Analysis and Reflections on How War has Changed Ukraine’s Religious Communities. Day 1096, The Third Anniversary of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion

Join us for an informative discussion where each speaker will share their insights on the main changes they’ve observed in their research on religion since the full-scale invasion. They will highlight important developments and topics they intend to focus on in the future. Each speaker will do a presentation followed by a general Q&A session.

Join via Zoom link at 1:00 PM ET on Monday February 24th, 2025.

Andriy Fert holds a PhD in History and is currently a lecturer in the Public History and Memory Studies Program at the Kyiv School of Economics. He serves as the Ukrainian PI for the international research project “Memories of Soviet Repressions in Post-Soviet Spaces.” Since 2017, he has been working for the Institute for International Cooperation of the Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband e.V. (DVV), coordinating projects related to history education in secondary schools in Ukraine. His studies focus on religion in the Soviet period and religion’s role in memory processes.

Pavlo Smytsnyuk is a Petrach Fellow at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University in D.C., where he is working on a project on religious peacebuilding. He specializes in political theology, modern Greek and Slavic Orthodoxy, and religious nationalism. From 2019-2022, Dr. Smytsnyuk was the Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies and a Senior Lecturer at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv. Pavlo studied philosophy and theology in Rome, Athens, and St. Petersburg, and holds a Doctorate from the University of Oxford. Before coming to Washington, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.

Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law where he teaches international human rights, law and religion, and the rule of law. He is also an affiliated researcher of the Cardozo Institute of Holocaust and Human Rights and the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law at University of Queensland. Vovk has been a rule of law, constitutional law, and religious freedom expert for several international institutions. He also testified before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and briefed the U.S. State Department. He has published extensively on religious freedom and church-state relations in post-Soviet countries and beyond. Vovk is a co-editor of the BYU Law International Center for Law and Religion Studies blog “Talk About: Law and Religion blog.”