Americans must press Congress on aid for Ukraine
The Rev. Maksym Padlewski, 37, leads the Roman Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Kherson, a major city in southeastern Ukraine whose population has shrunk drastically during the war from 300,000 residents to 71,000. Padlewski was born in Kherson, and this church is his childhood parish.
In March 2022, Russia took control of the city. Through the occupation, Padlewski, by then the rector, helped lead daily Mass for a handful of parishioners. In November 2022, Ukrainian forces liberated the city. But it’s still dangerous.
In November, 87 bombs hit the Kherson region in a single night, according to the Ukrainian government. On Christmas Eve, explosions from a Russian bombardment could be heard across the city. Two days later, the Ukrainians reported that Russian shells hit the train station as about 140 people were trying to evacuate, killing a police officer.
A year ago, a Russian rocket hit Sacred Heart while three children were rehearsing for the Christmas pageant. It was a dud that lodged itself into the floor of the church’s rectory, and within two hours, the Ukrainian military disposed of the unexploded ordinance.
This year, Sacred Heart was spared a direct hit. On Christmas Eve, parishioners celebrated mass with Padlewski in the church, whose origins date back to 1787. During the Soviet Union, it was used as a movie theater, and the humble, unostentatious building was reconstructed in 2009.
Now it sits just blocks from barbed wire, blown out windows, and a landmine warning that are conspicuous reminders of war.
I stayed at the church during a two-week trip to Ukraine, and I had the privilege of watching five children put on a humorous pageant during that Christmas Eve service. As I looked at those children, dressed as the wise men and singing the American Christmas carol “Little Drummer Boy,” I thought: There is no way the United States and its European allies can continue to allow Vladimir Putin and the Russian military to keep harming the children of Ukraine.
The Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is less than 10 miles from the “zero line,” where Ukrainians and Russians can kill each other face to face. Kherson is a strategic and economic prize. It’s divided by the Dnipro River, a tributary to the Black Sea, and Russia still controls East Kherson.
I am an American and a Roman Catholic from Arizona, where some politicians and voters seem uninterested in helping Ukraine defend itself from the Russian onslaught. I came here to bear witness to the devastation that Republicans in Congress, including from my state, seem increasingly unwilling to stop.
The MAGA movement behind former president Donald Trump runs strong in Arizona, and it is that wing of the Republican Party that is principally responsible for delaying President Biden’s request for $60 billion of critical military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.
If the Arizona MAGA opposition of this aid is principled, it is also ironic: 90 percent of security assistance to Ukraine has been spent in the United States, and almost $2 billion in aid to Ukraine has gone to companies in Arizona, a hub for defense contracting.
Looking at those five kids in the church, I thought about the life they might lead if they are annexed into Putin’s Russia: a life of cynicism, illusion, and learned helplessness.
In his chilling 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” Putin offered lies that underwrote his attempt to annex all of Ukraine.
On Christmas Eve, while sitting in a room full of boxes of humanitarian aid, Padlewski noted that because of Putin’s ideas and the people who think like him, “a lot of people have been killed and a lot of people are suffering right now.” If the Russian people truly want to end this war, they must put their bodies and comfort on the line and reject Putin’s leadership. But they do not seem ready to do that.
As President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told the US Congress a year ago: “The Russians will stand a chance to be free only when they defeat the Kremlin in their minds.”
Similarly, aid to Ukraine must be approved by the US Congress, but it really comes from the American people. And, without American aid, Ukraine will be a harbinger of perennial and violent Russian expansion.
It is up to the American people to give Congress the courage and the motivation to approve support for Ukraine in January.
As Russian bombs continued to drop on Kherson and elsewhere in Ukraine, I asked Padlewski why they kept the church open through the worst of the Russian aggression. He replied: “There is always a necessity of prayer.” And the greatest necessity, he said, is “when you have hard times.”