(6 Mar 2022) Ukrainian refugees gathered at a church in northeastern Romania on Sunday to pray for peace, as war rages in their country.
"The first thing that we do as servants of the church is talk to them, help them trust again," said Mihai Maghiar, priest at the Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox church in Suceava, some 45 kilometers (30 miles) from the Ukrainian border.
"Life doesn't end at the Ukrainian border, or any other border. Life goes on and it has to take its natural course," he said.
Young and old worshippers filled Maghiar's ornately decorated church and lit candles for those currently fighting, as well as for the dead.
Among them were journalist Oksana Oliinykova and her daughter Maria Kizilova, who fled Dnipro, a city in east-central Ukraine.
Oliinykova said she'd been receiving messages from a friend stuck in a shelter in Bucha, near Kyiv without electricity, blankets or enough food.
"It's very hard to talk about this," she said. "It's scary to understand that our boys, who go to fight have nothing. We can't provide bulletproof vests and helmets."
Oliinykova said she plans to go back to Ukraine to help her son and father, who stayed to fight, once she settles her daughter in the Netherlands where friends have offered a place to stay.
In the meantime, she prays.
Prayer "helps a lot, actually," said her daughter, Maria Kizilova. "It just gives you strength to live through everything."
Ukraine's majority Orthodox Christian population is divided between an independent-minded group based in Kyiv and another loyal to its patriarch in Moscow.
But leaders of both factions are fiercely denouncing the Russian invasion.
"As a Christian it's very hard for me to hate," said Oliinykova, who has a several relatives in Russia and speaks Russian.
"I have a lot of relatives in Russia. And I know that they are also shocked. I don't know how could I hate them," she said. "They are also sending young boys (to war). How to get through all of this?"
"I think we need less hate and more love," she said.
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