The Sisters of St. Basil the Great in Kyiv, Ukraine, will open a rehabilitation center for Ukrainian veterans and their families to help them reintegrate into civilian life after serving on the front in Ukraine’s ongoing war with Russia.
A person who has fought in the war returns and “he’s different,” said Sister Lucia Murashko, O.S.B.M.
She said the sisters’ new rehabilitation center in Kyiv has already been blessed.
“We have to finish the floor and the doors and the furniture, but it will serve for physical, spiritual and psychological recovering,” she said. It is also designed to help families “learn again how to live together.”
In Zaporizhzhia, southeast Ukraine, where the Basilian Sisters have a convent about 12 miles from the front, Sister Lucia has seen how war affects the young soldiers. She served there with five other sisters for the first four years of the war, including the delivery of aid to villages along the front.
Sister Lucia introduced the new apostolate of the Basilian Sisters in Kyiv, where she is now based, to U.S. Byzantine Catholics at the 92nd annual pilgrimage in honor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in early September. The Basilian Sisters in the United States organize the pilgrimage.
She said during her presentation that Ukrainian soldiers “fight against drones, against robots.”
“They are killed from the drones, you know? And to fight against machines, drones — we never saw such a war.”
Some soldiers “are standing in trenches for months, half a year, a year,” she said. Food and water are delivered to them by drones as well.
“Imagine these people who are in the danger of death, real death,” she said. “Will they be able to live a normal life after all of that?”
One soldier who had been held captive by the Russians for nine months told her he was tortured, and the prisoners of war were beaten on the way to and from every meal.
“How can you explain that?” Sister Lucia asked.
Sister Lucia recalled her time in Zaporizhzhia, going to houses, trenches and frontline medical stations, trying to help wherever they could. With Bishop Maksym Ryabukha of the Greek Catholic Eparchy of Donetsk, they visited a medical stabilization center at Christmas.
“We made [an] altar on the bed where they brought the wounded soldiers,” she said. “So, there is no church … but we bring them Christ, and they go to confession, and very often it’s the first confession of their life.”
“I like these moments, you know, when [the soldiers] meet Jesus in real, like in Eucharist,” she said. This experience of Jesus in the Eucharist changes their lives and “they start to pray,” she added.
“Many of them are missing now, and many… they went to heaven already,” she said.
Some are wounded, have recovered, and have returned to the front, proudly wearing the rosaries or crosses given to them by the sisters.
“If we stay close to those who are on the cross, we make a difference in their life,” she said.
People who suffer are not necessarily in a war zone, she told the pilgrims in Uniontown. “People who suffer are around you and your families.”