Over the last two years, I have met numerous Latin-rite and Greek (Byzantine) Catholic military chaplains while reporting from Ukraine, including some who are serving bravely in frontline units. Many see their work, which can be both sacramental and psychotherapeutic, as service to build a better Ukrainian society. President Trump’s transactional approach to resolving the war would have us believe that Ukraine is an economic asset that the major powers can exploit; but if we listen to these military chaplains, we can see past this dehumanizing economic calculus. We can glimpse Ukrainians’ vision for a society characterized by compassion, reverence for truth and respect for human dignity.
In December 2023, on my first trip to Ukraine after the full-scale invasion, I interviewed First Lt. Martin Andyaloshi, who was then just finishing his second month as a military chaplain. I spotted Father Andyaloshi, dressed in military fatigues, waiting for me at a pizza restaurant on the outskirts of Uzhhorod in western Ukraine. As he shook my hand, he explained that chaplains are required to be in uniform even when they are on leave, and that he was coming from a visit to his former parish.
He had been ordained a Greek Catholic priest in 2021, but decided to leave his rural parish after the full-scale invasion in 2022. He was now assigned to a corps of engineers near the frontline city of Zaporizhzhia, working alongside not only Christians but also Muslims and atheists, ethnic Tatars from Crimea and other soldiers representing Ukraine’s diverse society.
At first, he admitted, he had been unsure how to relate to non-Catholics, especially Muslim refugees from Chechnya who had fled Russia’s invasion of their country and then joined Ukraine’s armed forces. He blamed Russian propaganda for instilling in him a fear of ethnic and religious others. But now his unit was giving him a face-to-face education in Ukraine’s religious and ethnic diversity. “If all our actions depend on our fears,” he had realized, “then we will just be slaves.”
“If you were poisoned by propaganda, how do you cure yourself?,” I asked.
“Truth,” he replied, without missing a beat. “We are flooded by Russian lies. No one knows anymore how and when the truth will surface. It seems to me that the informational sector has lost its innocence. But at least now we know that we need to value the truth.”
The Ukrainian military chaplaincy’s credo is to “be close.” That means Ukrainian chaplains place an emphasis on bringing the quality of human presence and care into their interactions, the Ukrainian Catholic theologian Dr. Roman Zaviyskyy told a Dutch interviewer for the Journal of Practical Theology and Religious Studies in 2023. War, which robs us of our fundamental human compassion, threatens the very possibility of providing this presence. “Hatred is a natural companion,” Dr. Zaviyskyy told the Journal, especially when people are witness to so much needless suffering. “However, chaplains are to demonstrate that hatred cannot possibly secure a victory, whereas human dignity can.”
While I was in Uzhhorod in 2023, I spoke with Dr. Zaviyskyy several times on the phone, but we never met in person. At the time, he was in Lviv at Sts. Peter and Paul Garrison Church, a Greek Catholic parish with a special mission to Ukraine’s armed forces.
Tragically, Dr. Zaviyskyy died in 2024 in a car accident unrelated to the war. I offered my condolences when, in late February 2025, I sat down to interview Dr. Zaviyskyy’s colleague, Father Roman Mentuh, at the Garrison Church. Father Mentuh is also a chaplain, serving at a sergeant training center in western Ukraine. But he regularly visits his former trainees on the frontlines.
We met following afternoon Mass on Feb. 23, a day before the grim anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. In the trenches, he told me, he listens and simply spends time with the soldiers. People don’t have time to think deeply about anniversaries or diplomatic dealmaking, he explained. But that day he had given a homily knowing that, in Lviv, his parishioners had been dispirited by the news.
Father Mentuh had urged his parishioners to focus on small positive actions, like smiling at a soldier they see on the street or calling a friend recovering in a military hospital. But he had also tried to put this message in a broader perspective about Catholic social teaching and power. Father Mentuh said he had quoted Psalm 145’s warning against placing trust in leaders.
“The news tells us that everything depends on Putin, everything depends on Trump,” he explained. “It tells us that our future depends on the world’s strongest people, but that is not true. It depends on God and it depends on us. Jesus tells us that, in the end, what will happen to us depends on God and on us.”
To Andriy Zelinskyy, S.J., the war is a threat not just to Ukrainian national integrity, European security and democracy. The Ukrainian Jesuit says the war threatens humanity’s fundamental relationship with God. “We find ourselves at a time,” Father Zelinskyy told Vatican News Service in 2022, “when the greatest gift we have is in danger—that is, the gift of our humanity.”
Since the 2022 full-scale invasion, Father Zelinskyy has traversed the globe in his role as deputy head of Ukraine’s Department of Military Chaplaincy. But he has also ministered to soldiers in frontline trenches, shared meals with them in their bunkers and wept with them over their losses. In a 2022 interview with Inkstick, a justice-focused foreign policy magazine, he explained that the military chaplains embrace a vision broader than the goal of restoring Ukraine’s national integrity.
“Victory for us,” Father Zelinskyy said, “is not just kicking out the aggressor from our land. Victory is creating a society where a person feels their freedom and dignity, and where a human being remains a human being.”
When it comes to conflicts in distant countries, it is easy to get caught up in narrow framing and to miss the bigger picture. It can be tempting to forget the moral guidance of Catholic social teaching when we see the Trump administration’s transactional dealmaking, but we should not reduce the value of an entire country and its people to our economic loss or gain.
Ukrainian military chaplains are working to preserve the vision that their struggle for freedom is part of a global mission—to show that a people facing barbarousness need not become barbarous themselves. Ukrainians today are striving to see that cruelty need not breed cruelty, brutality need not breed brutality, and the best of our humanity might prevail. It is an effort rooted in Catholic social teaching and responsive to the particular needs of Ukrainian society. Just as important, as readers of America contemplate our own changing society, we might also affirm this compelling vision of a society centered in truth, dignity, compassion and humanity.
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