Ukrainian soldiers rest near their position in Bakhmut in Ukraine. Photo / AP
Andriy and his wife Yana were in the queue for groceries when they turned to God.
The young couple had gone to hunt for food in their home city of Mariupol during a lull in the Russian bombardment. When they arrived at the nearest shop, some 8km away, they found a long, snaking queue - and then missiles began to fall once more.
“The explosions were still heard but they were far away,” said Yana, 33.
“We stood in the huge line of about 150-200 people. When we were almost inside, missiles started falling closer and closer. One hit about 10m away from us. Thankfully, it hit behind the corner – only that saved us.”
Terrified of leaving their two children, who had stayed at home in a bomb shelter, orphans, they ran inside the shop and began to pray.
“That was the moment when our faith was tested: I was praying for protection all the time. And that was the moment that pushed us into faith,” said Yana.
“The real faith started at that moment when we saw that God spared all of us.”
In a war that the Archbishop of Canterbury on Sunday said had opened the “gates of hell”, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are turning to religion for solace. The number of people in Ukraine asking for Bibles has more than doubled since Russia invaded in February, according to figures released by the Ukrainian Bible Society.
In 2020, it distributed 136,767 Bibles, but in the first nine months of this year, that figure more than doubled to 359,000. British Christians have donated about 168,000 Bibles and scripture-based books.
Living surrounded by death has caused people to ask questions about life, said Anatoliy Raychynets, deputy general secretary of the Ukrainian Bible Society.
“I think the Bible is a point of hope to people who are living through the war,” he told The Telegraph.
Describing how his new faith grew in the months that followed his escape from the supermarket, Andriy, a 37-year-old electrician who suffers from a rare form of osteoporosis that means his bones can break easily, said it was like “God was guiding us again and again.”
When they received their first Bibles in the summer, they grew to love the Old Testament story of the patriarch Abraham, who God promised to bless as “a father of many nations”.
“There were so many situations where God intervened and helped him. He didn’t abandon His people,” explained Andriy.
“Looking at our situation, it is very similar – we were non-believers, let’s put it this way. But He was still pushing us to what was right. Just like with Abraham,” he added.
The family are currently living in a church facility in Lviv, trying to find the best treatment for Andriy’s condition.
“It looks like [God] was with us from Mariupol and led us by hand, straight to this church, to a great community,” he said.
Their story is familiar to Raychynets and his volunteers, who have zigzagged through roads laced with landmines and had the tyres of their vehicles shot out as they delivered Bibles and humanitarian aid to residents of active conflict zones.
“In one hand we have bread and in the other hand spiritual bread,” he said.
“People usually ask ‘if God loves the world why did He allow this to happen?’ Many of them saw a lot of brutal behaviour from the Russians, torturing other people, killing civilians,” he said.
“I expected that they would be blaming God or don’t want to receive Bibles but it’s totally the opposite. They have difficult questions, but they want to be close to God.”
During Ukraine’s toughest times this year, Raychynets said he had seen people hiding in bomb shelters reading the Bible together by torch or candlelight.
“People feel comfort, people cry when they receive them. I have been reading the Bible with soldiers many times. Psalms, the New Testament, where Jesus is talking to the disciples. I saw many tears in the soldiers’ eyes,” he said.
Many people who had never set foot in a church or opened a Bible were now finding words they could relate to, like Psalm 31 – a passage about suffering and taking refuge in God – Raychynets added.
“Be merciful to me, O Lord,” the Psalm reads, “for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and my body with grief.
“My life is consumed by anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak.”
Priests in the capital Kyiv have separately confirmed a resurgence in faith among the struggling population, telling The Telegraph that congregations had not dwindled despite an exodus of regular churchgoers overseas.
Abbot Lavrentiy, deacon of St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, said that he was now seeing people of a kind he had never encountered in 23 years of service.
“They address precisely such spiritual questions: how to cope with all this now?” he said, adding that new attendees were either seeking divine guidance or protection during the war or had decided to turn their backs on the Russian Orthodox church after the invasion.
People who had not been believers, “realised that human power is not enough to solve urgent problems,” he said.