The 3 Narratives on Russia/Ukraine & The Social Justice Connection

Welcome to the

Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. Today I will be taking the gloves off because I have been wondering for the last few days now, what have we become?

I don't recognize what I'm seeing right now. For those who listen from the

United States of America, as Americans. For those of you who are Christians listening, as Christians, I don't know what some of us have become.

I don't have a fully mature righteous indignation formed in me, but I have one that's starting.

And I have to question what in the world is going on among people who for the last two years weren't buying media narratives and cultivated what

I thought was a healthy suspicion and are now buying a simplistic narrative, hook, line, and sinker.

And it has more implications than just being simplistic. There are moral issues at play in this.

I'm sick and tired of a few things. One is the media lies, including conservative media, by the way.

I can hardly listen to most talk radio. At least there's some out there like Steve Dace, who's a

Christian and a conservative talk show host who will come out and say, look, I'm going to just admit I'm ignorant about a lot of what's going on.

We have this, we have the fog of war and there are a lot of people really sure about themselves on some things that probably shouldn't be speaking with such assurances.

At least there's a few people honest like that. There's hardly any though. There's a lot of lies being spun and half truths about what's actually happening.

And I don't know the full picture. I'm not an expert, but the little I do know is incompatible with what we're being told.

Proverbs 20, 23 says differing weights are an abomination to the Lord and a false scale is not good.

Lord hates measures and weights that are not equal. And we need to be suspicious of media narratives that are completely lopsided in one direction, one direction only.

Portraying certain figures and leaders and governments as pure as the driven snow and others as the height of all evil.

They're not really giving us hardly any explanation for why what's happening is actually happening. With little, and I'll be honest with you, this is the thing that really, it's bugging me.

It should be bugging all of us. With a callousness in many cases to actual people being harmed right now.

I don't recognize it. I don't recognize it. I'm tired of the outright hypocrisy of those on the progressive left who are valuing right now armed civilians, championing armed civilians, women who, according to some of the stories, some of which now have been proven to be false, but women going out with guns and Molotov cocktails and this is a good thing somehow.

And masculinity, strong masculine leadership, that's what we need. That's really good. And borders, borders are sacred and they shall not be infringed.

And the democratic process is this sacred institution that shall never be questioned, shall never be challenged.

And any war on a government that claims to be democratic is a war on everyone else.

It's a war on the entire world. And in Ukraine, it's fine to talk about these things, but apparently in the

United States and Canada, well, we call people who like guns, ignorant rednecks.

And we call super masculine people toxic and borders are meant to be crossed.

And democracy, well, we just had an election that showed where people are at in the mainstream elite media when it comes to democracy.

How about in Canada? It's nauseating. I hope you see it.

Matthew 7, 5 says, you hypocrite first take the log out of your own eye and you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye.

It's one of the big issues with us getting involved in some of these conflicts. There are others, but one of them is what we are, we would supposedly in the minds of our elites be fighting for and funding.

We don't even value at home, not in reality, not tangibly.

It's all an abstraction. It's a mental exercise we engage in and it's callous towards the lives of actual people being hurt.

Do you see that? I'm tired of the simplistic reductionistic intelligence, insulting wartime propaganda, including the massive deceit on social media intended to paint one government as pure as the driven snow and another as the definition of evil.

While actual innocent people are experiencing the consequences of their failure to negotiate.

And that's wicked. Exodus 2016 says you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Does it bother anyone that Russians themselves are starting to be vilified now? Here's a video of Congressman Eric Swalwell suggesting the deportation of Russian exchange students.

Check it out. I think closing their embassy in the United States, kicking every Russian student out of the

United States, those should all be on the table. And Vladimir Putin needs to know every day that he is in Ukraine, there are more severe options that could come.

And on the other side of the aisle, here's a tweet from Congressman Dan Crenshaw excited about women making

Molotov cocktails and passing out sunflower seeds. So Russian troops will grow flowers when they die.

While also managing to share fake news about snake Island and the ghost of Kiev. For those who don't know, there's a lot of stories going around and just about every single one of them that I've seen, and I've probably seen 12 or 15 has been proven to be false so far about this whole entire situation.

The ones that have gone viral on social media, but you have him. I mean, the more important thing isn't the fake news he's sharing.

It's this excitedness he has about, yeah, there's women out there with Molotov cocktails and they're giving sunflower seeds to Russian troops.

So they'll grow flowers when they die. Does it occur?

I know I'm not alone in this. I know many of you in this audience, I understand many of you, you feel similar to me and I'm in some ways your voice right now, but does it disturb you?

Does it disturb people listening that there's real lives being killed?

Real people are dying right now in Ukraine over things that should have been negotiated years ago.

And, and this is, this is how the ignorance emanating from politicians on both sides of the aisle in our country, distantly from a foreign land, saying the kinds of things they're saying is irresponsible, is downright irresponsible.

This isn't a game and Russian exchange students, how would, what do they have to do with the president of their country going into another country to take a military action?

What does that have to do with them exactly? Are we going to repeat the things that happened during World War II?

Are we, is that where we're going? If we get sucked into this, are we going to set up some internment camps?

How far do we take this? I'd really like to know. And as a student of history,

I know what it can be and I know what's happened before. And we're, we're not as involved in this conflict as we were in others, but during World War I, oh yeah, people were jailed.

In fact, going back way before that, during the American Civil War, journalists were jailed, thousands of them who disagreed, who dissented.

We, this is not a new thing. This is a, this is something that happens in times of war often.

A lot of the freedoms that we take for granted are taken away. And we've had two years of freedoms being taken away.

And the people that are vilified, that are honestly reduced down to, you're just this or that, some evil pejorative usually, oh, they lose, lose a lot more of their civil rights than the rest of us.

I can see little hints of it starting, bubbling up. We're not even in the war.

We're just funding one side of it, but we're, these little, little things are bubbling up that I recognize.

And I'm just telling you, this is not good. We should not celebrate.

There should be some sense of sadness in this somewhere that a woman would even go out with a

Molotov cocktail in the first place. I don't feel like celebrating that.

I don't know about you. I understand, look, if you're, if, if in fact you are being attacked, whether it's an army or just evil people in your town who are trying to break into your house and you defend yourself, there is nothing wrong with that.

And you should, but man, the loss of human life, the fact that these kinds of stories are being passed around with kind of glee and just a cavalier approach.

I'm just using these two as examples. I could use a lot more. This is really disturbing. I hope you see it.

This is not Christian. This is not how Christians should look at these things. Russians are made in God's image too, as are

Ukrainians and those living in the contested regions between the countries. They're all made in God's image.

How is it that in less than a week, otherwise intelligent people, some of whom were skeptical of the media because of their coverage of COVID, BLM and the election.

And many who probably couldn't even tell you where the Donbass region was on a map of Ukraine are completely parroting the media narrative, dehumanizing leaders on one side, elevating as moral heroes, those on the other and sharing unconfirmed stories as well as lies on social media about the whole event.

Does this concern anyone? Is this knee -jerk reaction Christian? We need to take the higher ground and be about the truth in this.

And that means being careful with some of the things we share and say and admitting we're ignorant if we are.

And there's nothing wrong with that. That's humility to say, I don't know. I just don't know. I know what everyone's saying, but I don't know.

I haven't looked into it. I got a job. I'm working a lot. I can't, I don't have time to dig into all the geopolitical things going on around the world.

You know what? There's nothing wrong with that. We don't have to take a side, but right now what's happening, just like the other movements we've seen in the last few years, there is an intense pressure that you must be on a side.

And if you deviate in any way, well, then you're just pro Putin. You're pro

Russian. You must be a Nazi. And that media narrative is an odd one to me.

We'll talk about that as we get into it a little bit, the Nazi thing, but that's what you are.

You must be a white nationalist. You must be a horrible person. If you even question the binary moral narrative, we need to take the higher ground.

My commitment to you is to share what I can reasonably confirm. And if I can't,

I won't say anything or I'll share my suspicion, but I'll make it clear. That's what I'm doing.

And this is what I'm striving for. I don't want to pull one over on you. And I like it. I want people to challenge me, not out of ignorance.

I don't care for that. And that's mostly what I've been dealing with for people who don't agree, which is fine.

But if it's just a repeating platitudes, if you have something that I've missed, if I said something in error and you can back it up,

I want you to tell me. This is my commitment to you, okay? No one's perfect. No one gets everything right.

And some people are deceived. And some of you may have shared some of these fake stories, and I don't think you should live in guilt about that necessarily.

