He spoke of a refugee who traveled 30 hours from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine to reach UBTS.
“When she came to Lviv to our seminary, that was the first time that she was crying,” Pyzh said. “She said, ‘I couldn’t cry before, because I was afraid of bombs exploding and killings and everything else.’ That’s kind of the need people have.”
Refugees arriving at UBTS peaked three days ago at about 400 people a day, mostly from Kyiv and Kharkiv, before subsiding, Pyzh said, but he expects numbers to increase.
“We expect it to pick up in the next couple of days because the war is kind of expanding geographically,” he said, “so I think people will be coming from other parts of Ukraine.”
About 2.5 million people have fled the country, the United Nations said, with another 2 million internally displaced. The U.N. has recorded 549 civilian deaths and 957 injuries in Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesperson Liz Throssell said in a March 11 press briefing from Geneva, indicating the actual number of causalities and injuries could be “much higher.”
“Civilians are being killed and maimed in what appear to be indiscriminate attacks, with Russian forces using explosive weapons with wide area effects in or near populated areas,” Throssell said. “These include missiles, heavy artillery shells and rockets, as well as airstrikes.”
Russia struck military airfields in Lutsk and Ivano-Frankivsk March 10, ABC News reported, striking targets as close as 85 miles from Lviv.
Despite the war, Pyzh has no plans to end relief operations and flee to Poland, but will rather expand relief efforts to reach refugees from Ukraine in Poland.
“The thing is I really believe, and I don’t have doubts, we will win,” he said. “So to say I have escape plan? No, I don’t have escape plan. I have expansion plan. So we will expand.
“Another thing I know for sure, we’re not going to be the same seminary we used to be. Something will change. And something drastic will change, because the situation is different and will be different. I don’t think we will be a classical seminary. I think we will emphasize the role of the church in society, raising people with spiritual values and things like that. But we’re not going to be training church people for church.”
For videos about the work going on at UBTS, go here.
To donate to Southern Baptist relief efforts, go here.
This article originally appeared at Baptist Press.
