Russian pastor Andre Furmanov was at home organizing his office space last May when his lawyer contacted him with a warning: Review the church library for any materials connected to Mission Eurasia or be prepared to face legal consequences. His church administrator immediately went to review the congregation’s library.
Moscow designated the US-based ministry—which focuses on training, equipping, and mobilizing Christian leaders in Eurasia and Israel—as an “undesirable organization” on May 13, effectively prohibiting it from operating inside the country. Anyone caught with its materials—including Bibles the ministry has been distributing for decades—could be prosecuted, Furmanov learned.
“The most disturbing part is that there does not appear to be a publicly stated, detailed explanation from the Russian authorities specifically identifying what Mission Eurasia supposedly did that justified this designation,”said Furmanov, an evangelical pastor in Vyborg, near the Finnish border.
Two days after the Russian Ministry of Justice added Mission Eurasia to the blacklist, authorities visited the office of Peter Mitskevich, president of Moscow Theological Seminary and head of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists—the largest evangelical denomination in the country. They found books published by Mission Eurasia—including The Phenomenon of Leadership and Holistic Mission—and Bibles with the organization’s logo.
“I don’t know why Bibles with the Mission Eurasia logo are considered extremist material,” Mission Eurasia president Sergey Rakhuba told Christianity Today. According to Rakhuba, many of the materials in question have been on the shelves of ministry libraries in Russia for more than a decade. Police fined Mitskevich for possession of the materials.
Since then, Mission Eurasia has received multiple reports from Russians about authorities visiting churches and Christian institutions to inquire about materials and connections to the organization.
“These are people we have known for many years—pastors, Christian leaders, former students, ministry partners, friends—with whom we have deliberately stopped communicating” for their safety, Rakhuba said.
Rakhuba, who is from Ukraine and lived in Russia for many years, noted that the recent action reminded him of his childhood under the Soviet Union. “Christians behind the Iron Curtain lived in deep isolation from Christians in the rest of the world.”
The Mitskevich case is significant because the Baptist leader is well-known and careful with his public statements, Rakhuba said. “Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mitskevich and the Russian Baptist Union have avoided publicly confronting the Kremlin over the war” and have instead maintained a more cautious and accommodating public stance toward the administration, he added.
“Imagine what message that sends to an ordinary pastor in a small Russian town: ‘If this can happen to Peter Mitskevich, what can they do to me?’”
This month, a Russian court also fined St. Petersburg Christian University 60,000 rubles (roughly $700) for possessing two Mission Eurasia books, including The Alphabet of Family Worship: 55 Characteristics of God for Family Worship.
Mission Eurasia isn’t the only Christian organization Moscow is targeting. Russia’s Ministry of Justice added Child Evangelism Fellowship to its list of “undesirable organizations” in July. The American evangelical ministry is known for its Good News Clubs, which teach the Bible to children.
The government registry lists more than 350 banned organizations, including those focused on democracy, independent media, human rights, and foreign policy. The DC-based Atlantic Council and Freedom House were added in 2019 and 2024, respectively. Freedom House declared Russia “not free” in 2024, assigning it a score of only 13 out of 100.
While the Russian government has not revealed why it has targeted his ministry, Rakhuba believes Mission Eurasia’s reports on Russia’s persecution of Ukrainian Christians have likely contributed to the designation. “Mission Eurasia has been very outspoken about Russia’s war against Ukraine and particularly about persecution and violations of religious freedom in the Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine,” Rakhuba said.
His organization has meticulously documented the number of churches Russian troops have destroyed or confiscated, as well as the clergy Kremlin soldiers have tortured, killed, or forced to flee their homes.
“We have shared those findings with the rest of the world, including the churches in the United States,” so that Christians will continue to pray for and support the church in Ukraine, Rakhuba said. Mission Eurasia has presented its findings at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, DC.
Mission Eurasia (formerly Peter Deyneka Russian Ministries) launched in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It equipped the Russian church to train Christian leaders and provided materials and tools for missional outreach.
Furmanov witnessed the impact of the organization’s publications in those early years. He said the children’s Bible storybooks were everywhere—in Sunday schools, children’s camps, and the hands of children.
“Parents read it, grandparents read it, brothers and sisters read it, and sometimes an entire family was introduced to the Bible through a simple, beautifully illustrated children’s book,” he said.
“This was especially significant because our country had come out of decades of Soviet atheism,” Furmanov said. “Christian literature had been extremely difficult to obtain, and there was an enormous spiritual hunger after the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 and began cultivating ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. Those ties flourished, and Mission Eurasia grew concerned about how the changing landscape might affect ministry work, Rakhuba said. The organization moved its headquarters from Moscow to Kyiv in 2008.
Still, Mission Eurasia continued its work in Russia through leadership training programs, collaboration with seminaries and churches, and the publication and distribution of Christian materials.
Now, its ministry endeavors in the country are at risk.
Rakhuba believes the war in Ukraine isn’t the only factor contributing to the crackdown. “I think the larger issue is that independent Christian mission work is a lot more difficult for an authoritarian regime to control,” Rakhuba said. He believes the Kremlin’s strategy is to silence evangelicals because “the gospel creates people whose highest loyalty is ultimately to God, not to the government or a political ideology.”
Religious freedom in Russia has been deteriorating for years. Evangelicals have experienced increased restrictions on evangelism, theological education, and relationships with Christians abroad. Some Russian pastors have left the country, including former president of the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists Yuri Sipko, who fled in 2023 after the government called his sermons “enemy propaganda” and filed a criminal case against him.
Rakhuba believes Moscow is increasingly moving from restrictions to criminalization.
On September 3, 2025, Russian courts sentenced Pentecostal pastor Nikolai Romanyuk to four years in a penal colony for an antiwar sermon he had preached three years earlier. Rakhuba said cases like this change the atmosphere for the entire church.
“The real story is what happens to a society when its government becomes so suspicious of independent Christian faith and relationships that a Bible, a Christian textbook, an old ministry partnership, or simply contact with another Christian across a border becomes something you have to fear,” Rakhuba said. “I once lived behind that kind of Iron Curtain. I pray we are not watching another one being built.”
Furmanov said the government may pull books from shelves, but it cannot erase what has already happened in a human heart. “They cannot make a child forget a Bible story he learned years ago,” he said. “They cannot erase the faith that grew from something that was once read in a home, a church, or a children’s camp.”
