Hope for Ukraine by Kyle Duncan

Author:Kyle Duncan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Inspiration;REL012110;REL012040;HIS027130
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Gennadiy Mokhnenko

Gennadiy Mokhnenko has a soldier’s bearing. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested with intense eyes and a rugged face, he cuts an impressive figure in his army fatigues and boots. Like many soldiers who have fought long and hard, he carries himself with quiet strength, and the battles he has fought are written in his eyes.

Gennadiy’s wars, however, have not been waged with guns or bullets, and his battle scars are mostly unseen. For decades he has been waging a different kind of war in the Donetsk region against hopelessness, abandonment, and drug abuse among the region’s street orphans. In 1998 he founded Republic Pilgrim to help get homeless and addicted kids off the streets of Mariupol. Since then it has grown into the largest children’s rehabilitation center in Eastern Europe.

At age twenty-four Gennadiy turned to God in a time of difficulty—and God answered. He was praying for relatives bound up in alcoholism, and he saw them set free when everything else had failed. “Over time, the Lord saved both my father and mother and my sister,” he said.1 He was able to see his parents embrace God before they died, and his sister continues to do well.

In the early 1990s Gennadiy left a promising job in the book business to become a pastor. In 1992 he and some friends founded the Church of Good Changes in Mariupol, where he still serves as senior pastor. He says, “I was a homeless Christian and a homeless pastor in the first years. Maybe this is the reason why my life is connected with street kids.”2 Since then, the Protestant pastor and his church have aligned with the Church of God in Ukraine.

Mariupol is a city of more than five hundred thousand people, and Gennadiy saw a huge need in scores of children with varying problems: orphans with no parents or family; children from broken or dysfunctional homes, with little or no supervision; runaways; and kids addicted to drugs and alcohol. “At first in the ‘Republic Pilgrim’ there were 90% of children with punctured veins, necks, some even injected [with drugs] in the groin. There were a lot of children with AIDS, and we buried many,” he says.3

Gennadiy is Russian-Ukrainian and his ancestry crosses national boundaries. His mother was from near St. Petersburg, and his father was from the Kursk region, an oblast of Russia that borders Ukraine. Like many other Russians and Ukrainians, the branches of his family tree stretch across the borders of both countries, and his roots run deep into Russia’s cultural soil. “I grew up on Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn. I did my army service in the Moscow garrison of the fire department,” he says.4

Like his family’s history, his heart for orphans reaches beyond borders. In 2011 he helped lead a campaign called World Without Orphans—partnering with the organization of the same name—to raise global awareness for orphans. Gennadiy and several of his sons rode bikes from Ukraine all the way across far-east Russia. That trip covered more than fifteen thousand kilometers and was done in phases over four summers.

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