On a fall morning in 2022 in Berdyansk, Ukraine, a resort town on the Sea of Azov, Father Bohdan Geleta, CSsR, prepared for the Divine Liturgy at the Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos.
Like the tides of the sea, the size of his congregation in good times ebbed and flowed with the tourist seasons. Ordinarily, though, the Byzantine Rite congregation was small — a Sunday liturgy might gather no more than 50 parishioners. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church hadn’t taken full root in eastern Ukraine, where the shadow of neighboring Russia and its Orthodox Church, an ally of the Kremlin, looms. But for three years Geleta, a Redemptorist priest then in his mid-50s, and the Reverend Hieromonk Ivan Levytskyi, CSsR, the church’s 40-something rector, had lived in Berdyansk, 90 miles from the Russian border, having moved there from Lviv in the west full of hope and enthusiasm. The Redemptorists are a Catholic missionary order called to bring God to the poor and abandoned. Here they would bring the Catholic faith to those who might otherwise have little access to it.
After Russia’s multifront invasion of Ukraine earlier that year — in the north near Kyiv, the capital; in the east at Kharkiv; at Kherson and Zaporizhzhia in the south — any religion other than Russian Orthodoxy was frowned upon in its newly occupied regions. Even the devout were afraid to practice their faith. Many had chosen to leave, fearing capture or expulsion, as had happened during the 2014 invasions of Crimea on the Black Sea and the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. And previously under the czars and the Soviets.
But Geleta and Levytskyi had chosen to stay and shepherd their people. The calm, bearded Geleta had even begun serving the Roman Catholic parish two miles away when its priest left. Levytskyi, known as a caring and devoted pastor, would say the rosary with Catholics in town, occasionally adding prayers for peace and for Ukraine.
The priests also welcomed a flood of refugees from devastated places like Mariupol, another coastal city just 50 miles east. The refugees brought with them stories of horror — of attacks on civilians, children and hospitals, of mass graves, of starvation, of humanitarian disaster. The priests invited these evacuees into their home. With them came scrutiny from their new oppressors, who would drive slowly past the church, an ominous and persistent presence.
On that quiet November day, the church was empty save for Geleta and a light fog of incense. An icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the icon of the Redemptorists, hung on one wall. Her heavy, sorrowful eyes seemed to anticipate the entrance of the pair of masked men who kidnapped Geleta as he was changing his robes.
They had already taken Levytskyi. Like that, the two Catholic priests disappeared.
Vitaliy Kosovych ’24 LL.M. is a Ukrainian lawyer who grew up in Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine. He attended St. Josaphat, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic parish where he grew to know Geleta and Levytskyi in the years before they left for Berdyansk. Levytskyi once sprinkled water at Kosovych’s home for the traditional house blessing at Epiphany.
Kosovych earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in law at Ivan Franko National University of Lviv before continuing his studies in Austria and Germany, which is where he was at the time of the 2022 invasion.
“I decided to continue studying abroad to learn and then be well equipped with knowledge to go back to Ukraine and rebuild it after the war,” he recalls, speaking with steady, hopeful confidence.
Kosovych heard from a former professor in Ukraine, who mentioned having been a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame in the United States and said he thought Kosovych might find valuable opportunities there. Given the atrocities being reported in eastern Ukraine, Kosovych applied to Notre Dame’s one-year graduate program in international human rights law and arrived in the fall of 2023.
During his first semester at Notre Dame Law School, Kosovych saw in his church newspaper in Lviv a request for prayers for Geleta and Levytskyi. By then the priests had been missing, with no trace of their whereabouts, for almost a year.
“I decided that in addition to praying, we also need to . . . learn how they are doing and work on releasing them from captivity,” he says.
Reverend Hieromonk Volodymyr Boreiko, CSsR, is the superior of the Lviv Province of the Redemptorists. After the kidnappings of Geleta and Levytskyi, Boreiko and his fellow priests had spent months contacting authorities for information about them, to no avail.
“Unfortunately, we did not have any reliable information at all about whether our brothers were alive — and if they were, then in what condition and where they were located,” Boreiko says. “Very often we received conflicting information about them from different places. Therefore, we could only hope that they were alive and would be released from captivity.”
