RUSSIA IS IN THIS WAR TO WIN
The Ukraine War
The Ukraine War
Many people are viewing the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine through the lens of the Western dominated media outlets they have grown up believing. These outlets are painting a David vs. Goliath picture – but the world is way more complex.
Russia may have the upper hand against Ukraine, but that doesn’t mean that Russia’s dominance in the region is a foregone conclusion. The fact is, Russia needs strategic depth buttressing its western border lands. Without this, Russia will have to invest even more money into its security.
This is why Russia will not stop with the Eastern part of Ukraine. Putin knows he needs his army all the way up to the Carpathian mountains in order to provide maximum security to prevent any NATO push Eastward.
While Russia was stalled from going into Kiev, it is regrouping to take the entire Donbass and from there it will prepare to take the entire country and beyond. With nothing stopping it, Russia will able to hold off NATO and add strategic depth to the Russian Federation
We have already seen this from Putin. First Crimea and then the Eastern part of Ukraine. What’s next? After the Donbass – Russia will pause, lick its wounds and then move forward.
President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday said that Russia would triumph in its conflict with Ukraine, delivering his first remarks in several days about the weeks-long war.
“That Blitzkrieg on which our foes were counting on did not work,” Putin claimed of the West’s crippling sanctions imposed after Putin’s Feb. 24 order to invade the country, according to state-run media outlet TASS. Putin made those comments alongside Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally, at Vostochny cosmodrome in the Amur region.
Russia’s economy is on track to contract by more than 10 percent in 2022, the biggest fall in gross domestic product since the years following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin said on Tuesday, reported Reuters. Russia is facing soaring inflation and capital flight while grappling with a possible debt default following the sanctions.
Putin, who had been ubiquitous on Russian television in the early days of the war, had largely retreated from public view since Russia’s withdrawal from northern Ukraine this month.
The Russian leader, despite setbacks, claimed that the operation in Ukraine is going according to plan, saying that a collision with Ukraine was inevitable due to nationalist factions operating within the country.
A resident stands with her belongings on a street near a building burnt in the course of the Ukraine-Russia conflict,
in the southern port city of Mariupol, Ukraine, on April 10, 2022. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
“We will not stop military operations in Ukraine until they succeed,” Putin said, adding that Ukraine has “deviated” from agreements that were made during previous rounds of talks, according to state-run RIA Novosti.
The goals of the conflict are “absolutely clear and noble,” Putin also said, state media reported. “There is no doubt that the goals will be achieved.”
“The main goal is to help the people of Donbass [region in eastern Ukraine], whose independence we recognized. We were forced to do so because the Kyiv authorities, pressed by the West, refused to comply with the Minsk agreements aimed at a peaceful solution of the Donbass-related problems,” Putin continued.
Also Tuesday, Ukrainian officials said they are checking reports of possible chemical weapons usage in Mariupol and other areas. They also urged civilians to flee eastern areas ahead of the anticipated offensive, while the battle for the southern port city of Mariupol was reaching a decisive phase, with Ukrainian marines holed up in the Azovstal industrial district.
“There is a theory that these could be phosphorous munitions,” Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar said in public remarks.
It came hours President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Monday night that Russia could resort to chemical weapons as it massed troops in Donbass for a new assault. He did not say if they actually had been used. The United States and Britain said they were trying to verify the reports.
Jack Phillips BREAKING NEWS REPORTER
Jack Phillips is a breaking news reporter at The Epoch Times based in New York.
In 1996, the year that Vladimir Putin moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow to take a post inside Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin, the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta asked its readers a leading question: “Do you agree that we’ve had enough democracy, haven’t adapted to it, and now it’s time to tighten the screws?” The paper set up a hotline and offered the equivalent of two thousand dollars to any caller who could come up with a new “unifying national idea.” The exercise reflected an impoverished country demoralized and adrift.
