Oleksandr Khomchenko, the courageous Donetsk pastor tortured for his active participation in the Prayer Marathon under a Ukrainian flag in 2014, has died after a long illness, aged 59. He had been living in Mariyinka, Donetsk oblast, where he was Pastor of the Church of the Transformation and very active in voluntary work, helping families in need. He had also traveled to the European Parliament as part of a mission aimed at highlighting Russian war crimes in Donbas, and was one of the people who gave testimony used in the report “Those who survived Hell’.
Back in February 2014, Father Oleksandr was one of the organizers of the Prayer Marathon. Together with members of all faiths, except the Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate, they gathered on Constitution Square in the center of Donetsk to pray for Ukraine’s unity and for peace. The Prayer Marathon continued for 158 days, although it became more and more dangerous with each day. Pastor Sergey Kosyak has stressed that the main danger was in the fact that they gathered under the flag of Ukraine. They had even been approached and told to take away the flag and they could pray as much as they wanted to. They refused “since for us it was more than a flag”, he explains.