Confess it, move on, perhaps. Or, you know, this is the reality we live in. We just got to be aware there's a lot of lies, and that mainstream media isn't helping.

They're sharing all these things. We can take the higher ground as Christians. We can be about the truth in this.

Meanwhile, as I said, people are dying. They're fleeing the country. Some are staying behind. And I've been in contact with several missionaries and missions organizations already, and I'm trying to arrange at least one interview.

And right now it's very hard, though, because the people that are living under these circumstances find it hard to find the time for that.

In the info section on this video, though, or podcast, if you're listening, you can find information on groups that I verified that you can contribute to if you want to meet tangible needs of those fleeing areas where military actions are taking place.

So please check that out. I'm giving of my own resources in this. I'd encourage you to give some of your own resources.

I don't know the full extent of all the needs. I just know from those on the ground there are going to be needs, and that would be any time you have something similar to this, and you have a large group of people that have to move very quickly from an area, they're going to have tangible needs that need to be met.

So pray for safety, but also that the gospel would go forward, as some consider their mortality.

There's missionaries that have chosen to stay behind in order to be a witness to those who are still in places like Kiev.

Pray for them. Pray that the gospel would go forward. Is that not more important than the political situation right now, that men and women would receive

Christ, know the true peace that comes with that, and have eternity to spend with him?

God can turn evil into good, and how many people are going to hear the word of God and become saved because they didn't stop long enough to consider their own mortality, and now it's staring them in the face?

Today on the podcast, we are going to talk more about this situation, and I've been reading as much as I can from all kinds of sources, and doing my utmost to apply the training that I received in grad school to piece together the truth as far as I can tell.

I think this is important for a variety of reasons. Number one, there is an agenda to influence the way you're thinking about this.

Behind it seems to be a number of motives, including reinforcing the idea that democracy, as an end in and of itself, is a goal.

Not a means to an end, but an end in and of itself. It's a goal worthy of unlimited support and sacrifice. Also, there are powerful forces heavily invested in getting you to think about the governments of Russia and Ukraine in morally absolute terms, and as Christians, we need a healthy dose of skepticism about man's goodness, which both of these motives relate to.

It is possible that the media conceives democracy to be a tool for creating egalitarian globalist open societies.

It is also possible for there to be multiple bad guys in a conflict, which is a thought not being entertained by hardly anyone right now, in the mainstream at least.

James 4, 1 through 2 says this, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? This is about the church.

There's a general principle here. Is it not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members?

You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.

What's the root of this? Shouldn't we as Christians kind of just assume right away, what's the root of this?

How come there's been eight years and really more than that, but there's been at least eight years of attempts to negotiate, to settle this particular conflict, and it hasn't happened, and there's conflicted interests here.

Could not the source be pleasures that wage war? Could not be the source lust for something, maybe for oil, maybe for, oh

I don't know, could be economic, could be military defense, some of it could be reasonable, some of it though could be sinful.

So just knowing what we know about human nature, we should kind of be suspicious of a hard binary narrative about this.

The issue will become also one of big, a big election issue. We have elections this year, and this will be one of the things that candidates are going to have to take a position on, and it will likely develop, just like the

COVID narrative developed, by the time we reach the election. So it's important to steward your vote well.

So we want to, I want to start on this early. It's also important for us to pursue the things that make for peace.

Christians should be about peace. Notice I'm not saying anti -war. We know war is inevitable. There's going to be war if there's sin.

We just read James 4. There's going to be war, going to be conflict. We know that, but we should pursue the things that make for peace.

That's what makes Christians unique in many contexts. Blessed are the peacemakers.

It's who we should be. We should try to avoid what's going on right now.

We should try to resolve things. We should be peacemakers in every area of our life, and then when it becomes inevitable, we have to defend ourselves.

We do that. We champion David's mighty men. We can make these distinctions.

It's possible. We don't have to be on one side of the anti -war completely, and then on the other side, the completely, you know, pro -war hawkish, right?

There is a reasonable, and I'm not saying a middle third way necessarily. What I'm saying is there's a deeper, uh, there's a, um, there's situations in which we can be on the hawkish side of some things, especially if American interests are being threatened, and it's by, it's literally by sinful evil impulses.

We can, yeah, let's defend ourselves, right? We can also be in the same way. Uh, let's not get involved in that conflict.

Well, we, we, you know, let's try to use another means by which to adjudicate this or this isn't our business.

As I read for you two podcasts ago from Proverbs, or three podcasts ago, uh, the principle is if it's not your business, you should probably stay out of it.

You, you, you need to be careful about getting involved in things that, that don't directly relate to you. That's up for debate in Ukraine.

We've been directly related, and our influence unfortunately has been one of the things that has unfortunately led to the situation now.

I don't know that the State Department of the United States is the good guy in all this. Doesn't mean

Putin's a good guy, right? And this is what you got to remember. You can have multiple bad guys. Just because someone says one person isn't good, or one side isn't good, or one government isn't necessarily good, it doesn't mean the other side's good.

It's also important for us to pursue knowing a little bit about the situation before applying ethics.

It's nice to think we can just be biblical. I get, I get that sometimes. John, you shouldn't talk about politics.

You just got to be biblical, right? Without any understanding of the political realities, that's just a dream.

You can't be biblical. Why? Christians telling Canadian pastors to just be biblical and submit to government fail to realize the circumstances that those pastors were under.

We must understand the circumstances if we are to apply biblical principles. This makes sense, and it makes sense about a whole range of issues.

I don't want to get on a big tangent here, but this is one of my issues with some seminaries, and this is from my own experience, is the impression that's given that you're here to know about the

Bible, and that's the only thing that matters. You don't need to know about history, or politics, or get involved in that.

You don't need to know about science, or you just need to know what the Bible says, and that's it. Well, amen.

You need to know what the Bible says. Amen. Absolutely. In fact, that's the most important thing.

You don't know how to navigate things ethically if you don't know what God says about it, but you need to know what's out there.

You can't talk about historical situations you don't know anything about and apply a biblical ethic.

You're going to come out wrong. You're just not going to attribute the... You're going to come out with good guys being bad guys, bad guys being good guys, and all kinds of confusion if you just accept the narratives that are given to you by the mainstream.

At this point, we need men who are humble enough to admit what they don't know.

We need men who are also willing to look into important matters, especially things that they're going to comment on, so they do know, and they can apply what the

Bible says. If you're going to become a pastor, this is for all those out there who are going to become a important,

I think. First, try to get a grounding. Know what you're dealing with.

Understand history. Understand science. Basic stuff, right? Understand economics to some extent.

Understand politics. Understand literature. Get a really good grasp of some of these things.

You don't have to be an expert. The basics, but that'll give you a good grasp. Hardly anyone has it today, and then, or it doesn't have to be in this order, but then study what the

Bible says. Go to seminary or get training, whatever you're looking to do, and you'll be far more equipped, far more.

Most seminary professors, I'm just telling you, they're not... Sometimes they're so specialized, they don't know kind of what's outside their area, and it creates errors, so I know

I went maybe too long on that rabbit trail, but we need to be people who are willing to understand a situation before morally applying ethics to it, so that's the reason.

Those are the reasons I think it's important for me to comment on this, and it's important for you to care a little bit about this situation.

Now, look, you don't have to understand. A lot of you have busy lives, and this is...

Most Americans, this isn't really related to them, and they're going to see their price of gas go up, you know, but this shouldn't be related to them.

The thing is, though, the elites care about it so much, and the media cares about it so much.

It's going to be an issue, and they're going to pull us into this issue, and they already are pulling us so much into this issue that it's good to know a little bit, and that's all

I want to give you. I want to give you a little bit to challenge this narrative and to help you think through this as rationally and biblically as we possibly can.

Is that fair? Is that reasonable? You don't have to listen to me if you don't want to listen to me. I just want to listen to the social justice stuff in the church.

Okay, well, skip this one. We'll talk about it, though, a little bit, but that's not the primary focus of this, but we will talk about social justice.

That's going to come out. So with that said, let's talk about the three... Let's start here. The three prevailing narratives right now.

What we can reasonably verify and infer about the situation, and let's then apply what we know about social justice and Christianity to the situation, okay?

So we're going to start with the three prevailing narratives that are out there right now. Of course, one of them is taking all the oxygen out of the room.

We're in the West, but let's talk about the three that are being discussed in some way, somewhere, and consider them.

Here's narrative one, and I'm going to make this as simple as possible, as understandable as possible, and my goal is...