Boreiko worried for both priests. Geleta was diabetic and before his disappearance had undergone heart surgery. He suspected Levytskyi’s public prayers had likely drawn official ire.
“The fact that Father Ivan and the parishioners prayed for peace in the center of Berdyansk was also a manifestation of Ukrainianness — namely, disobedience to the ‘new’ government and the desire to end the war,” Boreiko explains. But even before the public prayers, the Redemptorists were prepared to be targeted.
“With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, we expected that there might be some negative reaction of the Russian authorities in the occupied territories toward clergy and religious organizations,” he says. Religion is highly restricted in Russia and in the provinces it occupies in Ukraine. “The Department of Religious Organizations in the Russian occupation administration was created as a tool for controlling spiritual life. Its goal is to restrict freedom of religion and subordinate religious communities to the Kremlin’s policies in order to oust all denominations except the Russian Orthodox Church.”
Ukraine has two, rival orthodox churches. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine is a newer, independent church recognized in 2019 by the patriarchate in Constantinople. Fifty-four percent of Ukrainians belong to it, according to a 2022 survey conducted by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), which claims around four percent of the population, has traditionally been associated with the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), the Moscow Patriarchate and the Kremlin. The UOC announced its independence from Moscow in May 2022 as a protest of the invasion but stopped short of full autocephaly, or removal from the Russian Church’s hierarchy. Russia maintains the UOC is integrated with the ROC and has jailed some priests who do not support full integration.
This religious landscape is important to Geleta and Levytskyi’s case. Around the time of their arrests, Ukrainian officials had searched Pechersk Lavra, an Orthodox monastery in Kyiv, for evidence of subversive activity in support of Russia. Many conjectured that the priests’ kidnappings were a retaliation for the inspection of the monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since then, Ukraine has banned the ROC and has also considered outlawing the UOC.
While commentators in the West view Russia’s invasions of Ukraine alternately as a land grab, a reunification of the former Soviet Union (after 34 years of Ukraine’s independence), a pre-emption of Ukraine’s interest in joining NATO, or an attack on western democracies, Russia describes its actions as a “Holy War” against “globalism” and “Satanism.” In carrying out this holy war, Russia has repeatedly bombed Ukrainian churches, cathedrals and monasteries, contributing to more than 56,000 deaths and serious injuries among civilians and the creation of more than 5.9 million refugees since the 2022 invasion began. So, too, Ukrainian religious leaders have faced persecution. Reports include the torture and murder of an evangelical deacon and his son in Kherson, the abduction of a Baptist pastor and his wife for “extremist activity,” the jailing of Muslims, the official labeling of Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist organization,” and the fining of religious leaders of all denominations for exercising their ministries and practicing their faith. Catholicism, with its ties to the Vatican and the West, is a target of particular hostility.
Boreiko explains that Catholicism, and specifically Ukrainian Greek Catholicism, which follows the Byzantine Rite and is in full communion with Rome, has unique historical and cultural roots that distance the country from Russia. Those roots, including the use of the Ukrainian language, celebrations of church feast days when people wear traditional clothes or perform Ukrainian folk music, and a recognized list of beatified martyrs who died during Soviet persecution, highlight Ukraine’s independence and unique identity and undermine Russia’s narrative that Ukraine is merely a Russian offshoot.
In December 2022, Russia’s governing authority banned the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and seized its property in the occupied territories. It also outlawed Catholic charitable groups like the Knights of Columbus and Caritas, who it claimed were linked to intelligence services in the United States and the Vatican. The announcement reportedly accused Catholics of participating in anti-Russian rallies and storing firearms in church buildings, declaring the Church in “violation of legislation on religious and public organizations of the Russian Federation.”
These policies postdate the arrest of the two priests in Berdyansk, but their provincial says that doesn’t seem to have mattered. “The Russians do not need specific reasons to carry out repressive measures in the occupied territories. Their main task is to destroy everything that has something to do with Ukrainianness,” Boreiko says.
Professor Diane Desierto is the faculty director of Notre Dame Law School’s LL.M. Program in International Human Rights Law and global director of the school’s new Global Human Rights Clinic. She notes that around the world, religion is often attacked as a tool of oppression, but that Russia has targeted religious organizations and leaders, which are typically insulated from acts of war by the Geneva Conventions, as part of its war strategy.
