanks. In her short testimony, Nataliya described the columns of armored vehicles passing by her house near Bucha and Hostomel as well as the Russian soldiers searching her house looking for the “Nazis” and then about the pact she made with her parents that if one of them is killed, the others will bury him in the garden. She also included a story about their animals: “My elderly parents had two old dogs that suffered during the explosions. They would twist their ears, and sometimes they would stop recognizing us. One of them bit my dad on the hand and then whimpered for a long time, lowering his eyes and feeling guilty. The dogs did not survive the occupation. One day, a beautiful Dobermann found her way to us. She would bark at us but then would beg for food. We fed her the same kasha that we ate ourselves and that we fed our cats and dogs. The car with the family of the Dobermann’s owners had been shot on the road next to our house while they had been trying to evacuate through the so-called ‘Green Corridor’.” I thought about Nataliya’s story when I saw a terrified dog running into the charity kitchen building in Kherson. “Kuzia is very afraid of explosions,” one of the volunteers explained to me while gently patting the dog. We made some room for it so that the dog could feel safe. Loud explosions continued outside.

In the very heart of Kyiv is a historical building of the old port on the Dnieper River. It was built over sixty years ago and until recently served as the main administration building of the Port of Kyiv. For the past three years, the building has housed a Ukrainian-American University and flies the flags of both countries from the roof.

The university is not far from the place where — according to the legend — Saint Hyacinth walked on the waves of the Dnieper. He carried in his hands the Blessed Sacrament and the statue of Our Lady as he escaped from the Tatars. This is how the Polish saint is represented in iconography, and this is how the pilgrims visiting St. Peter’s Square in Rome can easily recognize him among the saints in Bernini’s colonnade.

I am not mentioning St. Hyacinth by accident. The Rector of the American University Kyiv, Professor Jacek Leśkow, had stopped by our priory while tracing St. Hyacinth’s footprints in Kyiv. We in turn planned to go visit the school that he supervises. Brother Marek, Brother Zdzisław, and I just recently returned from our trip to the modern and quickly growing university. As we sat in its old, solid walls holding meticulously restored mosaics from long ago, we discussed the future of Ukraine. Currently, the biggest challenge is to create possibilities of growth for young people so that they can decide to stay in the country and invest their knowledge and talents here. Unfortunately, every passing year — or even every passing month — of war makes the Ukrainian demographic outlook increasingly difficult.

A dramatic decline in birth rate, almost triple growth in deaths as well as a huge wave of emigration — this is what Ukraine brings into the fourth year of full-scale war with Russia. According to research from the Ukrainian Institute for Demography and Social Studies, in mid-2024, thirty million people lived in territories controlled by Ukrainian authorities while nine million remained outside their country. “How these numbers are going to change depends in large part on the length of the war and on how it ends,” said Ella Libanova, Director of the Institute, emphasizing how important it is that so many people saved their lives and well-being by running from the war. “In this respect, I do not have the support of many of our experts, but I don’t know of any higher value than human life,” she said. “These people have survived. Their children have survived. Thanks be to God. Even if we cannot bring back all of them. And certainly we will not bring back them all. In the past I dreamed of about a sixty percent return rate, then about fifty percent; now it would be great if one-third came back to Ukraine.” 

Stanisław Marcisz is from Wrocław, Poland and has been a volunteer of the House of Saint Martin in Fastiv since July 2022. When I asked him how it happened that he decided to move to Ukraine a couple of months after the beginning of the war, he told me about his hiking trip from Holland to Georgia and about the kindness and generosity that he had experienced from many people, as well as the words of his father: “You are opening a debt that you will have to pay one day.” As he listened to the “Notes from Ukraine” read by Father Szustak, he decided to begin another trip that still hasn’t ended. During his stay in Ukraine, Stanisław worked as a volunteer driver and traveled tens of thousands of kilometers on humanitarian missions. “I feel that what we are doing makes sense, that you are needed, that you do what needs to be done,” said Stanisław. “This is what keeps me here. Sometimes I ask myself why I should be here. After all, it was not my war and not my country. The only thing that was mine was the pack of cigarettes in the car. But then we went to Kharkiv, to the Donbas, to Kherson. We saw people, we looked them in the eyes, we helped them — and it made sense. It was important for me as a Christian, as a Catholic, and as a human person. No judgment, just help. This is the true Church of Christ.”

This need for meaning, this hunger for it, and the feeling of being lost that is experienced by so many people is described also by Bishop Mykola Luchok, a Dominican Ordinary of one of the Ukrainian dioceses. He sees this search for meaning as the greatest challenge facing us today. “How can we live in the country that is falling apart? How can we live in this world? This is an existential crisis, not just a sociological or geopolitical one.” Bishop Mykola from Mukachevo in Zakarpattia does not shy away from conversations about difficult life issues, and I am not surprised that so many people from Lviv came to the meeting for the launch of his book, “In Search of a Master”. A similar meeting is planned in Kyiv.

Dear sisters and dear brothers, I would like to thank every one of you for your prayer, for your kindness shown to us in so many ways, for your material support, and for your closeness which for us is one of the faces of hope. Three years are behind us! What is ahead? We trust that the long-awaited peace will come.

With gratitude, greetings, and request for prayer,

Jarosław Krawiec OP
Kyiv, February 21, 2025