One of them is, I hope you walk away and you understand this issue, and so I've broken it down into these three narratives.

The first one is Vladimir Putin is a dictator of a totalitarian government, invading Ukraine as part of his aspiration to aggressively reinstate a

Soviet -style empire. He is acting against military and civilian targets. Vladimir Zelensky is a democratically elected president, championing freedom and bravery, standing up to Putin's aggression.

Now, there's some truth in some of this. This is the mainstream narrative. This is what all of the evangelical elites

I've seen are talking about. This is what Al Mohler's talking about on his briefing. This is what your talk radio hosts are generally talking about.

This is what you're going to hear on NPR, on the major networks, the major newspapers, so this is kind of the prevailing narrative, and most people don't know anything past this, if they even know this, and so there's a contrast between Zelensky and Putin.

Putin being the totalitarian dictator wanting to oppress, Zelensky being the pro -freedom, pro -democracy person, and I will tell you this, that is not entirely accurate.

In fact, Russia would claim to be democratic in their process. Zelensky would, well, let's just say governments that shut down newspapers and have a lot of special interests and are as corrupt as Ukraine, they're not perhaps democracies in the way we think of democracy in this country, but I'm going to talk a little more about democracy at the end of this, because I think that's the social justice connection, because there's something going on with that word, and I read a whole book that really has helped me understand this better, but that's the binary right there, that it's on one side you have oppression, on one side you have freedom, one side totalitarianism, one side democracy, and so Putin is aggressive, that's true.

Putin's aggressive in this. He did cross the national border with his military, and it is true that military targets are certainly under threat and being targeted.

As far as civilian targets, I'm going to just admit that I have some ignorance in this.

I've seen the videos, I've seen the photos, most of them from places

I can't, I have a very hard time verifying, and I am talking to missionaries on the ground. The best picture

I can get, and it's a blurry picture, seems to be that there is no systemic targeting of civilian targets.

There may be mistakes that have been made, and that happens in war, and there may be some very cruel things that have happened, and that normally happens in war too, but there doesn't seem to be a concerted effort to, you know, bomb cities the way that,

I don't know, like the Allies bombed cities when they were going into Germany, or the way that, you know, cities were bombed by some of the

Japanese forces in China and things like, it's not like World War II stuff. It seems like the military targets are more the concentration and strategic targets.

That's a blurry picture, and the situation changes every day, and it could very well have already changed by the time

I say this, so I'm not, I don't know. It could be that maybe there are civilian targets that are being targeted, but I haven't seen evidence of it that seems to indicate that that's an order that has gone out to the

Russian military specifically, and that they're carrying it out. All right, so that's narrative one, and then you have narrative two, and this,

I think this gets more, there's more thought through. This is not, you're not going to find it many places. If you know someone who's saying this in the mainstream, let me know, because I don't know anyone in the mainstream.

I know people that are just kind of out, just off the mainstream that are saying this, but that is that Ukraine and Western governments provoked

Russia, so, you know, this, this has, there's a shared blame in this one, but that this was the assumption, and this is what a lot of people can't handle right now, especially people who are steeped in that first narrative.

They'll immediately start, you know, acting like the critical race theorists do on when they throw out the white supremacy thing.

They'll start just calling you a pro -Putin or pro -Russia person if you believe in there's any shared blame in this situation, and I've seen it, and I've been called it, so I am starting to become familiar, and frankly, that, that's what the social justice warriors do.

We don't just, we should engage in argument. We don't just go to pejoratives here, but there's shared responsibility in this way.

The Ukrainian and Western governments have provoked Russia by taking advantage of Ukraine's corruption, helping engineer the maiden revolution slash coup in 2014, encouraging

Ukraine to join NATO. That's, by the way, for those who don't know, let me just, along the way,

I'll try to explain things. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is left over from the Soviet era.

Let's just be honest. It's a military alliance, and if you attack one country, or you're at war with one country, you're at war with everyone, so if the continuing fighting that's already going on in Ukraine were still taking place, and NATO was involved, and they found out

Russians were involved in that, and let's just be honest. Russians probably are. I think the

Kremlin from, and one article I read said the Kremlin's denying that, but there, there's observer, observers saying that Russian body bags are going home.

If you remember in 2014 in Crimea, Russians came into the territory with unmarked uniforms, and that kind of thing is probably happening.

Meanwhile, on the other side, you have neo -Nazi type militias harassing the pro -Russian population there, so there's been a war there now for the last four years.

This is just a continuation and an escalation of it. It's really important to know that. If you just think that Putin did this out of the blue, then you're ill -informed.

This, this conflict has been going on, and, and, and I'm, I'm totally saying right now that Russia is certainly involved in its own attempt to influence that situation, and they're not being necessarily honest about it from what

I understand, but, but, but Russia is also provoked by this, and if NATO, if they join

NATO, Ukraine, then they could find themselves at war with the West, and that's, there's no way

Russia can handle that. If you, actually, their, their economy is smaller than France's and Spain's.

I mean, I think it's probably around the same size as Spain's. It's smaller than France's. It's smaller than Germany's. I mean, it's smaller than Italy's.

It's, it's a, it's not this, I mean, I know the Soviet style image that you might have about Russia, but that's not who they are right now.

China is immensely bigger, immensely. It's not even close in their economy and their military capability.

Russia does have nukes, though. That is true. So, anyway, if Ukraine joined

NATO, it could, it could be that nuclear missiles are put in Ukraine. That would be like nuclear missiles being put by China in Mexico.

That's, that's to give you somewhat of an, or, you know, the missile crisis. It's kind of like that. And there's been several indications that Ukraine wants this.

They really, they want nuclear missiles and they want to be in NATO. And so, if they are, that's, that, that becomes

World War III very easily. I hope you can see how that would become World War III. So, attempting to nullify the

Russian language. So, there's, there's been several efforts, I believe, mostly unsuccessful, but I'm willing to be corrected on that, to get

Ukrainians and even those in Russian -speaking areas to only speak Ukrainian and make it against the law to speak

Russian in certain contexts. But that has instigated the pro -Russian sentiment in the

Western regions, especially supplying Ukraine with billions of dollars in military funding and weapons. So, Ukraine's military is not solely because Ukraine's paying for military.

It is Western countries, mostly the United States, sending aid. And at one time, I know they were number three.

It was like Israel, Egypt, and then Ukraine was getting the most military aid from us. And then encouraging neo -Nazi militias to harm pro -Russian residents in the

Donbass region. And there are some, some resources at the end of this

I'm going to give to you on this that, that you can go look up yourself and you can start, if you are skeptical about this, you can start tracing this thread.

I, I don't know how direct those connections are with the current government.

I do know that they have certainly been involved with other political, very important political proceedings, like the

Maiden Revolution. And neo -Nazi militias are very active in that Western part of Ukraine and, and they're certainly being equipped from somewhere.

So, not enforcing, and Putin's accusation is that this is basically, this is the Ukrainian government that's fomenting this.

So, I, I don't know, but that's, that's, and he's calling it a genocide. He's calling it,

I mean, he's saying that this is, he, I think he even said that millions of people have died. He may be exaggerating it, but, but that's certainly one of the things that he's using as a pretext here.

And then you have not enforcing the Minsk agreement. So, this is actually something that's really important in this.

The fact that there were attempts since 2014, especially, and there, there were actually even negotiations before then, but the, the

Minsk agreements since 2014 have been an attempt to create, to rectify the situation through negotiation.

So, Ukraine agreeing to give a level of popular sovereignty to those

Western regions, let them hold their own elections, that kind of thing. And, and so, the problem has been actually, from what

I've read, it's been Ukraine that keeps toying with it and saying, well, we, you know, we need to renegotiate this.

We need to renegotiate this. And it becomes, as the violence is going on, it just becomes this never -ending kicking the can down the road.

And, you know, and it hasn't produced an active ceasefire in that region.

So, there's been conflict going on and there's been no resolution. And every time Russia feels like they have a deal, it ends up,

Ukraine's not satisfied with it. And part of that is, too, the Western end of Ukraine is not in favor of, of this.

So, the Eastern part of Ukraine is more so, but the Western part isn't. And so, where is

Kiev, right? The president has Western sympathies as well. And so, he has political pressure to, from the people around him that don't care for these agreements.

And then you have shutting down pro -Russian TV stations. They, and now look, Putin doesn't have money.

To complain about that or to feel bad about that is a little difficult when in Russia, that's pretty much what

Putin's done, too. He's shut down stations that are critical of him, or at least tried to, and he has successfully shut down,

I think, most of them, if not all. And then you have harboring U .S. labs researching biochemical weapons.

