Ukraine’s Believers and the ‘Christian’ Putin, Kathy hochul, Andrew cuomo, & Nassau oTB
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Pastors in Donbas and Crimea know what faith means to the Russian dictator.
A Ukrainian Pentecostal pastor teaches teenagers how to reinforce basements in Chervone, Ukraine, Feb. 11.
PHOTO: ALEKSEY FILIPPOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Pastor Sergey Perkhalskiy made sure to convert his Christian Hope Church in Kyiv to a bomb shelter before quitting the capital last week. He faced a tough choice: stay with his congregation or leave to protect his family, including his elderly parents. Either way, he says, “we overcome fear by helping each other.” Mr. Perkhalskiy’s church is Pentecostal. Like many Protestant clergy, he knows today’s trauma is a foretaste of tomorrow’s wreckage should Vladimir Putinconquer Ukraine.
Protestant churches have proliferated by the hundreds since Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In recent years, however, Moscow operatives have steadily increased their harassment and intimidation tactics against these congregations. The results: church properties seized, clergy tortured and killed.
They have a new and unlikely advocate in Natalie Jaresko, the former finance minister who steered Ukraine’s $15 billion debt restructuring in 2015. Ms. Jaresko, 56, is Orthodox, born on Chicago’s West Side to Ukrainians who survived Nazi death camps. She returned to her family’s homeland months after independence.
Ms. Jaresko notes a tendency among some religious conservatives in the U.S. to think Mr. Putin is upholding Christian values because he takes traditionalist views on social issues. These Americans, she says, ignore the dictator’s attacks on their fellow believers. “Ukraine is a tolerant society with deep Christian roots,” she says, “but that is what Putin cannot stand. He cannot stand a Slavic nation on his border that has a successful democracy, albeit messy. He cannot abide an example of democratic success next door while he remains an example of oppression.”
Lured over many years by statements suggesting Mr. Putin is pro-church, antiabortion and anti-same-sex-marriage, some religious conservatives have been reluctant to acknowledge the Russian leader’s expansionist aims. Ms. Jaresko believes that’s a mistake. “It’s a misunderstanding that Putin’s antiliberalism is aligned with Christian beliefs. His Christianity is a mythology and flawed in substance.” With Mr. Putin’s attack on a country that’s nearly 80% Christian, the Ukrainians’ grim determination to fight isn’t only patriotic. It’s a battle for their beliefs.
In Ukraine, non-Orthodox Christians, along with Jews and Muslims, hold equal legal standing to the Orthodox majority. President Volodymyr Zelensky is Jewish. Ms. Jaresko served in a cabinet alongside Greek Catholics and Baptist pastors.
“It was a multifaith, multilingual government in an environment that tolerated our differences,” she says. That’s not the case in Russia or areas occupied by pro-Russia forces since 2014, including the Donbas in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia took by force in 2014.
Pro-Russian fighters in Donbas seized churches and Christian universities, some violently. Militiamen abducted, tortured and killed four Pentecostal deacons. Their bodies were found in a mass grave along with two dozen others. One watchdog group, the European Evangelical Alliance, called Donbas “the area of Europe where the church suffers the most.”
In Crimea, Russian prosecutors punish Protestants and Tatars, who are mostly Muslims, under ill-defined “anti-missionary” laws. Of 23 cases brought in 2021, all resulted in guilty verdicts and fines. Meanwhile the number of Ukrainian Orthodox churches in Crimea has declined since 2014 from 46 to six.
If Mr. Putin’s military campaign prevails, “he will do in all the areas under his control what he has done in Donbas and Crimea,” says former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine John E. Herbst. “That’s very bad news for anyone in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, for any Tatars left from Crimea, and very bad news for evangelicals and for all Protestants living in Ukraine.”
Mr. Herbst in 2020 told a government panel that “Moscow sees religion as a key front in the battle to control both Crimea and Donbas, and to project influence into the rest of Ukraine.”
The Russian-led crackdown is in some ways more threatening than ethnic or religious cleansing, explains Mr. Perkhalskiy. “This is not about hatred of Christian believers, it’s about trying to bring a controlling ideology to destroy the mind and the will. Putin is doing the same thing Stalin did, raising up the one Soviet man and making everyone else the enemy. It is an antihuman ideology.”
Ukraine’s Christians vow to engage the fight. Two days into the Russian assault, 10 evangelical seminaries in the region, including five in Ukraine and two in Russia, published a joint statement condemning Mr. Putin for “open and unjustified aggression” and “blatant lies.” Their declaration, if Mr. Putin succeeds in Ukraine, could turn into evidence against them.
“This was always our reality, and we knew that as Christian believers we would form a resistance,” says Mr. Perkhalskiy. “Now we are a whole nation of resisters.”
Ms. Belz is a former senior editor at World Magazine and author of “They Say We Are Infidels.”
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