When Ukrainian priest Vadim Pavlovsky (not his real name) was “taken to the basement,” it was a terrifying experience. Blindfolded, he was shoved down the stairs into the infamous torture chambers of the Izolyatsia, which, before Russia’s annexation of the region in 2014, had been the pride of Donetsk.
Once the city’s contemporary arts center, a place devoted to culture, creativity, and civic pride, it has become a symbol of the Kremlin’s brutal occupation regime and disregard for life, law, and human rights. It is one of the places where the Kremlin’s enforcers have been brutally suppressing Ukrainian Christianity.
When pastor Pavlovsky arrived at Izolyatsia, he knew bad things were going to happen; he knew his captors were likely to torture him, and that he might not survive. He had already heard of the methods used by the Russian occupiers. He prayed for deliverance.
Beatings, starvation, and the use of electric shocks on the body’s most vulnerable parts are among the favored techniques. But what Pavlovsky also feared — something less reported in the West — was burning, a practice described by multiple religious and secular former detainees and documented through survivor interviews. According to Dmytro Hainetdinov, who has interviewed former detainees and helped document abuses at Izolyatsia, survivors have described the deliberate use of household irons as tools of torture.
The iron, he says, is brought in after other forms of abuse, often as a signal that the torment will escalate and no boundaries will be respected. Survivors describe the method as not only physically excruciating, but also psychologically annihilating, precisely because the weapon is so ordinary — an appliance associated with daily life.
For clergy, the abuse serves a broader purpose. Priests like Pavlovsky are targeted not for any specific action, but because of what they represent. In the occupied territories, churches are among the few remaining institutions that command moral authority independent of the state.
Moscow understands this, and religious persecution in occupied Ukraine is not incidental to the war; it is part of the Kremlin’s strategy. The Russian authorities want to extinguish one of the last sources of organized moral resistance to their occupation.
And when Russian forces entered Ukrainian towns and cities, religious leaders were often among their first targets.
Clergy from Ukraine’s independent Orthodox Church were targeted early, along with Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders. Some were accused of “extremism” or “foreign loyalty,” while many others were accused of nothing at all. Some were murdered, others disappeared into basements like Izolyatsia.
Vladimir Putin and some of his backers in the West claim he is defending Christianity, and there is a well-funded propaganda campaign to spread this untruth, but the facts on the ground tell a different story. Since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, Hainetdinov said that around 700 churches have been destroyed or damaged across Ukraine, the vast majority of them located in the Donetsk region, followed by Luhansk, Kherson, Kyiv, and Kharkiv. That number has increased significantly from less than 300 during the summer of 2022, according to a report by the Kyiv-based Institute for Religious Freedom.
And it’s not just that religious buildings have been caught in the inevitable crossfire. Churches aligned to Moscow are left untouched while Ukrainian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant churches, as well as synagogues and mosques, have been damaged, looted, shuttered, re-purposed or razed to the ground.
“In some towns, people pray in cemeteries,” a religious official told Hainetdinov. “It’s the only place they can gather without being watched.”
In occupied areas, independent clergy are removed and substituted with figures loyal to Moscow. Replacements are vetted and watched by Russian security services. Sermons change, language shifts, and the pulpit becomes political.
“Priests are told what they can and cannot say,” Hainetdinov said. “You either serve Russia, or you become its enemy.”
In Ukrainian-controlled territory, the contrast is stark. Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims worship freely. No single church dictates belief or enforces loyalty to the state.
What is happening to the clergy in occupied Ukraine is more than another tragic byproduct of war. It is a deliberate governance strategy, removing independent moral authority and replacing it with Moscow-loyal figures. Compliance is enforced through terror.
For Western policymakers, the response should be correspondingly concrete. Alongside desperately needed military support, there should be targeted sanctions and bans on occupation administrators, security services, and proxy “justice” officials tied to religious persecution, detention, and torture.
Kyiv should also be helped to systematically gather and preserve evidence for future prosecutions. There’s also an urgent need for explicit diplomatic pressure over religious freedom, which explicitly names clerical disappearances, coerced “re-registration,” and the weaponization of Russian Orthodoxy as tools of control.
Mitzi Perdue is a fellow at the Institute of World Politics and the co-founder of Mental Help Global, a philanthropy that uses artificial intelligence to support mental health.
Nicole Monette is a CEPA Editorial Intern and a graduate of New York University with master’s degrees in journalism and European & Mediterranean Studies.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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