Persecuted church agency Release International has announced that the bodies of Ukrainian Evangelical church leader Anatoliy Prokopchuk (52) and his 19-year-old son Oleksandr have been discovered in a forest.
They had been tortured and killed, four days after being abducted by Russian soldiers. According to the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group and the Global Investigative Journalism Network, father and son were taken whilst they were working in their garage, close to Kherson. The reasons for their abduction are not known.
Anatoliy was a deacon and preacher at a Pentecostal church in Nova Kakhova, close to Kherson. According to Release International’s Ukraine partner ‘Pavel’, when the Russian troops arrested them, the soldiers claimed: ‘Your church has no right to exist, as it has connections with America and other Western countries.’