At around the same time, Yeltsin assembled a committee of scholars and politicians to formulate a new “national idea.” Perhaps the newspaper contest could feed the process. But the efforts went nowhere. Yeltsin had failed to build any momentum behind democratic ideals, and the political optimism of the period between 1989 and 1991 was, for most Russians, now a bitter memory. The Soviet-era social safety net had been shredded. People were tired of looking through shop windows at glittering imports while a coterie of oligarchs were permitted to buy up the country’s most valuable state enterprises for kopecks on the ruble. Yeltsin won reelection, defeating the Communist candidate, Gennady Zyuganov, but only by enlisting those oligarchs who, with self-preservation in mind, bankrolled him and helped cover up his exhaustion and his alcoholism. By the late nineties, democracy, demokratia, was referred to as dermokratia, shit-ocracy. Yeltsin’s support fell to the low single digits.
The same intellectuals who had dreamed of free speech, the rule of law, and a general movement toward liberal democracy now experienced acute feelings of failure. “There is no sense of what this new country, Russia, really is,” a prominent cultural historian, Andrei Zorin, said at the time, contrasting the atmosphere with the Enlightenment ferment that attended the birth of the United States and republican France. “These last four or five years in Russia have produced little besides pure hysteria.”
Putin came to power, in 1999, advertised not as a man of ideology but as a figure of rude health and managerial competence. In truth, he was a man of the K.G.B., trained to view the West, particularly the U.S., as his enemy, and to see conspirators everywhere trying to weaken and humiliate Russia. He did not form any committees to devise a national idea; he set up no hotline. He established, over time, a personalist regime built around his patronage and absolute authority. And the national identity he has helped promulgate––illiberal, imperial, resentful of the West––has played an essential role in his brutal invasion of Ukraine.
To create the trappings of this Russian identity, Putin seized on existing strands of reactionary thought. While most observers paid closer attention to the intellectual and political turn to the West in the late nineteen-eighties and nineties, many Russian thinkers, publications, and institutions drew inspiration from far different sources. Newspapers such as Dyen (The Day) and Zavtra (Tomorrow) published screeds about the pernicious influence of American cultural and political power. Various academics celebrated the virtues of “the strong hand,” exemplified by such repressive tsars as Alexander III and Nicholas I and foreign autocrats such as Augusto Pinochet. A crackpot philosopher named Aleksandr Dugin published neo-fascist apocalyptic tomes about the eternal battle between the “sea power” of the West and the “land power” of Eurasia, and found an audience in Russian political, military, and intelligence circles.
Putin, from his first years in office, was obsessed with the restoration of Russian might in the world and the positioning of the security services as the singular institution of domestic control. nato’s expansion and the bombing of Belgrade, Iraq, and Libya propelled his suspicion of the West and his inward turn. He also recognized the importance of symbols and traditional institutions that could unify ordinary people and help define the particularities of a new Russian exceptionalism. He restored the old Soviet anthem with updated lyrics. He told interviewers and visitors that he was an Orthodox believer and did nothing to dispel rumors that he had taken on a dukhovnik, a spiritual guide, named Tikhon Shevkunov. Father Tikhon, who has appeared in films and runs the Web site Pravoslavie.ru., denied that he had notable influence over Putin (“I am no Cardinal Richelieu!”), but made it plain that he was a conservative nationalist who believed in the “special path” of Russia.In 2004, when Ukraine was in the midst of its Orange Revolution, Putin not only called on his security services to combat Kyiv’s drift to the West; he turned up the volume on his conception of an imperial ideology. He began to speak approvingly of such conservative émigré thinkers as Nikolai Berdyaev and Ivan Ilyin, who believed in the exalted destiny of Russia and the artificiality of Ukraine. In case anyone missed the message, the Kremlin distributed the appropriate reading material to regional governors and bureaucrats.
In 2007, the year that Putin delivered a famous diatribe against the West, in Munich, he visited a writer and thinker who had once been considered the greatest enemy of the Soviet state: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn believed that Russia and Ukraine were inextricably linked, and Putin tried to exploit Solzhenitsyn’s moral standing to underscore his own disdain for Ukrainian independence. What he conveniently ignored was Solzhenitsyn’s insistence, in 1991, that if Ukrainians chose to go their own way––as they did by a ninety-per-cent vote––he would “warmly congratulate” them. (“We will always be neighbors. Let’s be good neighbors.”)