Now, this is one of the ones that piques my interest a lot. And I'll show you some things on it because the embassy has now scrubbed their documents.

I just did a podcast a few days ago and I showed you, hey, this is what the embassy says. And this is something that just last year,

Russia was complaining about this. Why do you have these labs here? Russia and China both complaining about what happened in Wuhan with the

COVID stuff. And what are you doing with these, in these labs? And it's spelled out there in black and white on the embassy website that this is what's happening there.

And yet now the documentation is offline. Isn't that interesting?

So, this is one of the Russia's concern as well. And I have to ask you this. Why does the United States have five labs in Ukraine?

Two of them built in 2019. I think those are the recent ones. Why? Why five labs to research chemical warfare, biochemical weapons?

Why aren't they in this country? Why do we have labs in Ukraine? And why that many?

It's kind of weird to me, I'll be honest. And then publicly committing to taking back Crimea after cutting off its water supply.

So, this was probably, this may have been the straw that broke the camel's back that really set things in bad motion last year when

Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine said, we are committing ourselves to take back

Crimea from the Russians. And that is a pro -Russian area. In fact, many of the polls that have been done, even

CNN, I believe it was, did a poll. But many of the mainstream media polls at the time showed overwhelming support for Russia.

In Crimea, they've had a port there since the 1700s. Its population tends to be to favor

Russia. And so, there's not a big give and take on this.

And one of the things you have to understand, too, is that some of these regions, like Crimea, like the

Donbass region, like western parts of the, or eastern parts of the country, they were not always part of Ukraine.

I think we have an idea that Ukraine is a sovereign country that's been the way it is forever.

And that's just not the case. In fact, it was Lenin, I believe, who gave back the, or not gave back, but he included

Crimea as part of Ukraine. And then it was Khrushchev who put some of those western, or I keep saying western, eastern areas in the orbit of Ukraine.

And at the time, it didn't matter because it was all part of the Soviet Union. Well, now it does. So, that gives you a little window into why this issue is happening as well.

Now, out of desperation, Putin took military action to neutralize Ukraine's military capability. And that's what he says, at least, that he's doing.

He doesn't want to occupy long -term. He doesn't want to take over Ukraine.

That's what he's saying. Now, you could be lying, but that's what he's saying. He's saying that this is to neutralize them, to keep them out of NATO as well, and keep them from securing nuclear capabilities.

And if they're viewed as unstable and all this, they can't be part of NATO. And support for Russian natural gas interests.

And there's a really good video, at the end, I will introduce it to you, that I would recommend you watching, that talks about the military strategic nature of Ukraine, why that's important for Russia, why it's historically been important for Russia, and why the natural gas issue is a really big issue, when like 40 percent of Europe's oil or natural gas is coming from Russia.

And Ukraine's been putting a heavy tariff. The Russians have tried to get around this, and now it's winding up.

With the new technology for fracking, there's deposits, interestingly, many of them, in eastern

Ukraine and the Crimean region. So that makes them valuable as well.

So that's part of it, too. Now, the first thing that I mentioned is the corruption in Ukraine.

And I'm not going to go into an itemized detail on that.

It actually would be overwhelming. And I don't have it on the tip of my tongue or filed in my head.

I've read a number of things on it, and it's pretty amazing how corrupt things have been. But don't take my word for it.

Here's President Trump and what he said about Ukraine. ...exerted. But you don't have to ask him.

All you have to do is read the transcript, read the telephone call. But what I was having a problem with are two things.

Number one, Ukraine is known before him for tremendous corruption.

Tremendous. More than just about any country in the world. In fact, they're rated one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

And I don't like giving money to a country that's that corrupt. So this is

President Trump. And this is after that whole issue about his phone call with Ukraine.

But he's vocalizing what most people know. There was an independent organization that rated

Ukraine as, in Europe, the third most corrupt state. And that was recently. There was, in fact, before this narrative, narrative one was the only narrative that we were allowed to think.

The New York Times was even publishing things. There was an article I saw in the New York Times from,

I think, 2019, if I'm not mistaken, that was just raking Zelensky over the coals because he can't he's weak, he can't fight corruption.

He's he's he's just part of the system that he was supposed to reform.

So that has been an issue. They're not pure as the snow and they're not like this honest democracy.

There's a lot of things going on there behind the scenes. NATO expansion is part of this narrative as well, that the

North Atlantic Treaty Organization member states keep moving farther and farther east. And that is a threat in Russia's mind.

And why wouldn't it be? I mean, it was started pretty. I mean, it's prominence. The reason you know about NATO probably is because of how they challenged the

Warsaw Pact. And now countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact are now part of NATO and NATO keeps pushing east.

And the understanding that Russia has is and I'm giving you websites, all the links will be at the end, is that this in this from the

National Security Archive website, that they were given guarantees that NATO wouldn't do that, that they wouldn't move past a certain point.

They wouldn't move past. I think it was Berlin. They weren't going to go farther east than that. And and so they feel as though the agreements have been breached.

In fact, when you hear Putin talk about this stuff, it almost sounds like those old Western movies where you have a Native American person talking about how the white men lie, you know, their treaties are lies.

I mean, it really sounds like that. And and that's how Russians feel about this. And so I'll let you determine that for yourself.

But you can go read the agreements. And there are a number of them, most of them verbal agreements from United States Secretary of State's, you know, diplomats saying, you know,

NATO is not going to infringe on you. NATO is not a threat. We're not going to move farther east. And Russia took some of these things seriously.

And now it's like, well, actually, you know, we've taken I don't even remember how many now are in NATO of the former

Warsaw Pact countries, but but a bunch of them are. And now it's like, well, you know, the United States just recently said, yeah,

I mean, NATO can take Ukraine. Sure. And that's seen as a broken promise by Russia.

You also have, like I said, this this neo -Nazi militia thing. I thought it was interesting that I so I was reading a book and it's it's a

I couldn't find biographies of Zelensky I was looking for. There's tons of them of Putin and most of them just really, really, really anti -Putin.

I tried to find the most objective one I could. I wanted to know the good, but I want to know the bad. And I think I got one that was pretty good, to be honest with you.

Talks about Putin, talks about how people disappear around him, kind of like the Clintons, how he's he tends to neutralize his political opponents.

But he's also a guy who likes order a lot. He's very he's very loyal.

He's he he's actually an interesting character. He respects order, gradualism.

He doesn't like drastic changes quickly. He's pretty stoic. He's shrewd. He's got a sense of a higher purpose, not really interested in personally enriching himself, but he he is all about his country.

And he's so this is a weird situation. He he is kind of like he doesn't like really doesn't like politics.

He's kind of your disinterested leader there, but loves his country. And he happens to be very against anti -Semites.

Putin, believe it or not, he's being called a Nazi all the time, but he's actually very against anti -Semites. But on the other side, you have actual neo -Nazi groups fighting the pro -Russian people in the eastern end of Ukraine.

And yet the narrative is that Putin's the Nazis are really weird. OK, so Putin may be a lot of things. Nazi really isn't one of them.

Not it's it's not a fair representation at all. It's just not accurate. It's a lie. And don't engage in that.

Don't engage in that. He is. What you could say is he's a murderer, perhaps, but even with that is the biography

I was reading, they're like, we can't verify any of this, but it's just really interesting how his his political opponents didn't tend to disappear, you know, is and it's kind of like the

Clintons. It reminded me of Bill Clinton kind of like they just you don't find them again. And and so that's it's probably true that Putin's just exercising his power and he's taking care of business.

He's he's getting rid of political opponents. So, you know, not not a good guy on that stuff.

But the the book, that was the book on Putin.

But I was reading a book on Zelensky because I couldn't find anything. I found this one like 30 something page, 38 page short book.

And it's a really rough translation by a guy named

Frida Lensky or a girl named Frida. I don't know. I guess it might be a female named Frida Lensky.

But the author is it's pure propaganda. It's just pure like the whole thing is an apologetic for Zelensky, how great

Zelensky is. I thought this was interesting, though. The author says that this guy named

Ihor Kolomoisky in Ukraine has fans who have not forgotten that he financed volunteer battalions for military operations in the

Donbass. And whatever one may say, the Privat Bank he created is really very popular.

And in a number of options, it is still the most convenient bank for ordinary consumers. And the brand

Privat does not cease to associate with the name Kolomoisky. Now Kolomoisky is has very close associations with Zelensky.

