Memory as Resistance: Documenting Russian War Crimes and the Destruction of Holy Sites

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“I'm thinking a lot these days about memory and things that disappear: facts, histories, democracies, ecosystems, people, and entire cultures and ways of life,” I remarked to war reporter Janine di Giovanni on Feb. 2, 2022. I was interviewing her on her 2021 book, The Vanishing. Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets, which looks at the decline of Christian communities in the Middle East and the toll of ISIS plunder of churches and monasteries.

Just weeks after our conversation, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. From the start, he intended not just to claim Ukraine’s sovereign territory for Russia but also to annihilate Ukrainian culture and identity. And almost from the start, democratic powers, spooked by his threats to make recourse to nuclear weapons, gave Ukraine enough military assistance to prevent Putin from prevailing but not enough to defeat him.

Thus came the long season of futile hopes of an “off-ramp”: Putin would make things easier for everyone by somehow coming to his senses and negotiating with his enemies, making more pledges of military aid unnecessary. Such positions do not reflect the reality of how autocrats think and behave, as I explain in this March 13, 2022 MSNBC clip.

This war has been a textbook case of autocratic dysfunction: U.S. intelligence estimates that Putin has lost almost all of his pre-invasion army. This outcome is in line with my Feb. 2022 forecast that the invasion of Ukraine, intended to show Russia’s strength to the world, would instead reveal its weakness and how Putin’s corruption devastated the military.

Too often Putin has been treated as a capable and competent head of state, and even as a good faith adversary, rather than as a murderous kleptocrat whose dysfunctional government has caused mass death to his own people and catastrophic losses to Ukrainians. The International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Putin is a big step forward in recognizing this reality.

This brings us back to di Giovanni. As a war reporter, she knew that the Kremlin would seek to use its formidable information warfare capacities to erase evidence of Russian war crimes and generate narratives that tightly controlled the memory politics of the Russian-Ukraine relationship before and during the war.

That’s why di Giovanni, together with fellow journalist and Russia expert Peter Pomerantsev, founded The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies. The organization collects witness testimonies from sites of human rights violations. These become part of a body of documentation that can be used in courts of law to bring justice to Ukrainians.

Di Giovanni’s focus on threatened Christian sites is also newly relevant. Russians have targeted churches and other religious sites to harm Ukrainian morale and create distress. They know how important such sites have been for community sustenance and as repositories of Ukrainian identity and tradition. A July 2023 UN report lists 115 damaged or destroyed religious sites in Ukraine, but Christianity Today had catalogued 500 months earlier. They include Odesa’s beloved Transfiguration Cathedral, which was partially destroyed.

The destroyed central altar of Odesa’s Transfiguration Cathedral, hit by a Russian missile in July 2023. OSV News Photo, Nina LIashonok/Reuters.

Russian targeting of sites of faith has not lessened the support of the Russian Orthodox Church for Putin and his war. Church officials are all in as long as they can continue to receive a cut of his blood money to restore their own churches in Russia, a practice that dates back over a decade.

Meanwhile, the Middle East is losing more of its churches as the Israel-Hamas war continues. In what could be a coda to di Giovanni’s book, the physical testaments to the complex multi-faith culture of Palestine are now endangered. The Israeli military has bombed the Greek Orthodox St. Porphyrius Church and a convent associated with the Roman Catholic Church of the Holy Family, both in Gaza, since the conflict began. The latter tragedy, which included the killing of two Christian women, elicited a rebuke from Pope Francis.

This has been a year of great loss in the world, and we owe it to the victims to honor their memory by documenting the damage and destruction of cultural heritage sites that have brought solace and community to so many.