Ukraine’s Major Archbishop warns of Russian propaganda after Trump’s comments
Charles Collins/Crux• February 20, 2025
Controversial comments by US President Donald Trump on the war in Ukraine have coincided with a visit by Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church to the United States.
Taking to his social media platform Truth Social, the US president called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator”, alongside making other allegations.
“He refuses to have elections. He’s low in the real Ukrainian polls. How can you be high with every city being demolished?” Trump said, while claiming the Ukrainian president only had a 4 per cent approval rating. A recent BBC poll shows Zelensky has the support of 57 per cent of Ukrainians.
Zelensky’s five-year term of office was due to come to an end in May 2024, but the national crisis that followed the invasion by Russia in February 2022 led him to cancel elections due to the violence and disruption from the war.
The US president also seemed to suggest that Ukraine was to blame, at least in part, for the war, saying “you should have never started it” and “you could have made a deal”.
Shevchuk appeared to have those types of comments in mind during his US visit, offering support to his country’s leader and warning against propaganda and Russian claims that it had to act against the expansion of NATO.
“If someone believes that NATO expansion is the cause of the war, they are blindly following Russian narratives and propaganda,” the major archbishop said in Washington, DC, on 18 February.
“NATO did not exist in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, nor were security concerns an issue for the Soviet Union during the Holodomor.”
Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk at his enthronement ceremony at the Patriarchal Cathedral in Kiev (Getty Images)
The Holodomor, also known as the Ukrainian Famine, was a mass famine in Soviet Ukraine. Between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians died of starvation between 1932 and 1933 in the then-member of the USSR, after the Soviet Union took much of the region’s grain and introduced disastrous modifications to the area’s grain industry.
Many scholars say Joseph Stalin was trying to end the Ukrainian independence movement through his policies, which would make the Holodomor a genocide.
“I am neither a politician nor a public figure; I am a clergyman entrusted with the custody, prayer and guidance of God’s people – the suffering, yet dignified children of God who seek peace and demand justice,” Shevchuk said.
The Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, Borys Gudziak, was also at the meeting in Washington, DC, and urged everyone to trust in God before comments from politicians.
“Don’t worry about politicians. Don’t worry about meetings somewhere far away. Believe that the Lord is where it hurts,” the metropolitan archbishop said.
“He wipes the tears of those who cry. He supports those who are persecuted. God’s truth will prevail. We, Ukrainians, have experienced too many miracles not to believe.”
Trump has received widespread criticism in the US and internationally for his remarks on Ukraine.
His former vice president, Mike Pence, said on social media: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”
Photo: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky gives a press conference in Kyiv, Ukraine, 19 February 2025. (Photo by TETIANA DZHAFAROVA/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.)