Desierto is a human rights savant who is active as an international arbitration and litigation counsel at the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and more. In addition to her scholarship and teaching, she has taken on marquee cases like that of the Filipino Nobel peace laureate and journalist Maria Ressa, who was arrested for cyber libel by the regime of Rodrigo Duterte, the authoritarian former president of the Philippines. Desierto has confronted dictatorships and human rights violations of a similar nature all over the globe.
Practicing law of this sort entails serious personal risk, yet the professor is undeterred, pointing out that she came to Notre Dame to train a new generation of lawyers to become “part of the increasing army of human rights lawyers and practitioners who are there, first and foremost, to defend the rule of law,” but also to direct “decision-making in the international system towards those human rights ends.” She notes that 600 Notre Dame alumni are already doing that through organizations like the United Nations and the Red Cross. Many return to their home countries, often places where human rights are notoriously violated, to do work on the ground.
While the master’s program was founded at Notre Dame in the 1980s, Kosovych’s first semester coincided with Desierto’s opening of the global human rights clinic as its founding director. She describes the clinic as an accelerant for students that offers real-world services such as legal representation, education and advocacy. Clients include individuals, organizations and groups currently fighting rights violations in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Syria, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Spain, Hong Kong and Sri Lanka. And Ukraine.
When Kosovych read the plea for prayers for Geleta and Levytskyi, he was surprised that no one knew their location. The measured and soft-spoken lawyer gathered what information he could from newspapers, internet sources and social media before presenting the matter to Desierto. He wanted the clinic to take on their case on behalf of the Redemptorists in Ukraine.
“I had some gut feeling that maybe [with] the clinic being located in the U.S. and having good connections with both local U.S. authorities [and] different international organizations,” we could do something to help, he says. “I had this internal belief that at least it’s necessary to try.”
Desierto agreed for several reasons, but the most important, she says, is that she knew Kosovych would be a relentless champion for the priests because of his personal ties.
“Our cases are not abstract, strategic litigations for other people for certain causes. They are about accompaniment,” she says. Notre Dame excels at the moral dimension, at “making sure that we don’t lose sight of the humanity of people whose rights we defend.
“There’s never been a more dedicated advocate than somebody who fights for home,” she adds.
Kosovych contacted Boreiko, offering an overview of how Notre Dame might be able to help pro bono. He underscored Notre Dame’s Catholic identity. In response, the Redemptorists formally requested Notre Dame’s representation.
Time was not on their side. It was January 2024, and the priests had already been in detention for 14 months. That likely meant more than a year of unfathomable torture, if not death. Step one was confirming the priests were alive.
Under Desierto’s guidance, Kosovych and his classmates applied concepts they had learned in class to perform open-source investigations. Kosovych’s language aptitude and contextual awareness of the war proved to be valuable assets on an international team of students, many of whom hailed from South America and Europe. They interviewed other priests, including one who had stayed in contact with Geleta and Levytskyi until their arrest. They contacted authorities at Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Defense and Main Intelligence Directorate. They engaged the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Commission on Missing Persons and the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations.
After a few months, just as Kosovych began to feel discouraged by their lack of progress, Desierto came back with news from an unnamed source: The priests were alive, and she had a confirmed location. Now, they had to free them.
“It was not a surprise for me that I would become a target,” says Geleta, who agreed this past winter to be interviewed for this story. “I was ready for a long time, for years, before the situation that happened to me. Maybe it started from the moment of receiving my calling, for when you go to a monastery and renounce the world, you take an oath and you know that different things can happen to you because you give your life to Christ.”
As he reflects on what steeled him for all that would come, Geleta harkens back to the seminary, which he entered at age 30 after the fall of the Soviet Union. He remembers being inspired by priests who had endured persecution when the Soviets tried to “reunify” the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church with the Russian Orthodox Church during World War II. Those who refused to join the Russian Church were fined, imprisoned or sent to Soviet labor camps. Still, the Catholic Church persisted underground until it was legalized in 1989, after much internal and international pressure. The history of repression now appears to be repeating itself.
