A hundred or more empty graves have been freshly dug into the vast scrubland that is Krasnopillya military cemetery, between the old Dnipro tyre factory and the E50 motorway on the southern perimeter of Ukraine’s fourth largest city.
When the time comes, and it surely won’t be long, Lt Dmytro Povorotnyi, chaplain at Dnipro military hospital, is likely to be leading the rolling verse of Orthodox prayers as the long lines of prepared holes are filled with flag-draped coffins.
“I have buried half of the people already here,” he says, gazing across at the wooden crosses, giant floral displays and fluttering yellow and blue flags that mark the many hundreds – if not thousands – of burial plots.
A glance at the tributes on the crosses reveals that one of the soldiers to end up here most recently was Dmytro Komarnytsky, 21, killed in battle on 5 June – the second day of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
To be a chaplain in wartime is, Povorotnyi concedes, a heavy burden. Some here were old friends, sent into battle with Povorotnyi’s prayers in their heads. The stories behind many of the deaths are haunting.
Last weekend, Povorotnyi committed to the ground one of the Ukrainian prisoners-of-war killed in an explosion in July last year at the Olenivka prison in Russian-occupied Donetsk. Kyiv claims the soldiers were murdered by Moscow in an attempt to kill off those who witnessed torture. This soldier’s body was returned only two weeks ago as part of a swap.
Now Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the east and south of Dnipro is reaping rewards but also the heavy casualties everyone had feared. “I will do my duty when they come,” Povorotnyi says.
The role of military chaplain can be dated back to at least the Christians attached to Roman army units. The word derives from the Latin capellanus, a cleric who wore into battle a relic of the cape that a Roman soldier shared with Jesus.
The Royal Army Chaplains Department of the British army was founded in 1796, and since 1945 chaplains have served wherever British soldiers have been deployed, offering support and spiritual guidance before, during and after battle.
Ukraine’s military chaplains can boast no such history, however, and therefore little of the standing among the soldiers. “We have the recent experience of war, but the British have 300 years of experience of chaplains,” Povorotnyi says.
It was to the dubious care of deputy political commissars that soldiers of the Soviet Union would have turned for pastoral succour. Even after Ukraine achieved independence in 1991, it was not a position imbued with great authority.
The chaplains were volunteers and there were few of them, with commanders seeing them as a rival power while the soldiers tended to regard them as another symbol of authority.
The role was further complicated by the lack of homogeneity of faith, with a survey in 2019 recording around 33,000 religious organisations in the country, while those of the dominant Ukrainian orthodox faith were split between the Kyiv patriarchate and a church previously under the jurisdiction of the Russian Orthodox church.
It was only in 2021 that the law was changed to give chaplains representing many faiths the rank of officer and the accompanying salary. Povorotnyi, who became a military chaplain in 2014, inspired into action by Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, was among the first to benefit.
There are only 160 chaplains in the Ukrainian army’s command structure, with a further 600 needed. Last month, Povorotnyi was among 10 to complete a two-week training course with the British army at Beckett House on the Defence Academy’s Shrivenham campus near Swindon. “For two weeks, I was called ‘Sir’,” he says with a laugh.
The importance of being part of the unit rather than an outsider offering wisdom from the pulpit was the main lesson, Povorotnyi says. “We learned about counselling the soldiers and supporting the families, of course, but also organisation, fitting into the hierarchy, and how to be at one with the soldiers and the commanders.”
He adds: “I can’t, because of my faith, pick up a gun but I’m there in every other way”.
It may seem peculiar for a priest, as a believer in the sanctity of life, to want to support the military. But Povorotnyi believes in the concept of a “just war”. “I always explain to our soldiers the difference between being a killer and being a defender,” he says.
“A defender is forced to use weapons to protect his life, his comrades and those behind him. A warrior is not a bandit. A bandit does what he wants. He shoots when he wants, kills when he wants, robs when he wants. But a soldier has a charter: how and when to use weapons. The military is a high service. The Bible says: ‘He who kills with the sword will be killed by the sword.’ Now the armed forces of Ukraine is a sword. It is a sword that opposes another sword.”
Povorotnyi says he feels no affinity with the chaplains on the Russian side as he lists the towns and cities where war crimes have reportedly been committed by occupying troops.
“I have no reason to blame God for what the Russians did in Bucha, Izium, Mariupol, Nova Kakhovka,” he says. “What they are doing to the prisoners – this is their evil will, their sadism, their propensity for terror. What were those chaplains telling their soldiers?”
It is 16 months into Vladimir Putin’s war, and the death toll, from what can be gleaned from unofficial counts, has been grotesquely high. Povorotnyi claims never to have questioned his faith, even at the hardest of times. But he does hint at the internal struggles of his role.
“We priests also make confessions to each other,” he says. “Each of us has our own difficulties and problems of spiritual meaning. Our medicine is spiritual. We use the same methods to save our soldiers spiritually, and we use the same methods to save ourselves.”
