“There is no purgatory for war criminals like Putin – they go straight to HELL,” states the Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba to the media reporters. “Hideous and barbarous,” is Boris Johnson’s description of Putin’s orders to the Russian armed forces – air, sea, land, and cyber assaults against the people and nation of Ukraine.

I refuse to call this “war.”  The unprovoked and unwarranted assault on Ukraine is like a house invasion by a swarming gang of well-armed thugs following orders of their criminal boss. Calling it a “war” gives it more contradictory integrity than this crime warrants.

Putin is living out his fantasy via the young armed personnel and their officers in the Russian forces.  He wants to restore Imperial Russia and the extensive reach of the erstwhile Soviet Union.  He has efficiently and brutally controlled the information media; he has virtually wiped out organized opposition and killed or tried to kill opponents.  He regained Russian subjugation of Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea, Donbas' Lugansk and Donetsk regions, and now he not only wants to gobble up the rest of Ukraine -  effect regime change - but also wipe out the nation and culture.  And if he achieves the regime change there, can there be any doubt he will press the case in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia by sending 5^th columnist Russians into those democracies?  And where else? 

History should have taught us.  Hitler’s 1938 takeover of the Sudetenland is a model that tyrants seem to follow assuming impunity.  Xi Jingping eyeing Taiwan wants Putin to succeed so he can follow suit, continue the pursuit of cultural genocide in Uighur regions, after effectively absorbing Tibet into Han control.  Myanmar’s military expulsion of Rohingya people to Bangladesh is yet another example of totalitarian control.

Ukrainians have historic reasons to feel threatened by Putin's Russian bear and its criminal leader.  In the 1930s millions of Ukrainians died because Stalin, the then murderous dictator, forced collectivization on the farming people and starved them into submission.  Then came Hitler’s forces to “liberate” the people for Nazi occupation and brutalization.  Any wonder that Ukrainian people are willing to die defending themselves against the imposition of a Putin-controlled puppet government pursuing Moscow’s interests at the expense of Ukraine’s people and resources.  Courageous President Zelensky understands his people’s fears and their aspirations and there is little room in that vision for an imperial Russian brute and criminal thuggery.

There may even be a theological or better, ecclesiological dimension to this criminal action.  Diana Butler Bass’s article suggests that Putin wants to top off his criminal murder of Ukraine by replacing Kyiv as a key centre of Orthodox Christianity and replacing it with the Russian Orthodox Church as part of his Imperial vision of political, financial, social, military, and religious domination.  See her article here: https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/next-year-in-kyiv?utm_source=url   

We can all imagine how Putin is influenced by Jesus’ Gospel! Not…!  But if he can wrap an ecclesiastical cloak over his dagger and imperial pretensions, then why not!  The Russian Orthodox Church and its leadership in Moscow have no great record of  fostering justice and abundant life for the people of Russia.  The 1917 revolution was as much against the Czar as against the supportive ecclesiastical hierarchy. The prelates seem to be going along with the idea of replacing Kyiv and Constantinople as centres of eastern Orthodoxy with a Moscow-centred ecclesiology, doubtless accountable to the Kremlin.

My article has a bellicose tone – I admit it.  But there is no doubt in my mind that very strong action is called for in the face of Putin's dominating vision and  criminal action . 

I’m confirmed in the need for strength in this situation by the story Jesus tells in Luke 16 (verses 19-31 – The story of Lazarus and Dives, the Rich/Powerful Man” (the man is often called Dives, which is Latin for “rich man”.)   Lazarus has very little:  homeless, eating food that falls on the floor under tables and dogs licking his sores. When Lazarus dies, angels come to carry him "home" - away to be with Abraham, the father of the faith. 

When rich man dies, he is buried and left in Hades, tormented, agonizing in flames.  He begs  Abraham to have mercy on him by sending Lazarus with some cooling water.  But says Abraham, the chasm between Dives and them is too great – “no one can cross from there to us.”  Even pleading for his siblings’ salvation doesn’t work for Dives, because they too wouldn’t list even “if someone rises from the dead.” 

Says a commentator: “The moral quality of Lazarus is passed over to illustrate the fatal deficiency in the life of the other and the impossibility of changing his condemnation.”   [The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, 1991. P.108NT] Foreign Minister Kuleba may have had more biblical insight than he realized. Perhaps he too had read Jesus’ Gospel story and realized that without repentance or turning away from evil and criminal ways people like Hitler, Stalin, and other bullying, criminally-driven autocrats like Putin can only experience condemnation – in history and beyond.

We can imagine that the people of Russian will come to realize that Putin is not their friend, benefactor, restorer, or saviour.  He is a rapacious, greed-driven, power-hungry criminal dictator, whom the Russian people need to disempower and bring to repentance and conversion.  That is my hope for the conclusion of this violent invasion.  But I fear that only death will come from all this evil.

By strength I do not mean violence. I’m not proposing armed, declared warfare, although I must admit that my “reptilian” self would take me in that direction, but the divine Spirit holds me back from that impulse. But I am supporting every effort – economic, social, political, theological, psychological, digital, moral, etc. - to undermine the Russian criminal dictator, his obedient military leaders, and his oligarchy of sycophants [who are his arms-length trustees for the vast wealth Putin has stolen from the Russian people.] 

Everything!! possible within the boundary of non-violence must be done to disempower and stop the criminal sociopathic bully ordering Russian forces to blow up, murder, erase, and dominate Ukraine – people and nation.  The United Nations Security Council, crippled by the Russian veto, may not be able to act expeditiously and effectively - perhaps the General Assembly can, but governments and peoples around the world need to express their revulsion and commit to ongoing, imaginative resistance against this barbarous criminal Putin action.  May his day in the International Criminal Court come soon.

God by your Spirit turn the forces of evil away from their criminal pursuits and restore the ways of peace, based on justice, truth, and the aspirations, yearnings, and hope of Ukraine's people. AMEN