Geleta says that in 2014, when Russia first invaded and annexed Crimea, he expected the occupation would spread. He moved east to Berdyansk in 2019 knowing he was at risk, but feeling called as a missionary. “And of course there was a fear of arrest, but there was also a bond in God.”
He felt, too, a bond with his people. For months preceding his arrest, he watched as neighbors were robbed, killed, disappeared. Those refugees who fled to Berdyansk from the war zone warned the priests of what was to come. So, Geleta and Levytskyi waited for their turn.
“It happened all the time; it happened almost every day. And that’s why there was so much internal tension until we were arrested,” he says.
After their arrests, the priests spent nine months in Berdyansk. There, Geleta says, he endured psychological torment. Though he was not physically touched, his cell was located across from the torture chamber. He spent his days listening to near-constant screams from other prisoners.
“I heard these abuses, these voices, these agonies, these beatings. . . . People screamed, moaned, begged; some stopped screaming. You could hear all of that for hours. I heard all of that for months,” he says. In rare reprieves, loud, patriotic Russian music was piped into his cell. For four months, he had no indication why he and Levytskyi were being held. Then they were interrogated separately and given documents saying they were being charged with terrorism and possession of weapons. They were told to sign a statement saying they had been present when weapons were discovered at their monastery, though they had been in jail at the time and the weapons claim was a lie. They refused.
After nine months, Geleta and Levytskyi were transferred to a penal colony in Horlivka, a city in the Donetsk region.
“In Horlivka, there were all sorts of abuse, both mental and physical,” he says. “It is difficult for me to remember this, especially remembering how others were tortured, and especially knowing that this torture is happening now.”
While concrete numbers are hard to find, Amnesty International estimates that thousands of Ukrainian civilians and military personnel are still being held as POWs by Russia, and thousands more have been exchanged in prisoner swaps during the four-year conflict.
Due to the psychological impact of his imprisonment, Levytskyi declined to be interviewed for this story. In his stead, Boreiko, the provincial superior, summarizes: “They were abused and tortured in the same way as other prisoners of war. Unfortunately, for Russians, there is no concept of compliance with the articles of the Geneva Convention.”
The fact that the two men were priests was no secret, but Geleta says it didn’t win them special treatment. They were not allowed to offer Mass or preach, only to offer private prayer. Eventually they got hold of a Russian Bible and could offer five minutes of prayer with other prisoners; any more would draw attention. The same went for confessions. Geleta says that during walks in the prison yard, prisoners would ask furtively to confess something, then scurry away. In the absence of formal ministry, all he could provide was support and consolation to people in true need. Through it all, he attests, God stood with him.
“I felt his presence all the time. It’s just that this feeling of God’s presence is sometimes greater and sometimes smaller,” he says. “I am simply grateful to God, and there is a feeling that God does everything for me, and I am just an instrument in His hands.”
While Geleta was ministering in prison, the Global Human Rights Clinic was advocating through quiet diplomatic and legal means to free him. But doing so didn’t — and often doesn’t — mean going to trial, Desierto explains.
“Not everything needs a frontal assault before a court, and this Ukraine case was an example,” she says. During war, she notes, people slip through the cracks. Notre Dame’s role was to raise the visibility of the priests’ story and bring urgency to their release. The law students led that charge and for six months researched, advocated, pursued tips and sources, and kept hope. “The follow-up on our end resulted in bumping them very high up on the list of prisoner exchange, and thus they were released.”
On Friday, June 28, 2024, Geleta and Levytskyi, along with eight Ukrainian civilians, were returned to Kyiv after more than 19 months of imprisonment. They were not told of their release ahead of time. Geleta believes that near the end they were being moved from colony to colony before landing in a Moscow prison. From there, they were taken by car to the Belarus-Russia border, then south into Ukraine. They thought they were again being transferred to another camp when they were instead released at the Kyiv International Airport as part of a prisoner swap.
Geleta remembers, “Returning to Ukraine was a surprise, but somehow my soul was prepared internally. There was no outburst of great emotional joy, but internally, there was gratitude to God for the saved life. Well, there was inner joy that the Lord had torn us out of this hell. But one question was constantly spinning in my head: ‘Lord, what will happen next?’”
