Few realize the centuries of suffering that Ukraine has endured, most of it to do with its rival, Russia.

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

That holocaust compares with any in history, including the Jewish one.

Russian Communists crushed Catholicism across Ukraine, even nailing priests to walls.

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

Water was thrown on Terelya outside during the Siberian winter as guards demanded he renounce his religion. He refused, even though ice formed on his brows.

Even more hideous tortures were in store for him.

But he endured, and on two occasions, the Virgin Mary appeared to him.

And he also witnessed her after he was released from prison (after the fall of Commnism) at the apparition site of Hrushiw, which we visited (along with a church where we saw men excavating the skull and bones of priests and other faithful the Russian Communists had murdered).

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

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

“My daughter Ukraine,” she allegedly said, “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 tom 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 inhamnely persecuted.”

And we look now how for more than a thousand days, the nation, which became free in 19–, still struggles to keep its land as it is mercilessly bombarded.

Pray need indeed.

The Virgin Mary appeared at dozens of locations in Ukraine during the fall of Communism.

But now she faces yet another picotal moment in her history.

What can further occur?

“I see fire,” the Virgin told Terelya 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.”