Gennadij Mochnenko (1968) is the pastor of the Protestant Church of Good Changes in Mariupol, which has been caring for homeless children for many years. He and his wife have three biological and 36 adopted children. Ten of his sons and one daughter are fighting in the war today. He commands the Chaplain Battalion composed of priests and volunteers, their units help materially and spiritually on the entire Ukrainian front line.
As a child, you probably did not dream of spending part of your life at the front. What did you want to be?
Athletes. I was also quite successful, in my youth I was the boxing champion of Mariupol and the Donetsk region. However, I became a pastor at the age of 24 and have been a pastor for over 30 years. Thanks to our church, it was possible to build a large center helping homeless and problem children who had nowhere to go. These were orphans, homeless children, children who succumbed to alcohol and drugs, or ended up in prison.
Where did you find them?
In the streets, in garbage dumps, in parks, in uninhabited buildings, under bridges, in shafts, or someone pointed them out to us. At the beginning, we gave them health checks, provided them with hygiene, gave them food and drink, provided clothing and housing so that we could continue to work systematically with them. The goal was to get them out of the margins of society and integrate them into normal life so that they know something other than hopelessness. We gave them safety, the warmth of home, humanity, but with the understanding that they were always aware of their responsibility.
Several children had never attended school before. The reasons why they ended up on the street were different. It was a difficult job, in which we had to alternate between the roles of understanding parents and strict policemen, but we succeeded. Movies were made about our work.
For example, the American film Almost Holy.
Yes, Americans filmed about us, but several Russian directors, who today are propagandists for Putin, also made films about us. They also collected awards for them, so that eventually the Russians came, destroyed my city and killed my friends, including one of my daughters. One of the official representatives of the Kremlin even declared about us that they found a children’s terrorist camp in Mariupol. He spread the lie to the whole world that we are training seven-year-old children to be terrorists.
It doesn’t make sense to a person – first in Russia they presented us as role models, they made films about us that received awards, only to suddenly identify us as terrorists? Russia has also officially announced that I have been captured and am in prison. It never happened. Russians lie as much as they breathe.
Where are the children you helped in Mariupol today?
We managed to evacuate all the children who were in the orphanage when the siege of Mariupol began, to different countries in Europe. My hometown is totally destroyed today. It was horrible. Most of the buildings disappeared from the face of the earth, dead bodies were lying everywhere, the Russians killed around 100,000 of my fellow citizens in the city alone. I can’t call it anything other than genocide.
There are many mass graves, mobile crematoria operated here for a long time. When I saw them, I called it a mobile Auschwitz. The bodies of civilians were loaded into cars and burned directly inside them. However, many dead women, old men and children remain in the cellars of Mariupol until today, whose bones and blood are today mixed with cement. My city simply does not exist anymore, the Russian occupiers took it from us.
The effort to save our children was a real race with Russian tanks. We succeeded at the last moment before the Russians
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