News from Ukraine
Meet Victor. Victor is one of many who, just two generations ago, had family members shoved onto a cargo train headed to Siberian labor camps. Victor’s family is of German descent, but they lived in Ukraine when it was part of the Soviet Union during the Communist Era.
When WWII began, Stalin ordered all men of German descent to work in the coal mines, while hundreds of thousands of women and children were shipped to the gulags in Siberia. Victor’s mother and two of his older siblings were among those sent away. One of his siblings died there. His mother and other sibling managed to survive and return to Ukraine, where, a few years later, Victor was born.
In the 1970s, Victor was in the Soviet security service as a policeman. His job was working in conjunction with the KGB to locate, infiltrate, spy on religious gatherings, and report. He himself never had to arrest, shoot, or send anyone to the gulags, but he knows that these things happened as a result of his work.
He came to Christ in the 1990s at a revival held in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union. A few years later, he was watching TV and saw EEM partner Sasha Prokopchuk’s Bible program and later got in contact with Sasha. He started coming to Sasha’s church planting seminars in the early 2000s. Today Victor is a church planter! He has planted four churches in his hometown area of Kryvyy Rih, Ukraine.
We are honored to be partnered with Victor, and we praise God for Victor’s testimony and journey to Christ after working side by side with the KGB to spy on Christians. God never gives up on any of us, and He obviously turned the tables on Satan through Victor’s life!