I believe he helped finance a show that Zelensky was on. Zelensky was on a television show in which he played the president or the

I believe that's a title they had the president of Ukraine, believe it or not.

So I don't know if you knew that. But before he became the president, he was playing the president on television.

And Ukraine is a very popular show. Ukrainians were watching him as president. So it was a celebrity thing.

But the one of one of the business associates he had, and I believe it was involved in the entertainment industry, but financed him quite a bit, was this guy

Kolomoisky. And in their speeches where Zelensky admits this, but it was one of the weaknesses he was perceived as having.

And so in this book, which I'm guessing was intended for a Ukrainian audience, saying, oh, yeah, yeah,

Kolomoisky. Yeah, he he he financed the volunteer battalions for military operations in the

Donbass. You know, whatever you think of that. Hey, he's got the Privat Bank, though. You know, everyone knows that.

That's pretty popular. So they kind of like kind of a downplay of that. But yeah, like an admission that, yeah, he did that.

Yeah. He financed those groups going in. So like the fact that that's just this is a pro

Zelensky, like over the top pro Zelensky publication. And even in that they're admitting, oh, yeah, like his his big business contact that he's close with.

Yeah. I mean, he financed those battalions going into the Donbass. Gives you a little bit of a sense of.

I mean, I can't even see that in the United States. It wouldn't even. There's a there's kind of a civil war type of thing going on in western and eastern

Ukraine between the two. And when you when you understand that this kind of stuff becomes understandable, you understand why this would be in a pro

Zelensky, because there's going to be people who like the fact that you got a guy like Kolomoisky, you know, financing this.

They they want that. So it's it's interesting. So that's one of the things.

Let's see here. Zelensky said that he said, I have instructed the foreign ministry to convene a summit of the country's signatories in signatories to the

Budapest Memorandum. If it fails to take place or refuses to give Ukraine security guarantees,

Kiev will recognize it as well as the clauses signed in 1994 as null and void. So this is the

Budapest Memorandum of 1994. This was about this was a guarantee that Ukraine would not have they would not have their own nuclear arsenal.

And so Zelensky, this is recently within I believe this was either 2019 or 2020. He said, we're getting rid of this.

We're going to we need to get rid of this thing. We he wants that's it. That's signaling we want nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

So Zelensky has done this, and this is why Putin's getting nervous. He's saying, well, you know, what was that agreement then?

Well, like, can we trust anything? Can we this? Russia thinks that challenges their security.

Ukraine, though, feels threatened by Russia. So that's the sentiment. Taking back Crimea. This is another thing.

President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, signed the decree number 117 slash 2021 of March 24th, 2021 on the strategy of the deoccupation and reintegration of the temporary occupied territory of the

Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol. Now, this happened in, let's see,

March, right? And that same month, the Department of Defense announces 125 million for Ukraine in military spending.

You also have Secretary Antony Antony Blinken and Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky at a joint press conference in which our own country says, yeah, we're totally with Ukraine on this.

They need to go take back the Crimea and we're with them. So that happened just last year, less than a year ago, almost a year ago, you know,

March of last year. This is when this happened. So that was one of the things that contributed.

And there's a map here for those looking, you can see the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of the eastern part of Ukraine, which are where a lot of, especially

Donetsk, where the violence is going on, where the conflict has been going on. Crimea, you can see down at the bottom, it's not colored, but it's the area that juts out there, very strategic, of strategic importance.

And Russia, until you get to the mountains, it's this big plain that kind of funnels north and south from this pass here at the western end of Ukraine.

And it's hard for Russians to defend that. But traditionally, throughout time, and there's been many situations where Russia has been invaded, so you can understand why they would feel like we could, this could happen again.

They are, they use this region in Ukraine, the western end, to defend themselves of what's now

Ukraine. So a little side note about the map there. And so here's a poll, this is from the

Pew Research Center, and it shows eastern and western Ukraine, and this is how they divided it, the poll, and it's divided pretty evenly in half.

And so they weren't able to survey the really pro -Russian areas, Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, but they were able to survey just western

Ukraine, other than those. And so that would tell you that this number would even be more exaggerated.

But more adults in eastern than western Ukraine look to Russia as the protector of ethnic

Russians. 54 percent agreed in the east, 25 percent in the west. Shows you a huge difference.

Eastern Ukraine tends to side more with Russia. They tend to be more pro -Russian. Same thing with the

Russian Orthodox Church. In fact, that's a very complicated situation I'm not going to get into as well, but they tend to side with the

Russian Orthodox Church in eastern Ukraine, and in western Ukraine it's the

Ukrainian Orthodox Church based in Kiev. So there's a big cultural difference here.

And you might be thinking, well, maybe it'd be better if they're just kind of two countries. And I've shared my thoughts sometimes about the

United States on this too. I've said, look, you've got a lot of states that are completely different than other states, and maybe it would be better in some ways if they could just part peacefully.

And maybe that would be a peaceful agreement, rather than one side feeling like they have to live with a president and a congress or a court that, you know, not of their choosing that they disagree with on just about every issue.

But we're not the only country like that, and this is a problem.

So when we think of Ukraine, don't just think of like, oh, it's just one sovereign country that has borders that have always been this way.

Think of it as these borders have changed many times over the last few hundred years, and where we are right now, it's cramming people who don't feel the same ways about some fundamental things together.

There's different identities going on here. Half of Russians say it would be right to use military force to keep

Ukraine out of NATO. That's how scared Russia is. There's a CNN poll from February 23rd of 2022, so recently.

You can see in this chart that the military aid to Ukraine from the United States has gone way up, and this is only goes to 2020, but I'm sure it's skyrocketing right now.

And so the Russians are seeing that. And then the U .S. bioweapons labs. It's now reported that the bio...

Someone needs to get this to, like, Tucker Carlson, I think. He's one person in the mainstream that I think would talk about this, and he's taking a view of the situation that I find to be more reasonable.

But he says, or this website says, and I verified it, it is true, that one day after reporting on the

U .S. biolabs in Ukraine, U .S. embassy scrubs all Ukraine bioweapon lab docs from website. Really makes you suspicious.

Vladimir Putin's advisor said last year, April 21, that the

U .S. is developing biological weapons near Russia. So that's another thing that they're very upset about.

Why is Ukraine letting the United States develop biological weapons near their border? That's what they think. And you think, well, that may not be true.

They're just studying biological weapons. Well, yeah. Well, we saw what happened last, or two years ago.

So a little more over two years ago. We know with the COVID stuff, what's been going on. So and then here's, this is the idea that there's foreign interests taking advantage of Ukraine against Russia, against Russian interests.

And I should be clear about this. Russia has been very overt at times about their support for particular candidates in Ukraine.

And so they, and I'm sure they've sent in advisors. I'm sure they've tried to manipulate things themselves.

So it's either a case that they haven't been as successful or they've just been so overt and honest about it. And upfront that it's obvious that they support certain candidates or certain candidates are, have supported them in the past.

Whereas we haven't been quite that way. And neither has, have other interests, including

George Soros. So this is George Soros commenting on the maiden revolution slash coup that took place in 2014.

George Soros. I set up a foundation in Ukraine before Ukraine became independent of Russia.

And the foundation has been functioning ever since. And it played an important part in events now.

So George Soros saying, yeah, I, I helped with this.

So why is George Soros involved in this? What other NGOs are over there? Why were we involved?

Why is there a recording of Victoria Newland from that time talking to the future president of Ukraine about regime change,

Yatsenuk, to become prime minister. And he did. Why, why, why is that out there?

You can look it up. It's online. It's probably on YouTube. I've listened to, to parts of it.

We were definitely involved. And so there's, there's a suspicion on Russia's part of the

West is bringing Ukraine into the orbit of the West. And, and that doesn't just mean it's not just the

West, but it's also perhaps a globalist agenda as well, which brings us really to the third narrative here that Vladimir Zelensky is in an alliance with globalists like George Soros and the

World Economic Forum who want Ukraine in their orbit and in opposition to Putin and his traditional Christian nationalism.

And this is propelling Putin into the economic orbit of China, which also values nationalism. And the conflict in Ukraine concerns competing global visions between two super alliances.

Now this, this could be true. Narrative two could be true. And this can be true. And there could be aspects of one that are all true.

The reason some people are saying this, and there's probably way deeper reasons that if I had time to look into,

I would, but here's some of the things that are floating around out there. And I listened to this whole speech.

I encourage you, if you really want to understand this, go listen to president Vladimir Zelensky speaking at the World Economic Forum in 2020.

