Drones, Air Raids, Heartbreak and Hope: Pastor Shares Reality for Children in War-Torn Ukraine
Slavic Gospel Association VP of Ministry Operations, Eric Mock, took an interesting journey into ministry. He started out in aerospace and moved into the space program, spending 16 years in that vocation as he served on the International Space Station program in Moscow. That’s where God dropped a love in his heart for the Russian-speaking nations. Then God called him into ministry in 2002.
Not only does he work for Slavic Gospel Association (SGA), but he’s also a pastor of a small Illinois church, and spends about a third of the year overseas ministering in various Slavic countries. In fact, he just got back from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, a city on the front lines of the war. He recently spoke with Crosswalk Headlines about what life has been like and how SGA is working to minister to Ukrainians living on the front lines of the war.
Years after Russian forces, unprovoked, first rolled into the small European country, aiming to take over the country, the fighting continues. Brave Ukrainians continue to battle against Russian aggression, fighting to protect their families and their homeland.
However, as the war persists, the Russians have stooped to the level of even attacking children via drone attacks as they are attempting to attend school.
With all the Trauma and Danger, What Motivates the Kids to Attend School?
Mock answered this by drawing a parallel between the perspective of the average kid in the U.S. and that of the average kid currently living in Ukraine. Most kids in the U.S. like seeing their friends, but they don’t like getting up early in the morning. When asked what their favorite class is, they often say recess. Your average U.S. kid doesn’t want to be at school.
In contrast, Ukrainian children are living in an environment in which 90 percent of the nights are filled with air raid sirens. Sadly, when the sirens go off, the kids need to immediately jump out of bed and head for an interior hallway so they don’t get hit with shards of glass from shattering windows. Just walking to the grocery store can be a risk because of the drone attacks.
From about the age of 9 and younger, he said, the kids have only known destruction. Many of them have lost their father, or their father is serving.
Now, many mothers are trying to raise their children alone. In fact, there are more kids than in underground schools.
“And so in that context, the school is their safe place. The school is a place where they go, they see everyone, and especially an underground school, the focus is keeping them safe while teaching them and investing in them.”
Not only have they adapted in spite of the circumstances and are able to learn, but many kids can listen to the engine noise of a drone, know what kind of drone it is (missile or jet), and know how much time they have to get to safety.
Mock noted that the kids know the teachers and administration are investing in them. The administration could have fled, but instead, they chose to stay for the sake of the kids.
He said the pastors and missionaries he serves with in Ukraine “live this out every single day,” and they choose to stay “because there might be one child who could perish apart from the gospel, and that breaks their hearts so much that they stay in the fight and minister to these families.”
So for Ukrainian kids, school has become a safe place where they can gather and be in relationship with each other in the midst of some terrifying and horrible circumstances.
Have Many Families Stayed Together, or Are Many of the Children Orphaned?
“Some are orphaned. Most have been able to stay together, but I think the hard part,” Mock said, “is you have over a million men serving in Ukraine, you have anywhere from 25,000 to 40,000 men per month are dying in the war, about 1.2 million men have been killed or seriously injured since the war began, and the war is now longer than World War 1.”
Another complication of the war is “war widows,” Mock said, adding that, “It’s very difficult for a woman in Ukraine to get work than for a woman in America. So when they lose their husbands, they also lose their ability to survive. So part of what SGA does is send meals into Ukraine, and that’s done by helping churches purchase meals locally, which stimulates their economy, supports local vendors and helps churches reach their own people and reach out to unbelievers. Most of the churches are filled with women and the elderly.
“Most of the kids you talk to, if you ask them what to pray for, they’ll tell you to pray that their dad would survive and could come home.”
Are Families Able to Escape, or Are Most Just Trying to Shelter in Place?
“Most of the single moms with children have nowhere to go,” Mock said
He added that besides being alone, they don’t have any money. Likewise, the seniors are on pensions and don’t have anywhere to go either. Anyone who had the ability and means to leave has long since left, yet there are still around 38 or 39 million people in Ukraine, so it’s still highly populated.
How Can American Christians Help? What to Pray For?
“There are two general ways to help. One is continue to help us equip the National Evangelical Bible teaching churches we serve. There’s about 1,800 of them that we try to help out…” and “pray for these churches that they would be salt and light in the middle of very dark and difficult times.”
He also mentioned that Odesa, on the seaport side of the Black Sea, is really getting pounded by the Russians and desperately needs prayer.
Mock went on to note that, “I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve met that said it wasn’t until they lost everything that their hearts were opened by God for the truth of the gospel, and they recognize that they lost everything to gain everything.”
Photo Credit: ©iStock/Getty Images Plus/HStocks
Originally published October 12, 2026.
