When the Russian armed forces announced on Tuesday that they would attack Ukrainian secret service targets with rockets in the heart of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital also understood this as an attack on the heart of Ukrainian culture and on Christianity in Ukraine.

Because diagonally across from the headquarters of the secret service at 33 Volodymyrska Street, a neoclassical building from the beginning of the 20th century, is the St. Sophia Cathedral, one of the oldest churches in Ukraine.

The distance is so close that if a missile hits the Secret Service building, serious damage to the impressive 11th-century church, with its many spires and golden domes and ornate mosaics, would be almost certain.

And just a small deviation of the missile from the target could completely destroy it.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

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Saint Sophia Cathedral was the main church of the princes of Kyiv in the early Middle Ages.

It is a prominent part of the story because of which Russian President Vladimir Putin – following 19th-century Russian historians – claims that Russians and Ukrainians are one people and that Kyiv is the mother of all Russian cities: the baptism of people in the Kievan Rus-designated principality in 988 is considered in this tradition to be the beginning of the Christian Russian state.

However, at the end of 2018, the synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church also took place in the church, in which it decided to separate itself from the Moscow Patriarchate.

The Russian government protested violently against this step, in the Russian state media there was so much talk about the danger of bloody conflicts over individual church buildings at the time,

Targeted attacks on Ukrainian self-confidence?

For a long time, many Ukrainians were convinced that Putin would not dare attack such prominent sites.

But under the impression of the rocket fire and the air raids on residential buildings in the past few days, that is about to change.

If you phone people in Kyiv, you even hear the suspicion that Russia could even target such places in order to destroy the self-confidence of the Ukrainians.

After all, in his speech last Monday on recognizing the so-called “people's republics” in the Donbass, he denied their independent history and the right to an independent existence.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also spoke of the danger of the destruction of St. Sophia Cathedral on Wednesday.

The reason for this was the rockets that hit a place of special importance on Tuesday.

During the shelling of the nearby TV tower, they hit the Babyn Yar Memorial.

There, in September 1941, the German occupiers shot more than 30,000 Kiev Jews within two days.

“What kind of person does one have to be to make a place like this a target for rockets?

You are killing the victims of the Holocaust a second time," Zelenskyy said in a video address released on Wednesday morning.

“Such a rocket hit shows that for many people in Russia, our Kyiv is completely alien.

You know nothing about our capital.

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