Here's one of the things he said. We do not have sufficient investments.

We propose to all of you to be the stakeholders and shareholders of the success of the new

Ukraine today for the pragmatic and also fight world drastically once miracle and the world economy on the verge of the new global crisis needs economic miracle.

Ukraine is the place where miracles come true. Okay. So, and it gets, in some ways it gets worse, actually, when

Klaus Schwab starts questioning him and they have this little discussion, but he, he's the word stakeholders there.

He's talking to an audience at the World Economic Forum. These are the globalists of the globalists. And he's telling them all, we want you to be stakeholders in the new

Ukraine. And that's where the economic miracle can happen. I mean, look what he's saying.

This is 2020. He's saying, hey, come on over, implement your ideas here. This is the place to do it.

This, that's a scary prospect for Russia. And, you know, the

WEF, not, not exactly, not exactly the place where Putin's popular.

Here's the Ukraine MP Kira Rudik expressing her determination to fight for the new world order.

Right now, it's a critical time because we know that we not only fight for Ukraine, we fight for this new world order for the democratic countries.

We knew that we are the shield for the Europe. That is a very telling comment.

And, and you could get, I mean, you could get from the United States, like a Democrat Senator saying something that doesn't represent all the people.

Right. So I want to be careful with this, but these are the things that are floating around out there that people are like, this is, this, there's globalism, you know, at play here.

Here's just on some moral issues, which happened that these play into it. The breakdown of the family is part of that globalist agenda.

Zelensky on homosexuality. Now you got to understand Ukraine, a lot of the more Catholics reside in the

West. There's also though, you know, Eastern Orthodox, and then there's

Russian Orthodox in the East. And they're, they're not very,

I mean, Russia is very against homosexuality, Ukraine against homosexuality. And yet Zelensky is paving a way to make that more acceptable.

There is a, an article in Euronews. And I looked up, you can go to Wikipedia and look up like LGBT rights in,

I think the page is LGBT rights in Ukraine. And you can see how, how unsuccessful there are marches have been until very recently.

And Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian who took office last month, has promoted a tolerant culture saying he stands for all people's equality and freedom.

Zelensky's office urged the police to prevent violence and guarantee the safety of the participants in the march for equality.

Ukraine's constitution states that citizens have equal constitutional rights and freedom. So the president's office on its Facebook page on Sunday morning,

Ukraine hosts largest ever gay pride parade. So he's using this more general language, but he's, he is paving the way for something that the

Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian citizens would be very against. Here's, here's a question and answer at a forum where Zelensky addresses this even more.

And you can, you can listen to just think about it like if it was America in 1994, you know, and the same thing came up.

That's kind of how you have to think about this. He's saying you'll, you'll stop the

George Soros program, spreading perversity and homosexuality.

So he's asking Zelensky these questions and he's got a big cross around his neck. He says, will you prevent the legalization of prostitution and abortion?

So he's saying, are you going to do what your predecessor did? Are you going to keep following the George Soros model?

Which is interesting. Open Societies actually, George Soros' foundation, they have a whole page where they talk about the millions they give to Ukraine and what they do with it.

I looked it up earlier. And so he says, so Zelensky response says, I don't know Mr. Soros.

He says, I'm not his toady. So, you know, he's saying he's distancing himself. He's saying, I'm not engaged in the legalization of prostitution.

I don't know George Soros. It doesn't exist in this country. He's saying if anything is going to be legal, it's got to change based on legislation.

So notice the argument he's giving. This is what we heard going. I mean, I'm, I feel like I'm replaying the path to Obergefell.

This was what all the conservatives who were actually before them, it was all the progressives saying this, then the conservatives, quote unquote, started saying this.

And now it's like, well, it's just, it's part of the law. But they were saying that they were saying, they started saying the, focusing on the process instead of the morality of it.

So the answers weren't like, this is wrong or this is right. They'd sidestep that and they'd say, well, it's, you know, we have a process.

And as long as the process was working, you know, people voted and legislation, people were elected and there was legislation approving of same sex marriage or something.

Well, then it was implied that that was okay. But we don't want these activists, judges, right?

So I feel like I'm replaying this because he's sidestepping the moral component and he's, all he's focusing on is the procedure here.

So here's the key part. He says regarding LGBT, I don't want to say anything negative because we all live together in an open society where each one can choose the language they want to speak, their ethnicity, everyone can choose their ethnicity.

And sexual orientation. And he says, leave those people be. For God's sake.

That's what he says. Leave those people be for God's sake. This is, you are watching

Ukraine and they know it. They're going down the same path that the Western countries went down decades ago and they're starting it.

And Zelensky is bringing that kind of thing in. So, or at least one of the things, one of the people.

So that's some of my commentary. I want to go over some resources with you that I think will help you in this.

First, here's some links for giving help for Ukrainian refugees, Slavic Gospel Association, ABWE International, and then the

Mission Impact Alliance. These are all places you can go and donate. And as far as resources go, so these are four books that I've read in the last few days.

Just trying to understand this. I would not recommend the first one. I rated it one star. It's just, it's not written well or it's not translated well and it's just total propaganda for Zelensky.

The Stephen Lee Myers book, The Rise of the New Tsar, I think it's actually pretty fair. It may have a little bit of an anti -Putin edge to it or something, but it didn't bother me one bit.

Putin's not a great guy in every way. So some of the things that they talk about, that Stephen Lee Myers talks about,

I was glad he included them. And then there's another book, The Demon in Democracy by Legutko.

And I'm going to save that for the end -to -end. I want to talk about that a little bit. And then

I still recommend this, Ukraine, What Everyone Needs to Know. It's by a Ukrainian, Serhiy Yakelchik, and living in, or at least up until recently, was living in Kiev.

And it's definitely, you can tell at the end, very pro -Democrat in our country and anti -Republican.

Trump had problems with Russia or what the

Paul Manafort thing was legitimate, but the Bidens never really did anything bad.

I'm like, really? But it does give you at least a good, I think, overall survey of the political situation in Ukraine.

So these are some of the things that I've been reading. And then resources, primary sources,

I always say, go to the government websites. Yeah, there's propaganda, but at least you're going to get it one way or the other.

It's either going to be through the filter of the media, or you can just read it for yourself. So go to the Twitter accounts.

They're still up. Go to the Epoch Times if you want good reporting on this. For commentary,

I suggest Chronicles Magazine, Peter Hitchens, Paul Craig Roberts. And I have the links to the books as well here.

And I'm going to make this available. Explainers. So these are videos and articles that really explain the situation.

One of them is called The Six Reasons Russia Is At Odds With Ukraine's Zelensky by the Washington Post. And it's super short, but it just gives you an idea of some of the things that I already talked about.

What Russia Wants in Ukraine is another one. That's a really good video on the economic and military.

Very understandable, very visual. It's like half an hour long. I would suggest watching that. It really gives you a good angle on this.

Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West's Fault by Mearsheimer is,

I got the link there. Normally there's a paywall there, but I found it in a free PDF form somewhere.

So you can go check that out or you can download it from Audible. And then some more resources here that I just have a lot of the things that I've already talked about in this particular podcast.

So I have links to like the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and why the

Soviets think Ukraine joining NATO is a violation of previous agreements. So all the previous agreements, you know, stuff on the

Maiden Revolution and why it's considered by some to be a coup.

The Minsk Agreements and the Normandy Format. These are just the negotiations that took place attempting to rectify the situation with the

Eastern regions of the country. Zelensky and the United States' goal to take back Crimea. I have all the links to that.

Some of the fake news stuff. The West versus the

East of Ukraine. I have stuff on the border. There's actually one that shows the Ukrainian border over the past thousands, thousand years in time lapse.

It's the whole actually region of Europe, but Ukraine's in that. We have, I actually gave you the link to Putin's speech where he says it was a tragedy that the

Soviet Union fell. I would suggest watch the whole thing, watch the whole speech, because it's interesting how that quote is taken.

And if you watch him, he says it's a tragedy. And then he explains why he says that. And it wasn't what people

I think are taking from it, which is it's a tragedy because, you know, lost the empire and, you know, we need to get it back.

It's more, he's saying like the corruption that came in when the

Soviet Union fell. It's that kind of stuff. It's all the circumstances that arose afterward that led to bad things for the country.

