Russia's cruelty against the churches in Ukraine and its care with the mosques

Yesterday I shared some information here about Russia's attacks on nearly 600 Christian churches in Ukraine during the current invasion.

Russia has attacked nearly 600 Christian churches in Ukraine: what propagandists are keeping quiet about
The video of Putin kissing the Quran that the Kremlin has omitted from its official website

596 churches attacked but only 8 Islamic buildings

As I indicated yesterday, a report (see PDF) published by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture in February 2025 noted that Russia has attacked 642 religious buildings in Ukraine, of which 596 were Christian buildings. The vast majority of them (396) were Orthodox Christians, of whom 338 are members of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and 58 are members of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

In addition, 24 Catholic buildings and 176 Protestant buildings were also attacked, as well as 17 Jewish buildings, 8 Muslim buildings, 15 buildings of other denominations, and 9 religious educational institutions. Furthermore, and as I indicated yesterday, of those 642 religious buildings attacked, 53 were completely destroyed, 97 suffered serious damage, 157 suffered medium damage, and 255 suffered minor damage.

Only one mosque is among the temples destroyed or severely damaged

A striking disparity is evident in these figures: 596 Christian buildings attacked and only 8 Muslim buildings. I wanted to find out more about this and to do so I went to the "Religion on Fire" website, a project of the public organization Academic Religious Studies Workshop, supported by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, which was launched in March 2022 and which documents data on damaged and destroyed religious sites in Ukraine.

On this website you can find data on the various religious buildings attacked depending on the degree of damage suffered by each one. Here you can see those in the "complete destruction" category (which includes buildings that have suffered more than 75% damage) and here those with serious damage (between 45% and 75%).

Curiously, among the 73 buildings for which detailed information is available on that website and which suffered complete destruction and serious damage, only one was a mosque, one was a synagogue and the rest were Christian buildings. The fact that only one Jewish building is listed among those destroyed or seriously damaged (specifically the New Synagogue in Mariupol, which was eventually destroyed) is not surprising, considering in 2013 there were only about 103,600 Jews in Ukraine, according to data published by the US State Department.

With a similar number to Muslims, Protestants have suffered 176 attacks.

However, the same source indicated that there were around one million Muslims in the country, many of them (300,000) Crimean Tatars, an ethnic community that has long been settled in the country and that suffered harsh repression by the Soviet dictatorship. At the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022, there were more than 160 mosques and 90 Islamic schools in Ukraine (in case anyone thinks these are large numbers and thinks Ukraine is being Islamized, I will add that in 2022 there were already 7,500 mosques in Russia and currently there are about 26 million Muslims in that country).

Putin's Chechen Islamists and Russia's Recruitment of Muslim Soldiers

It's curious to note a disparity. There are between 800,000 and one million Protestant Christians in Ukraine. Thus, we would be talking about a community similar in number to the Muslim community. However, as I indicated yesterday, the Russians have attacked 176 Protestant buildings and only 8 mosques. These figures indicate a clear relentlessness on the part of the Russian army toward churches and a certain caution in avoiding attacking Islamic temples. Nothing strange considering that Putin has received help from Chechen Islamists for his invasion.

In addition, it should be noted that Dagestan is a peripheral region that supplies many soldiers to the Russian army, and is also a Muslim-majority region. On the other hand, and in order to avoid having to carry out mass recruitment in areas of ethnic Christian Russians that are more privileged by the Kremlin, Putin has carried out recruitment among Muslim immigrants, violating Russian laws. Perhaps this is one of the possible causes of the attacks on hundreds of churches in Ukraine by an invading army that, however, seems to be more careful with Islamic temples.