When Father Ruslan Mikhalkiv returned on April 7 to the abandoned seminary outside Kyiv where he serves as rector, there was one thing that unsettled him above all others.

It wasn’t the garage, seemingly struck by a rocket, or the front door, which appeared to have been destroyed by an armored vehicle. Nor was it the empty spaces where coffee machines and routers were previously installed. It wasn’t even the bare spot once occupied by a chalice that Pope John Paul II had used during his visit to Ukraine.

It was the shattered statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

“I have been studying for days how exactly it was destroyed,” Mikhalkiv said after finding the Marian image on the floor of the dining room in the Major Theological Seminary of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Vorzel.

“At first, we thought the military might have come in and overturned the figure, or perhaps it had been knocked over by a rocket explosion, because the windows there were also broken.”

“I also thought that a shell fragment might have hit the figure.”

Finally, Mikhalkiv settled on another theory about the statue, purchased by the seminary in Fatima, Portugal, for the 100th anniversary of the apparitions in 2017.

Read more at Catholic News Agency