By the time Putin returned to the Presidency, in 2012, his attention to distinctly conservative values had deepened. He cracked down on dissenters, vilifying them as “traitors,” an American-backed “fifth column.” He occupied Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine. His vision of Moscow as a center of anti-liberal ideas and Eurasian power intensified. During the pandemic, he rarely met in person with his advisers, yet, according to the political analyst Mikhail Zygar, he spoke for days at his dacha with Yury Kovalchuk, a media baron and the largest shareholder in Rossiya Bank, who shares his messianic vision and sybaritic life style. In recent years, Putin has even succeeded in exporting his particular brand of illiberalism to, among others, the National Front, in France; the British National Party; the Jobbik movement, in Hungary; Golden Dawn, in Greece; and the right wing of the Republican Party. As Donald Trump’s ideologist, Steve Bannon, put it recently, “Ukraine’s not even a country.”
The devastation of Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities suggests that there is little mercy or modesty in Putin’s faith. Early in his reign, according to the journalist Catherine Belton, he went with his confidant, banker, and eventual antagonist Sergei Pugachev to an Orthodox service on Forgiveness Sunday, which is celebrated just before Lent. Pugachev, a believer, told Putin that he should prostrate himself before the priest, as an act of contrition. “Why should I?” Putin is said to have replied. “I am the President of the Russian Federation. Why should I ask for forgiveness?”
David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992.
Taunton explains: “[Russian] rulers were always struggling between two impulses: one is westernizing, one is moving back toward dictatorship. And—for eons—they were always going back and forth between the two—that struggle between freedom and progress, versus hardline dictatorship and terrorizing the old Russian Slavic way. This pattern has continued to this very moment.
By Shira Sorko-Ram
English
Stories from Ukraine
Alona
Ukraine: The War & The Church
We are Here for Them
To understand the complexity of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, a quick bit of history will help:
In the year 1054, an event took place in Christendom that would forever impact the future of the entire world. The greatest schism in church history occurred between the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople. In short, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the envoys of the Pope excommunicated each other. It had been a long time coming, as church fathers wrangled over such dogmas as proper ways to fast, differences in their veneration of Mary, and whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father only, or also from Yeshua.
Though the Catholic Church has a brutal history of faults and failures, there were periods of revival which birthed new vibrant communities and a return to the Word of God. On the other hand, the Eastern Church consistently took many steps away from Biblical truths without the accompanying seasons of renewal and re-grounding in God’s Word.
Russia fell into the Eastern Orthodox sphere. Then, what was left of Eastern Christianity eventually mingled with the local Slavic pagan culture. Award-winning author and student of Russian history Larry Alex Taunton 1 points out: “Consider the fact that Russia never experienced a Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution, or Industrial Revolution. These epochs define the West as we know it and define Western thinking, but not Russia, not Ukraine.”
The Russian Empire was often isolated from the West culturally, spiritually and linguistically during centuries of the influence of Oriental tyranny. As a result, Russia and Ukraine entered the 20th century with a Middle Ages despotic mentality.
Beginning in the late 15th century when the Mongols’ 250-year reign of terror finally ended, a strange split-personality behavior evolved. There were a few powerful rulers and czars who saw Russia’s social deficiency and tried to liberalize the nation by giving rights to citizens, improving the state of peasants, and encouraging education and individual enterprise. However, there were also many evil tyrants who ravaged the land, starved and mass-murdered their people and devastated their cities over and over.
Taunton explains: “[Russian] rulers were always struggling between two impulses: one is westernizing, one is moving back toward dictatorship. And—for eons—they were always going back and forth between the two. Catherine the Great was a westernizer. Her son wasn’t. Alexander I was a westernizer followed by Nicolas I who wasn’t, followed by Alexander II who was a westernizer, followed by Alexander III who wasn’t.” So it went back and forth—that struggle between freedom and progress, versus hardline dictatorship and terrorizing the old Russian Slavic way. This pattern has continued to this very moment.
It is important to note these extreme political swings continued during the Communist takeover—hellish tyranny in the form of Soviet Marxism lasting from 1917 to 1991. It ended because liberalizers Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin opened the country to capitalism, and ultimately to freedom. During this period, fifteen sovereign states emerged, independent of the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine!
Schism of 1054
Separation of Western and Eastern Christianity
Centers of the spread of Christianity
This period of freedom and liberty created an extravagant opening for Christians around the world to bring the Gospel to these nations whose citizens had been “forced atheists.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia welcomed Western influences of many stripes, whether they were economists, capitalists, Christians, Evangelicals—whoever they were—they were allowed in!
