Commentary
Dmitri Bodyu, a Ukrainian American pastor, is a three-time religious refugee who last year added “Russian prisoner” to his list of life-or-death challenges. As a teenager in 1989, Bodyu and his family fled religious persecution in the Soviet Union and moved to Texas where they were given legal refugee status and eventually became U.S. citizens, free to worship as they pleased. In the mid-2000s, he and his wife moved to Ukraine and founded a network of thriving evangelical Christians churches there.
While pastoring a church in Crimea in 2014, he was given 10 days to pack up and leave amid Russia’s invasion and annexation of the strategic port-filled peninsula. The couple and their children moved inland to the Ukrainian city of Melitopol and rebuilt their churches and ministry, only to have history repeat itself last year, this time with a far more brutal chain of events….