Ukraine (MNN) — Russia has massed troops and military vehicles near Russia’s border with Ukraine. The move threatens to escalate a conflict that has raged between the two countries since 2014.
Eric Mock of The Slavic Gospel Association says civilians living in the war zone have reported heavy artillery fire. Some have compared the intensity to the early days of the war: “When you go there, you realize that the shelling and the gunfire have never really left the region. There’s an area that is demarcated by the Minsk Accords, the peace accords that were done, and they call it the Red Zone. But the reality is they have been always under conflict, always under shelling.”
“I remember visiting a village within one kilometer of this line, and knowing that two hours after I left, they shelled the village.”
While war has torn the region apart, Mock says new life and hope have sprung from the local church: “Congregations that have emptied out now are completely full again with new believers. SGA has been a part of equipping these churches for compassion ministry. We’ve been rushing aid for the last seven years into these villages. It’s incredible to see how the churches have risen up and ministered to people that have lost family members to stray gunfire fire, to the shelling, and the destruction that has gone on.”
Pray for an end to this endless war. Click here to come alongside SGA as they support churches in the area.
The header photo shows a destroyed church in the war zone. (Mstyslav Chernov, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