There was kind of a naivete that characterized the Soviets. They embraced everyone with enthusiasm. Missionaries from large organizations and small churches flooded Russia with the Gospel. Literally hundreds of thousands of Russians came to faith. Churches and Bible schools sprang up across Russia and the new independent states. Among the Jewish population, Messianic Jewish congregations were birthed in many of these countries.
Jonathan Bernis of Jewish Voice, and a board member of Maoz,crisscrossed Russia and Ukraine for 12 years, hosting Messianic Jewish concerts, preaching the Gospel and seeing thousands and thousands of Jews and Gentiles come to faith. In 1994, Ari and I had the opportunity to teach for a week in St. Petersburg at his Messianic Bible school. Just months before, this group of young Jews and non-Jews didn’t know God existed! Now they came with a deep passion to learn everything we could teach them. It was a unique window of time that, thanks be to God, was not wasted by the people of God!
Many new Russian Jewish believers made aliyah to Israel and quickly doubled the number of Messianic Jews in Israel. Today some are pastors, musicians, business people and artists, all working for the Kingdom of God. Several talented members of our Maoz team came from Russia and Ukraine.
This map, published in The New York Times in February 1918 shows the boundaries of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, which existed from 1917-1920.
Vladimir Putin denies that Ukraine was a sovereign state for those three years.
Anyone in Russia claiming this historical fact can be imprisoned for up to 10 years.
Then Vladimir Putin became president in the year 2000. By 2012 Russia was already moving to impede foreign missionaries and three years later, their law said all religious meeting places needed to be registered. By 2020, Russian Christians were being persecuted, whether Roman Catholics or Pentecostals, while the Russian Orthodox Church’s status was elevated.
Sadly, there is also a tragic element which the West must acknowledge. The West was given a rare opportunity to influence a culture. But besides those who brought the Gospel came a flood of pornography, sexuality, and every kind of corruption and depravity, notes Taunton. Russians didn’t have the historical experience or savvy to figure out what was what. They simply slammed the brakes on everything.
Returning to the present crisis: Although Ukraine and Russia have been tied to the same historical heritage, the Ukrainian people have had a deep longing to enjoy their own country, language and culture; they have long been attracted to the self-determination and prosperity of the West. So when the last Romanov czar was suddenly ousted in 1917, Ukraine boldly declared its freedom as a sovereign state and fought against the Bolshevik Red army. They had three years of freedom, until Lenin’s Marxist Bolshevik forces swallowed Ukraine back into their Russian empire.
Almost immediately, Russia’s Communist leaders demanded that Ukrainian farmers collectivize their farms. Ukrainians rebelled and were horrifically punished by the Soviets with genocide and a forced famine in the 1930’s. The manmade Great Famine claimed the lives of some 3.9 million people. The hardest hit area was Ukraine.
When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, there were Ukrainians who did cooperate with the Nazis, not because they agreed with Germany’s ideology, but because they thought they had a better chance of rebirthing their sovereign state under Germany than under Communist Russia. Still, they are not without blame as they actively participated in hunting down Jews and mass shootings.
Manipulating that history, Putin’s propaganda today explains he must attack Ukraine to destroy their “Nazi leadership”—despite the fact that Ukraine has come a long way in it’s ideology as both the president and the prime minister of Ukraine are Jewish. During the 74 years of Communist Russia’s tyranny they managed to obliterate 100 million people from the earth—that bit of history Putin leaves out.
Nationalist rally in Kyiv in January 1917 when Ukraine declared itself an independent sovereign state.
Contrary to President Putin’s misinformation that Ukraine was never an independent state until 1991 at the collapse of the Soviet Union,
this picture is one of the many proofs that Ukraine achieved its independence from 1917-1921.
Of Ukraine’s 43 million citizens, 67% of the total population still adheres to Orthodox Christianity. About 2.2% of Ukrainians are Evangelicals (mostly Baptists and Pentecostals) with about 3,000 churches.
Interestingly, the most trusted entities in Ukraine are the Church, trusted by 63%, and the military at 65%.2 A year ago, a poll showed over two-thirds of Ukrainians distrusted state officials and politicians. President Volodimir Zelensky won because he ran on a platform to wipe out corruption.
