Few realize the centuries of suffering that Ukraine has endured, most of it at the behest of its rival, Russia.

During the first part of the twentieth century, Stalin created an artificial famine by stealing all of Ukraine’s wheat, leading to the starvation deaths of twenty to forty million.

That holocaust compared with any in history, including the Jewish one, and had been foreseen, in a manner, by an apparition of the Virgin to twenty-two peasants in 1914, warning that they faced eighty years of war, famine, and persecution.

Now we see Russia firing hypersonic missiles at Ukraine and threatening a much wider conflict, dragging in Europe and perhaps the U.S.

It is a long history of torment. Less than a century ago, Russian Communists crushed Catholicism across Ukraine, even nailing priests to walls.

Hundreds of thousands of Christians (including mystic Josyp Terelya) were tossed into the horrid gulag.

Taking him outside during the Siberian winter, guards demanded Terelya renounce his religion as they poured buckets of water on him. He refused, ice forming on his brows. They beat him. They prevented him from sleeping. They impaled his hands with a steel wire.

Many tortures were in store for him and countless others.

But Terelya and others endured, and on two occasions, the Virgin Mary appeared to him, at one point saving him from another torture (death in a “freeze cell.”)

The mystic-activist also witnessed the Blessed Mother after the fall of Communism and his release from prison, this time at the apparition site of Hrushiw south of Lviv in western Ukraine.

It was one of a dozen or more apparitions (in Ternopil, Pochaiv, Zarvanytysa, Buchach, Hoshiw, Ternopil) that erupted across Ukraine as the Communists lost power (while no major reports of the same came from Russia).

At Hoshiw, we watched Ukrainians excavating the skulls and bones of priests and other faithful the Russian Communists had murdered).

Ukraine, Terelya believed, “is an apocalyptic nation.”

“My daughter Ukraine,” the Virgin Mary said at the largest site of Hrushiw, “I am interceding and praying for you, for your children, and for your future. The time is here when this nation of yours that loves God shall attain its statehood and become a haven for those who remain faithful to Jesus Christ.

“But the anti-Christ is very powerful and is opposed to the will of the Eternal One. Russia continues to involve itself in division and war. It continues to reject the call to love and the Eternal One, the call issued by Our Lord and Savior.

“The Eternal God is calling out to you to turn from Satan before it is too late. Ukraine, this is why I have come to you, for you were among the first of nations to become mine. You alone have not lost hope and love, though you have been inhumanely persecuted.”

In our current day, now nearly forty years since the apparitions, we watch a brutal invasion as Ukraine fends off its rival, struggling to keep its land as it is mercilessly bombarded.

Prayer need–an urgency–indeed.

The country faces yet another pivotal moment in her history.

What may further occur?

“I see fire,” the Virgin told Terelya back when he was still in prison. “The villages are burning. Water is burning. The very air is on fire. Everything is in flames. If people do not convert to Christ, there will be war. There shall be great conflagrations.”

[resources: Witness, by Josyp Terelya]