A woman is cleaning and crying. She lovingly washes the gravestone of her son, a soldier who died in the tragedy in Ukraine. It is an image that will remain forever in the heart of a friend who has just returned from that country.

Like that woman, hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian mothers and wives clean gravestones of Vladimir Putin's imperialist delirium.

And now the tyrant's cruelty devises another torture: the cold. He deliberately destroys energy sources and the frozen layer falls over all of Ukraine, paralysing, suffocating and crushing the will of a people who heroically resist disappearing.

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We evangelicals think a lot about the soul of each person, but we don't pay much attention to the collective soul of peoples. However, the Bible speaks of it. That soul defines what each people wants to be, how it understands the world, its relations with neighbouring countries, its welcome to foreigners, its care for the weak (beginning with the unborn), its concept of dignity and progress, its culture... how it approaches or moves away from the ideal of humanity designed by the Lord.

That soul can be heard physically in the music created by each people. The soul of Ukraine is special and unique, like that of all nations, like that of each person, and it sings in the most beautiful way we can imagine; today it sings to proclaim to the world its right to survive. As a Galician, I understand that one of the greatest gifts God has given to each people is music, and as long as it continues to sing, life will continue to beat within it.

The cold

The cold, the cold of the night that the imperialist tyrant now uses to destroy the Ukrainian soul, that winter cold is sung in a special way by this people; it chills us to the bone when we hear the song ‘A Moonlight Night’:

The night, the moonlight, starry, clear / is so bright Pick up your needles! / Come, beloved, so tired from work, / come, if only for a moment, to the forest. / Do not be afraid that your little fingers / will get cold in the cold dew. / I, my love, will carry you in my arms / to the little house. / Don't be afraid of freezing, my swan, / it's warm, there's no wind or clouds. / I will hold you close to my heart, / which shines like an ember. / I will hold you close to my heart, / which is as warm as fire.

The music is even more beautiful. I invite you to listen to it. It is sung by the Gimnazija Symphony Orchestra and Choir of Kranj (Slovenia), as a sign of solidarity from the Slovenian people:

The red kalyna

Another hallmark of peoples is the territory and landscape that God gave them: ‘He has determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live, so that they would seek God’ (Acts 17:26-27). In the landscape that the Lord gave to the Ukrainian people, the kalyna, a tree with bright red fruits that is a symbol of life for that nation, a life that they now want to take away from them missile by missile, bursts forth in full colour. A song intertwines the tree and the country and their determination to rise up and survive. It is banned in occupied Crimea:

In the middle of the meadow, a red kalyna has bent. / For some reason, our glorious Ukraine was filled with sadness. / But we will take that red kalyna and lift it up / And we will lift up our glorious Ukraine!

The recording I am sharing with you is striking not only because of the lyrics and music, but also because it is sung by a group from Estonia in a show of fraternal solidarity, one of the hallmarks of a people's greatness:

Prayer for Ukraine

For years I have been praying for the Ukrainian nation, asking for peace and freedom, that the Lord may remove those who want to steal it. I conclude with a beautiful ‘Prayer for Ukraine’:

O Lord, Great and Almighty! / Protect our beloved Ukraine. / Bless it with the freedom and light / of your holy rays, / enlighten us with teaching and knowledge / us, your little children, / allow us, Lord, to grow in pure and eternal love. / We pray, Almighty Lord, / protect our beloved Ukraine, / grant our people and our nation / all your goodness and grace. / Bless us with freedom, bless us with wisdom, / guide us to a kind world. / Bless us, Lord, with good fortune / forever and ever.

It was also sung as a proclamation of solidarity by the Los Angeles Master Choir one month after the invasion:

Let us pray for the Ukrainian people. Let us also pray for the Russian mothers cleaning their children's gravestones, for the Russian people, that they may rise up with determination and faith, regain their true place in the world, free themselves from imperialist madness and break the chains of the dictator who sells glory and brings death.

Xesús Manuel Suárez, medical doctor and general secretary of the Spanish Evangelical Alliance.