For a small minority of 2.2%, there is an unusually large number of Evangelicals present in Ukraine’s government. The shortage of good leaders in Ukraine was so intense, political parties started to recruit candidates from Evangelical churches! In 2020, more than 500 Evangelicals were elected to all levels of government!
After the elections, Nikolay Kuleba, Zelensky’s Ombudsman for Children, gathered all the winning Evangelical politicians and asked them to ask God: “What is your purpose for me here?”
Kuleba was the only high-level official from the former administration that Zelensky didn’t fire when he came to power. “Believers need to be in the government,” he said.
Recognizing this recent cultural shift towards the Gospel, the coordinator of Ukraine’s National Prayer Breakfast, Pavel Unguryan, said, “Ukraine has become the epicenter of a global spiritual battle… Introducing people to the teachings of Jesus will change the country and region much faster than the activities of a party.” One can see why the Enemy would like to have Ukraine once again under communist control.
This war has changed everything. At the very least it has inspired a movement to bring together Baptists, Pentecostals and other newer groups into an informal union so that practically all Ukrainian Evangelicals can now speak with one voice.
Reports of the heroic efforts of Evangelical churches in Ukraine in this war are getting widespread coverage. Church leaders are occupied full time with the refugee chaos. In most cases, pastors send the women and children westward on buses, while they and a small team remain to help more refugees make it to the borders.
One pastor, Ivan Rusyn, stated: “This war has completely redefined my understanding of mission and holistic ministry. You cannot show compassion from a distance.” He and his seven remaining colleagues coordinate relief from the offices of the Ukrainian Bible Society, where he sleeps on the floor at night.
His joy, he says, comes from seeing the smiles on the faces of Ukrainian soldiers who know that the pastors and priests are praying. He plans to stay in Kyiv as long as President Zelensky does.
Rusyn said, “For 70 years the nation was under the bondage of Soviet Communism. But the Ukrainian church used well the 30 years of freedom that we have had. Wherever the Russians are, they restrict born-again believers and institutions, attempting to shut down the robust religious tolerance of Ukraine. Christian leaders that remain in Kyiv and other cities are the incarnated witness of Jesus Christ.”
The Gospel has indeed been expanding across Ukraine, including to the Jewish people. In Kyiv, Boris Grysenko pastors the largest Messianic Congregation in all of Europe with over a thousand members, Jonathan Bernis says. “Conservatively I would estimate there are some 80-100 Messianic Congregations in Ukraine (while in Russia there are only estimated to be 10-20 such congregations).”
In the midst of this horrific war, Israel has found herself in a precarious position. While literally all the civilized world is horrified at the war crimes happening on their screens, our citizens are doubly so, because many Israelis have close relatives and friends caught in this carnage. Yet Israel’s Prime Minister is preoccupied with the reality that Russia has placed troops on our northern border since the war in Syria began during the Obama administration. Russia’s excuse for this is that they are protecting Syria.
Nevertheless, there has been an agreement between Israel and Russia permitting Israel to have open skies over Syria to bomb Iranian shipments of weapons on their way to Hezbollah. It is imperative that those skies remain open for Israel’s security.
So P.M. Naftali Bennett may be the only Western leader who has tried to maintain some sort of neutral position. Believe me, he has received plenty of criticism for it. Volodimir Zelensky has not been happy with Bennett. At the same time, Israel is the only country mentioned in the news when it comes to mediating between the two countries. If there is any positive movement towards mediation through Bennett, it is because Israel has solid relations with both sides.
Yet as we Israelis say, it is complicated. Around 400,000 Jews are citizens of Ukraine and are living there now. Israel is ready to bring them all “home” to the Promised Land. At least 100,000 new Jewish immigrants and their families are expected in the next few months. And as always, Israel is sending tons of humanitarian aid to this war-torn nation.
On the other hand, the Israeli government is also concerned for the well-being of 165,000 Jews who are citizens of Russia, and is ready to help them also immigrate to Israel, even though, it is reported the backlog of applications will take nine months to process!
As one commentator said, “It takes a large number of coordinated and committed people to make peace; it takes only one madman to make war.”
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June 21, 2023