But, and then of course, I have some of the links for the globalist stuff,

Kira Rudick, Zelensky speaking at the WEF. I also have some

Zelensky stuff that I didn't want to show. You should know about it, but some of it, one of them

I should have mentioned actually, he does, he is trying to expand abortion rights, Vladimir Zelensky. He is trying to expand abortion rights while Putin right now is trying to curtail them.

Putin is pro -choice like any good former KJB communist guy, but he is realizing there's a population problem and Russia's population is shrinking.

And so he is trying his best to fund, the state is funding alternatives to abortion. And so, and of course he's way against the

LGBT stuff and all that. So you have that contrast kind of going on with Putin's being this really loves order, very private man.

And then you have Zelensky who is this former comedian and I couldn't show these, but I mean, some of the skits and stuff he did, really sexualized dancing in bondage apparel.

Yeah, yeah. He did one, he was playing the piano with his private part, skit.

I mean, these are some of the things that he would, he was involved with. So he's also, so you have the abortion, the homosexuality moving the country in that direction.

You have, he is a more of a product of the decadence of the

West that the Soviets hate so much. Did I say Soviets? That Putin, a former

Soviet, but yeah, the Soviets would have, would have looked at that, down at that. But the traditional Russians look down at that even more today,

I would say and say, well, that's the West and they're, and they're so terrible and we don't want to become that.

And we're afraid that we could become that if we're militarily taken over or culturally domineered and foreign money gets in here and starts wreaking havoc.

So they're afraid of that moral decay and Zelensky seems to represent that in their minds. So there's some documentaries here.

One's called Ukraine on Fire, The Real Story. And there's some footage of some of those neo -Nazi groups. There's also footage by the independent reporter,

Graham Phillips on YouTube. And he's got some footage as well of some of that stuff.

If you're looking for sources on that, that might point you in the right direction. Now to close it off,

I just want to, I want to talk about the social justice connection here, if I may. So let's talk now about democracy a bit, because I think that's the social justice connection, if there is one in this conflict, which there, there is.

The book that I was reading today was called The Demon in Democracy by Ryszard Ligutko, who lived in Soviet -style communism, grew up in that,

I guess, and then lived in Western societies. And he makes some really, really, really interesting observations.

And I took a few notes, but I more just, I was just absorbing it. It's on audible, so you can listen to it.

That's what I was doing. And I give it five stars. I barely ever do that for a book. But it, just, just listen to some of these observations

I wrote down, some of the things that he points he makes. Societies are improving, that there's this, there's this march in history, right?

Towards, towards something, we're moving towards something. And you want to be on the right side of that history, right?

There's, and so, so this sounds like Marxism, but he's saying, you hear the same rhetoric in liberal democracies. And I thought, you're right.

Absolutely right. You want to be on the right side of history. There's an unfolding. There's this, this eschatology of like secular eschatology of our form of government and more rights and more equality and more success.

It's just going to lead us into this, this great new world. And there's these challenges we need to take care of, but we're going to get there.

And the, and there's enlightened rulers that, that will help us get there. Enlightened figures.

I mean, that's becoming more celebrity now than anything else. The good of humanity becomes the highest goods.

It's very human centered. Mankind needs to be liberated. I mean, this is all stuff

Marxism has, but, but, and it would be incorrect to say that Marxism hasn't influenced this, but it's a different, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's different in many ways, but it's also the same in many ways.

Liberal democracies, they're all, they're both products of modernity. He has an excellent chapter on ideology.

I was really happy because it was so similar to my chapter on ideology and Christianity and social justice, religions and conflict, which by the way is also inaudible now.

And, and so he talks about this as ideology, this, this all encompassing abstract way of looking at the world that just kind of reduces everything.

And you, you lose actually who man is in the process, but it, but man's supposed to be the center of it.

There's a totalism to it, a totalism. It's all encompassing. Everything should be liberal, democratic.

Everything becomes political. And we're seeing that more and more in our day and age. If you're not down with that, if you don't want to be liberal democratic, if you, you know, you're a threat to democracy.

And have you, how many times have you heard that Trump is a threat to democracy? That flag is a threat to democracy, right?

And, and really what they're saying is, well, it's, it's equality, it's, or it's equity, it's inclusion, it's diversity.

If it's a threat to that, it's a threat to democracy. Because you get these in this progress that where you're heading towards more democracy, you get these interest groups and it leads to this bigger state because they have to secure, the state has to secure these rights for the interest groups to extend to them more democracy because they weren't perhaps participating as much as they could have.

They, they were deprived of participation for whatever reason. You know, maybe they were just, you know, in an area they just couldn't get to the, to vote or something, but they don't have the same access.

And if everything becomes political and social things become political, then that's not, it's more than just voting. It's influence in every area that becomes part of democracy.

Everything must be democratized. Okay. So we hear that. I think sometimes we think like, oh, it's a vote, right?

But that's not what they're saying. This is something that applies in every area. It's really equality they're talking about. Everyone must have an equal say in every single area, regardless of who they are.

And we must rectify disparities that exist for disadvantaged groups who haven't had that supposedly, but progress is inevitable.

We're going to get there. And there's no alternatives to democracy. Any deviation from democracy is going to be, it's going to be viewed as a threat somehow, and it'll be a catastrophe.

And it's always unfinished though. We're on this, we're on, we're making progress, but we have so far to go.

I mean, these are all things he talks about and they just jump right out of our talking points we hear in the news.

There's competition among politicians to grow the state, you know, who can represent the aggrieved groups or the groups that want more equality, more democracy in their minds.

So it inevitably grows the state and increasingly becomes totalitarian.

He actually has a whole, he talks about how it's against rural life and villages, which I thought was really interesting because they have, they have tradition.

It's against tradition. They have traditions and local customs they still operate by and you need to get rid of that.

That's, that's the past that's holding you back. Those are, that's where the bigotry is found. It's, it's against the family.

The family isn't independent. It squashes anything organic that would rise up. It's, and the mainstream becomes the most important thing, what most of the people think, what they're influenced by.

Everything becomes reduced to politics. He uses feminism as one of the examples of that. He talks about how feminism is, you know, it says it's all about women, but it's totally not about women.

It's, it's, it's literally just reducing women to a political block for certain purposes.

It's, it's not a, it's the politicalization of women. It's the reducing women to a, almost like an abstraction of some kind.

It's, it's, it's, and it's getting rid of their purpose and it, you know, it destroys all hierarchy. And so he says, this is what liberal democracies are.

This is, and he, he acts like that's inevitable. That, that was from the beginning. He's a whole section on Christianity at the end.

And what he says about the Catholic church was just, I thought this is exactly what the evangelical church is doing now.

It was so eerie to me that the Catholic church, he said they had, what they would do is when there would be a new moral challenge to them, they would, the

Catholic, you know, the, not the conservative ones, but the ones trying to get out ahead of it would say how this, they would try to neutralize any opposition to it and say that this is it, this is compatible with Catholicism because he basically makes the argument, this is a challenge to religion, always has been.

And, and so there's so much more that could be said, but the reason

I'm bringing this up, the reason that I listened to that and I wanted to know more about that particular issue is because the, the narrative right now is democracy, democracy, democracy.

And, and I know that's just not the case in this situation. You don't have two perfect democracies.

It's not like Putin's just only totalitarian and Zelensky's only democracy. That's just not even the case.

But when they're talking about democracy, I thought, well, what are they meaning? They all act like they mean something by this. What are they meaning by it?

Is it just having an election or is there so much more to it? And I think, I think this book helped me. There is so much more to it.

When they say that they're, they're meaning something way beyond just voting. They're talking about an open society.

They're talking about a society where you can exercise these immoralities that you want to.

You have the freedom to define yourself. You don't have the obligations that come with organic things like families and local communities.

You're, you're free from those. You're liberated from, from that, from the bigotries of the past, right?

And you're, and there, there, there's kind of a globalist edge to it too, that you know, they're a democracy, we're a democracy, therefore we must share everything in common and like all democracies, democracies of the world unite, right?

That, that, that's the principle that's going to save us. There's almost a utopian salvific kind of just, it must be really good if it's a democracy and really bad if it deviates from that.

And, and the biblical take on this is that there, there actually isn't a, there, there isn't a form of government in the

Bible that you can look to chapter and verse and say, well, this is what God wants for us.

Now, what you can do is you can look at the example of Israel and you can see when God's law was laid down, how powers were divided.

There, there was, in fact, some of the founding fathers talked about Hebrew republicanism, believe it or not.

We don't know how it all worked, but we do know there, there were, there was representation of some kind and, and by the time we get to the

New Testament, of course, we see the Sanhedrin, but, but it's, of course, that's, that's also, that'd be, be today viewed as theocracy of some kind.

