Russian Upper House Approves Use of Military Force in Ukraine

Spotlight on Ukrainian Baptist Leader Turchynov

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By Jeremy Reynalds
Senior Correspondent for ASSIST News Service

SIMFEROPOL, UKRAINE (ANS) -- Russia's upper house of Parliament voted unanimously Saturday to approve sending Russian military forces into Ukraine, amid mounting tensions in the country's Crimea region and in defiance of warnings from Western powers.

Oleksandr Turchynov

According to a story by Tom Watkins, Laura Smith-Spark. and Ingrid Formanek for CNN, the vote followed a request from Russian President Vladimir Putin for approval to send troops into Crimea to normalize the political situation there.

CNN said Putin cited what he called the “extraordinary situation in Ukraine” in making his request, adding that the lives of Russian citizens and military personnel based in the southern Crimea region had been threatened.

Ukraine's new government condemned the move.

“We perceive Russia's actions as direct aggression towards the sovereignty of Ukraine,” said acting President Oleksandr Turchynov on the Twitter account of his Fatherland party.

The fledgling government in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, is trying to prevent tensions in Crimea, which has a majority-Russian population, from escalating into a full-blown bid for separation.

CNN reported that opposition leader Vitali Klitschko said Saturday in a posting on his party's website that he planned to ask Turchynov to call for Parliament to meet in emergency session to vote to invalidate the Black Sea Fleet Naval Base agreement.

Spotlight on Turchynov

According to a story by Bob Allen for the Associated Baptist Press (ABP), the heightening crisis and turmoil in Ukraine has cast a spotlight on the former Soviet republic’s minority Baptist religious population with Turchynov’s selection.

He is a veteran politician, author and lay preacher at the Word of Life Center in Kiev, which belongs to the Evangelical Baptist Union of Ukraine.

Turchynov, an opposition leader to deposed President Viktor Yanukovych and a one-time member of the youth organization of the Soviet Communist Party, became a Christian in 1998.

ABP said he has a long record for advocacy of religious freedom, pushing for legislation including the return of church properties seized by the state under Communism and ending import taxes on Bibles brought into the country by religious organizations.

He is named in a Wikileaks memo about an interfaith dialogue luncheon in 2006, where he disputed a speaker’s assertion that Ukraine needed a national church.

“Turchynov, an ordained Baptist minister, stressed that one of Ukraine's great strengths was its tolerance and diversity; no single denomination dominated society,” the document said. “Turchynov, no friend of the Kremlin, quipped that if the State created a single, national church ‘we'll wind up looking like Russia or Belarus.’”

ABP said the European Baptist Federation identifies Turchynov as a Baptist elder at the Word of Life Church, created in 1992 in the city of Kiev.

Because of his clean-cut image – he doesn’t smoke or drink, for example – and his high-profile Baptist identity, media reports often label him a pastor. He preaches regularly at the church, even though he travels with security.

ABP said the election of a Baptist might seem unlikely in a nation with an overwhelming Orthodox Christian religious identity and Protestant population smaller than 1 percent.

However, observers say Turchynov is well equipped to promote unification and healing in a country sharply divided between citizens seeking closer ties to the European Union and those more in agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Source: Assist News Service