Ukrainian Internally Displaced Persons and Their Journey of Christian Hope

Drawing on eighteen personal narratives of internally displaced Ukrainians gathered after Russia's 2022 invasion, this study applies Paul Ricoeur's threefold mimetic method (prefiguration, configuration, refiguration) alongside Jürgen Moltmann's theology of hope to interpret displacement as a locus theologicus. The author situates the respondents' accounts of crisis, uprootedness, and yearning for home within Ukraine's national history and the biblical image of Christians as strangers awaiting the Kingdom of God. She argues that the IDPs' expressions of hope, whether explicitly Christian or not, mirror the Church's own homeward journey and reveal intercultural and ecumenical dimensions that can enrich migration theology, ultimately calling the Church to recognize displaced persons not merely as recipients of aid but as bearers of theological insight.