Published July 22, 2026
For months now, I have been receiving alarming, early-morning text messages from Major-Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk of Kyiv-Halyč, leader of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The texts are typically sent after this heroic churchman has spent the entire night in a bomb shelter (as he has done many, many times over the past four and a half years), and they include a digital map of where Russian missiles and drones have lit up the nocturnal sky by hitting Ukraine’s capital city.
There are no military targets on the map. Russian strikes are deliberately aimed at civilian sites, and while Ukrainian air defenses shoot down some of the missiles and drones, others get through. Innocents are killed and families lose their homes because of this campaign to intentionally inflict civilian casualties.
On June 15, a Russian drone did serious damage to the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, the historic Orthodox “Monastery of the Caves” (so much for Czar Putin as “defender of Christian civilization”).
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George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Catholic Studies Program. A Catholic theologian and New York Times bestselling author, he is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Catholic Church and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He served as president of EPPC from 1989-1996.
