Freed priest speaks of time in Russian captivity

A Ukrainian priest who spent a year and a half in Russian captivity prays that others will have the kind of hope in their everyday struggles that got him through his ordeal.

“Do not lose hope. If you are feeling sad, doubtful, or going through tragic situations in life,” said Fr. Bohdan Heleta (also spelled Geleta), in the first television interview since he and fellow Redemptorist priest Ivan Levytskyi were released in June. “Try to turn to the Lord. Surrender yourself and your situation to Him so that He can be present in your life and dwell in your heart. He acts — He always acts — and He is always waiting for our decision, for us to say yes to Him, to give our consent. So pray, pray a lot, turn to God, change yourself, and change the world around you.”

Speaking with an interviewer from Zhyve Television August 22, the TV station of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in Kyiv, Ukraine, Fr. Bohdan described psychological pressure put on him in prison, saying that he was not tortured physically.

Frs. Bohdan, 59 (in photo above, second from left), and Ivan, 47 (on left), were freed on June 28, along with a number of other Ukrainian civilians. For many months, there was no word from them or about them.

In announcing the news of their release, Ukraine’s president, Voldymyr Zelenskyy, thanked the Vatican for its help in getting Russia to hand over the two priests.

The two priests served at the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin in Berdyansk, a small city on the Sea of Azov, southwest of Mariupol. They are Greek Catholic priests but after the Russian army occupied their town beginning February 27, 2022, they ministered to both the Greek and Roman Catholic communities. 

Their congregation was diminished, as Russian troops advanced and many residents fled west to unoccupied Ukraine. In the TV interview, Fr. Bohdan recalls walking around nearly desolate Berdyansk and feeling like he was in a science fiction movie.

But internally displaced people from places like Mariupol started streaming into the town on their way to safety, and this flow of refugees convinced the two priests to stay and minister to anyone who needed food, shelter, and moral support. At first, Fr. Heleta said, occupation authorities tolerated his and Fr. Levytskyi's religious activities, including a regular gathering of local Christians at a point on the coast to pray the Rosary. 

“We celebrated the Liturgy, prayed, and had meetings with people,” Fr. Bohdan said.

But on November 16, 2023, as Heleta was preparing to celebrate Divine Liturgy, “two masked people” entered the church carrying weapons.

“They came up and said in Russian: ‘Come with us,’” Heleta related. “I asked them in Ukrainian what they wanted, why they came into the church dressed like they were. They told me that they did not understand Ukrainian. I switched to Russian. Then I took off my vestments and went with them to the central pre-trial detention center in Berdyansk. And there they drew up a report that Father Ivan and I had violated some rules. We had to take permission from the authorities to pray in the city.”

He found that Fr. Ivan was picked up in town and already in a cell in the same facility. Members of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) soon arrived. Eventually, these agents offered to make a deal with the two priests if they “cooperated,” but the priests refused, Heleta said. Teams producing propaganda material also visited, conducting interviews with the priests.

“We could also hear screams from our cell in the corridors, because there was a cell where people were tortured,” Heleta said. “It was simply horrifying.”

The priests were transferred from one facility to another, and at one point, Heleta was put in solitary confinement, he said. There, prison officials “blared Soviet songs” into his cell “all day long.”

“I realized then how a person goes crazy,” he said. “I realized why people commit suicide then.”

But, he said, “God, Jesus Christ, Mary, and the angels were all present. Prayer was salvation.”

In another prison, he said, officials “harmed me almost every day” and Fr. Ivan was “beaten so severely that he lost consciousness twice.”

They and other prisoners were offered three meals a day, but to get them, they had to run into a cafeteria with their hands behind their backs and head bent down, and run through a gauntlet of special forces who would beat them. When they finally sat down to eat, they would receive electric shocks.

Though they were arrested as civilians, officials gave them uniforms to wear, and “we were prisoners of war, we were just like everyone else.”

Their being Catholic priests didn’t help, either. “From their reaction, from their conversation, I concluded that our Church is a sect for them,” Fr. Bohdan said of prison officials and guards. “For them, we are a sect that split from Orthodoxy, and they are Orthodox, they genuinely praise God. Genuinely, yet they beat people, you know? It’s such religious fanaticism. ... Both the Greek Catholic Church and we, those priests, are a sect in this Church, who need to be eradicated, isolated from society, and purified.”

They were told at first to not have any communication with other prisoners, but eventually they were able to hold brief prayer meetings and even hear confessions. 

Finally, on May 3, “someone important” arrived from Moscow – an ombudsman involved in the affairs of prisoners – and the priests knew “it was a sign that something was happening” that would lead to their release.

“After that, we felt things were moving forward, and we knew something was being done,” he said.

Perhaps unknown to the priests and other prisoners, there were negotiations going on that led to an exchange of prisoners. Those negotiations involved the Vatican.

After the priests’ release, His Beatitude Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head and father of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, thanked the Vatican diplomatic corps, in particular Cardinal Matteo Zuppi and the apostolic nuncio to Ukraine, Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas.

At a Peace Summit in Switzerland a week earlier, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, spoke of the Holy See’s ability to maintain an open line of communication with Kyiv and Moscow and its readiness to assist in mediation.

Now free, Fr. Bohdan said he is determined to give testimony to the closeness of God that he felt while imprisoned. He also does not want the world to forget about Ukrainians who are still in Russian hands.

“They want some kind of support, they want prayers, they want to feel that they are not forgotten,” he said.

And he wants people to know that his and Fr. Ivan’s experiences happened for a reason. “They are meant to help many people and give them hope,” he said. “And hope is given by the Lord God.”