Deepertruth: Journey with Mary as She returns to the Ukraine 2002

One of the most notable feast days of the Holy Mother is October 14, known as the Feast of the Protective Veil or Sviato Pokrovy. On this date, we gratefully and prayerfully accept protection from the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Her intercession on our behalf before the Lord. On this occasion we also pay tribute to the heroes who fought for Ukraine’s freedom, the Kozaks, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and others.

“There will be a war. Russia will become a godless country. Ukraine, as a nation, will suffer terribly for 80 years – and will have to live through the world wars, but it will be free afterwards.”

This prophecy proved to be most auspicious. Russia did indeed become a godless country following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And the atheist leaders of the Kremlin inflicted the most horrible crimes against the people of Ukraine. There was the Holodomor, during which millions suffered a slow and agonizing death by starvation. Between the 1930s and 1950s, millions more were arrested, sentenced and deported to the hard labour camps of the Gulag to perish or endure long years of unrelenting misery. There were also purges, the destruction of the Ukrainian churches, both Orthodox and Catholic, the enormous devastation and suffering inflicted upon Ukraine during the second world war by both Nazi and Soviet armies, followed by new waves of persecution upon the annexation of Western Ukraine, and many more horrors including the Chornobyl disaster. And then, almost 80 years after the apparition, Ukraine became independent.

The 1914 apparition at Hrushiv also proved to be a prelude to the much-better known apparitions at Fatima, Portugal, when the Holy Mother appeared to three children in 1917. There too she warned of upcoming wars and a godless Russia.