In photos of their release at the Kyiv airport, Geleta and Levytskyi appear with heads shaven. They are emaciated and stooped and draped in Ukrainian flags. Their faces are blank, as if they’re in shock. They were, Kosovych says, almost unrecognizable. He sat at his computer, staring at those photos, looking for semblances of the men he once knew.
Kosovych had graduated from Notre Dame the month before, and had gone to Geneva, Switzerland, to work as postgraduate research fellow at the Vatican’s Permanent Observer Mission. There he saw Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s announcement in a post on X: “I am grateful to everyone who helped. I thank our team working to free the prisoners. I also want to acknowledge the efforts of the Holy See in bringing these people home.”
The next day, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, two saints who spent time imprisoned, Pope Francis said, “I give thanks to God for the freeing of the two Greek Catholic priests. . . . May all the prisoners of this war soon return home.”
The road to recovery after months of torture is long. Yet Geleta harbors no bitterness, not even for his captors, who he claims knew no better. Instead, he says his heart is full of faith, love and a desire to help others.
“This experience did not change my faith, it only deepened it. It deepened my faith very, very concretely. My ministry has also deepened,” he explains. “As soon as I returned from prison, I immediately turned to my provincial abbot for a blessing for various initiatives. They are mainly linked to the military, survivors of captivity and relatives of those who were killed or went missing.”
Geleta now leads retreats for those affected by the war, while Levytskyi has returned to parish ministry and the spiritual accompaniment of religious sisters.
Boreiko echoes that the war has made the Redemptorists’ response to faith more tangible, more pressing and more important amidst despair.
“What once sounded like a spiritual ideal has now become a daily reality: to be strong in faith, persevering in prayer, joyful in hope and ready for self-sacrifice,” he says. Serving the “most abandoned” now means the people right in front of them: the displaced, wounded and grieving. To them, he says, the Redemptorists offer accompaniment and closeness, but also radiant and unrelenting hope.
“Even in the midst of the ruin that has affected various regions of our homeland, the Redemptorists testify about Easter — that there is a resurrection after Calvary. Hope in our sermons becomes not an abstract necessity, but a vital necessity that helps us get through difficult times,” he says.
Hope was a critical takeaway for Kosovych, too. “This experience of advocating for the priests shaped me professionally as well as personally,” he says. “In both dimensions, I learned how to sustain hope and develop action plans even in the most dire circumstances, when injustice seems to be fully under the control of the oppressor and legal instruments appear helpless. There is always a way to fight injustice and bring relief to those suffering from it; at least, it’s definitely worth trying your best efforts in doing that, even if the situation appears hopeless.”
After 14 months in Geneva working on arms control, disarmament, international humanitarian law and cybersecurity — all relevant to the war in Ukraine, he says — Kosovych returned to Notre Dame to pursue a doctorate in juridical science. He still intends to return to Ukraine and help rebuild his home country.
“I have great confidence in the bright, successful and prosperous future of Ukraine,” he says. “Ukrainians consistently demonstrate that there is no obstacle or suffering that cannot be overcome through their resilience, innovation, creativity, bravery and faith in God’s guidance.”
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, the Kyiv-based head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, has said no Catholic priests of any rite remain in Ukraine’s four Russian-occupied eastern regions. More than 100 parishes have closed, leaving the faithful without the sacraments. Many church buildings have been looted or destroyed.
Shevchuk has repeatedly stated that the Church in Ukraine is in danger. During a panel discussion at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., in February 2025 he said, “If Russia succeeds in occupying Ukraine, our church will not survive. For us, it’s a matter of life and death.”
Outside Berdyansk’s Church of the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, the temple where Geleta and Levytskyi served at a time of great need, thigh-high weeds are growing between the cobblestones. A lock has been placed around the iron gate. None are welcome.
Still, the temple’s blue roof and gold trim shine in moments of sunshine. The icon of the Theotokos More Spacious than the Heavens glimmers above the door as Mary and her son watch over the town. The church, and all it stands for, rises above the barriers. It reminds the people of Ukraine. And it stands as a beacon of hope.
Tara Hunt McMullen is author of The Homefront Devotional: Navigate Military Life with Courage, Hope, and Faith and a former associate editor of this magazine.