But there, there were certain principles that definitely made it into our system of government and those are very wise principles, but what you don't have is a clear cut, this is how to do it.

You see warnings against having a king, but again, it's not wrong to have a king. In fact, when

Christ comes back, he's going to be a totalitarian king and he's going to rule with a sword and he's going to be, you know, for those keeping his law,

I mean, he's going to be, he's going to be the most just ruler we've ever seen, but, but, but it's not going to be a democracy.

That's not the final state and communist regimes have also used this term.

I believe it was Lenin who said, it wasn't in this book, I read that somewhere else, but that Lenin had said that democracy was a tool that could be used from the proletariat against the bourgeois, that it's a, it's a tool to, to get to the next stage, but it's this, you know, it's a tool and, and so this term is, has been used by communists as well, but in, in our liberal democracies of the west, we can see a, a communism, a cultural

Marxism of a sort rising that, and it's very different than the path Russia has chosen for itself in many ways.

Russia has kind of gone through the classical Marxism. They've come out the other side and they're, they're changing and they are, they, they don't really want to go back to that.

In fact, the, the Russian Orthodox Church is, is very state funded. They're, they're building churches, you know, all over the place.

They're trying to provoke more interest in Christianity. They want Russian Orthodox religion to be part of the

Russian identity. And that's one thing people don't understand about this conflict either, that, that's, that plays into it to some extent.

A sense of responsibility those in Russia feel toward those in Ukraine who are under the, the guidance of the, the

Moscow sect of Orthodoxy. So all this stuff is, is very interesting.

It is, it, it's a clash of civilizations in some ways.

And I think the social justice connection is those in our country who value that march towards equality, whatever that looks like, even those, the neoconservatives, they, they believe in this too.

They, they'd like to go plant America in the Middle East or something. And they think that, oh, just it'll work, right? It doesn't, it's, it's not suited.

Our form of government is not suited for every kind of person. In fact, it's, it's really built for a

Christian people in, and a certain kind of Christian people who had a, a

British common law tradition. It's not really made for people that don't have those things.

And so it's not, it's not a perfect form of government. It's a great form of government, but we're, we're finding out now the weaknesses in it.

And it's, and so all, all that to say, democracy promises some kind of a tearing down of hierarchy and elevation of everyone to this plane of equality where everyone has the same voice.

And, and if you can paint one side as they're the democracy side and the other sides against it, then it, the vilification just completely takes root.

That's not to say there's, there's plenty of vilification you can make for Putin. He just invaded a country. His political opponents seem to kind of disappear.

In some ways, the Western nations were just more powerful and better at doing some of the manipulation than he was.

At the same time, you have to also take into account, this is a guy who loves his people, believes in a sovereign nation, and he knows what he's doing.

He knows he's invading a sovereign nation, but he also believes in a sovereign nation, that, that kind of model, that, that exists, in fact.

He's not for the globalist thing. He's for what will benefit his people.

He's not going to die on the hill of ideology. And so, he's very much a pariah in the

New World Order, if I can say that. I feel weird saying that, but after I read it in HG Wells, I was like, well,

I mean, he said it, it wasn't a conspiracy theorist. And now you have, you know, this parliamentarian in Ukraine saying it.

So, Putin, that's where Putin fits into this in a global scene, I believe. And, of course, the traditional

Christianity, the traditional institutions that have created supposedly so much oppression,

Putin's championing those. He wants more of those. He wants more babies. He wants more families in Russia.

He wants to reduce abortion. He wants to keep the

LGBT stuff out of his country. And he arrests people who would be public about it.

And that is, I mean, it was the, I think the chief of the British intelligence service tweeted out that the main thing that separated

Zelensky and Putin in Ukraine and Russia was how Putin was against LGBT rights, and he must be defeated.

If that's the West, if that describes our Western governments, then, man, I don't, I just don't want to think about what

God's going to do. He's going to judge Putin. He's also going to judge our countries and our leaders. And I think it's important to think about that.

There may not be, like I've said in three podcasts now, a good guy in this situation. It may be a bunch of bad guys out for their own interests.

And that's a sobering thought, because I love to think of America as the good guy. I really do.

I think we have done a lot of good in many ways. But you know what? It doesn't mean everything we've done is good on the government level.

And this is certainly one of those things we've, our government has contributed to this in many ways, as I've shown.

So hope that was helpful. I know I repeated some things from some previous podcasts, but I think if the focus right now was on, and I know some people have said

Putin violates the border, but if the focus was all on, you know,

Putin, you know, we've tried to negotiate, and we're open to negotiations, and Putin is just, he's a tyrant who's coming in suppressing a smaller country.

And it still remains to be seen what he's actually even going to do, whether he's going to just take Ukraine for himself, or whether he's going to take out their military.

And then, I don't know, he just tried to negotiate with Zelensky, and Zelensky was not open to negotiating.

So he's like, give us back Crimea, you know, change the status quo in our favor. So, you know,

I don't know how this is all going to end, I really don't. But if the focus was on that, just that, and wasn't on democracy, which is where the most of the focus seems to be, democracy, democracy, democracy, what does that have to do with this?

Why is that such a big deal? You got to ask yourself, doesn't that seem a little weird to you? And I hope you're seeing that.

That's the social justice angle. That's the, you know, whenever the narrative is racism, racism, racism, xenophobia, xenophobia, xenophobia, nationalism, nationalism, nationalism, right?

Democracy, democracy. So these terms that are usually not very defined, will get brought up, and they're just used to smear, they're used to separate, they're used to squash any opposition, or even questioning, hey, maybe it's not just white hats and black hats, maybe there's some gray hats here.

Well, if you say that, then you must be against democracy. And that's, and that's how this hammer works.

So I hope you see that, that this is an extension of those, that same kind of narrative that we've just seen over and over the last few years, of these, these movements arise.

And if you deviate in any way, you're just a pro Putin, pro Nazi, you hate people. And it's like, no,

I'm not. I'm definitely not. Not a pro Putin guy, not a pro Russia guy. Don't think

Putin should have invaded. Think Putin does some bad things. But also, we've also done some bad things to contribute to this.

And it's fair to acknowledge that. And saying that doesn't mean you're against democracy.

So these are some of my thoughts on I know. I hope that was helpful for some of you who were interested more in this.

Next episode is going to be J .D. Hall, actually. J .D. Hall is in, pray for him, as you're praying for the people of Ukraine, which

I do every night with my wife. It's heart wrenching.

Pray for J .D. Hall, too. And you'll know more about that when I drop the next podcast.

But he's going through, he got a Planned Parenthood lawyer, Planned Parenthood lawyers, basically, after him for not using preferred pronouns.

And this is what's happening in this country. Our country right now is having some real problems.

And it's going to take the Lord, it's going to take the Lord to fix this.

We are going to need to be proactive in evangelism. I'm convicted of that myself. And we are going to need to trust

God more than we ever have, I think, in the next few years, with everything that's unfolding before us.

But know this, the unsaved world, the people who don't know

God, they have no stability in this. They just don't. No sense of purpose.

It's just one catastrophe to the next, and all they can do is try to pursue pleasure. And as actually my dad wisely said in a sermon this past Sunday, you know, if you pursue pleasure, you won't get pleasure and you won't get success.

You'll get neither. If you pursue godly success, you'll get pleasure. But that's what they have.

Their lives are that shallow. And we can offer something so more meaningful. And what could be more meaningful than opportunities like what, in Ukraine right now, for people who are fearing death to hear the gospel and come to a saving knowledge of Jesus.

I mean, there's opportunities here. And in our country, as things get darker, in many ways, we're going to have opportunities as well.

And so take heart. God knows. He's still at work. There's still those who haven't bowed the knee.

And we're just going to keep doing what we're doing. And this episode was, a lot of this was just because I wanted to talk about what's happening in our media, and what's happening with our leaders in this country.

And why are they saying this? They're And it's not really about Russia, Ukraine.

It's more about, are you on the side of equality, democracy? Are you, you know, you make sure that you're wholly 100 % not questioning and you're in that, on that side, because I guarantee you, this narrative is going to be coming up again.

It's probably going to be coming up in the election. And it's going to be used against quote, unquote,

Christian nationalists, because they're just like Putin. They're against democracy. Mark my words.

Take heart, though. Our God is big. He's powerful. He's sovereign. He's good. And we shall be fearless.

And we shall follow Him. And He, the eternal realm is more real than the temporal realm.