Year One of Russia's War

We will soon be at the first anniversary of Russia’s unjustified war on Ukraine.  How many thousands of the human family have already been killed?  We’re told that well over 100,000 Russian soldiers and sailors have died and who knows how many went out of the war theatre with serious, life-changing wounds or just fled. 

The Ukrainian casualties – military and civilian, adults and children, all innocent victims of Putin’s immoral and criminal decision-making can’t be numbered, but must also include the millions who have been turned into refugees – internal in their homeland and external to receptive countries like Poland and Canada.

The Russian expectation that brutal invasion would quickly lead to a takeover of Kiyiv and a change of regime was a miscalculation with potentially fateful consequences.  The possibility of the giant Russian marauding bear being driven back to historic border continues to be mooted and yearned for.

As a Christian, I abhor this war and all war. The birth of the Christ-child we just celebrated again reveals God’s intentions for the human family are peace, abundance, joy, love, and hope for a future where all might live with respect for each other and for all Creation.  So an unprovoked war is a curse and a sin of the highest order.

When we see the Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kyrill standing with the sociopath Putin in support of  this bloody war then we can only wonder what Jesus would do in the face of such blatant evil. 

I understand that Putin has imperial pretensions he wants to realize. And! those pretensions are backed up by an institutional religious background.  The Russians don’t want to tolerate the highly significant schism that took place in 2018 when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church separated from the Russian Church. Pan-Orthodoxy and Pan-Russian aspirations are overlapping and complementary. Theocracy is a dangerous and deadly form of government - as Iran has ably demonstrated.

Here's how Maine-based Orthodox Archdeacon Rev. John Chryssavgis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul summarizes the Russo-Ukrainian stakes in an article in America-the Jesuit Review magazine:

The war is not about Russia capturing Ukraine; it is about Russia challenging the Western world, which Mr. Putin and Patriarch Kirill both regard as evil.  Russia has declared war against the world order and for a new morality. Russia is competing for what it considers the soul of the world, for a cultural unity that—again in their distorted image of the world and interpretation of the Gospel—brings Russia and Ukraine together in a brave new Russian world. This worldview presumes a Russian hegemony, no matter how fictitious that appears to the rest of the world.

It will take more than a map and Wikipedia to sort out the ecclesiastical morass underlying Kyrill’s ecclesiological fantasies and Putin's wedding of his new-found religious convictions and his demonic megalomaniacal imperial dream to Kyrill’s blasphemous claims.  But all the rest of the world and certainly Christians need to reflect carefully on the course of this tyrannical project.

For now I am most concerned about the consequences of a possible Ukrainian defeat in this hugely significant unjustified invasion.  Russian history shows us that the consequences for Ukraine and its peoples would be colossal.

History Foretells

Joseph Stalin’s Holodomor or Terror-Famine of 1932-1933 imposed on the Ukrainian people tells us that Russian authoritarians have no moral compass when it comes to terrorizing a subject people.  As many as 30 million Ukrainians died as food became the chosen weapon of Soviet subjugation.

The “Katyn Forest” massacre by Stalin’s secret NKVD forces is another foretaste. 

The massacre was initiated in NKVD chief Lavrentiy Beria's proposal to Joseph Stalin to execute all captive members of the Polish officer corps, which was secretly approved by the Soviet Politburo led by Stalin. Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials". The Polish Army officer class was representative of the multi-ethnic Polish state; the murdered included ethnic Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Jews including the chief Rabbi of the Polish Army, Baruch Steinberg. (source Wikipedia: Katyn Massacre) 

Putin has also demonstrated his cowardly ability to use his armed forces for the annihilation of civilian adults and children, including those in hospitals, schools, and other clearly non-military targets as a political gift to Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad efforts to cling to power.

The current invasion has revealed this same criminal mind as we heard of murders in Bucha.

The Bucha massacre (Ukrainian: Бучанська різанина, romanized: Buchanska rizanyna) was the mass murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war by Russian Armed Forces during the fight for and occupation of the Ukrainian city of Bucha amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Photographic and video evidence of the massacre emerged on 1 April 2022 after Russian forces withdrew from the city. (source Wikipedia: Bucha).

I remember well both the Hungarian Uprising of October/November 1956 terminated by Soviet tanks and the 1968 Prague Spring snuffed out by the invasion of 650,000 Soviet-led troops.  The memory helps me understand the Russian colonizing imperial mind and its ruthless ways with dissident people.

The bombing of key Ukrainian infrastructure in the current war with weaponizing of winter weather, the use of criminal conscripts and the Wagner unit’s convicted rapists and murderers as mercenaries conscripted and freed to be canon fodder and terrorizers of Ukrainian people – these are further signs of the evil conscience inhabiting Russian leadership in this killing campaign.

If this, or that

If Russia is the victor, the consequences for Ukraine will not just be regime change. Count on a blood-letting that goes far beyond the current Ukrainian political leadership.  It will extend to any and all who espouse Ukraine’s freedom from Russia’s all-encompassing oppressive yoke and those who choose to orient themselves to a more democratic and European way of being a nation and a people. The reign of terror will be real and deadly.

As well, count on ongoing “nibbling” away at the land base of former Soviet “republics” and Warsaw Pact nations by claiming that Russian citizens of those lands are being badly treated.  All neighbours Chechia, Slovakia, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and others are vulnerable to the Russian imperial appetite for vassal states and buffer zone to serve as obstacles to western influence in the Russian plutocracy.

For any person of faith and for me as a friend and companion of Jesus, we are caught between the hard rock of Russian brutal victory with its inevitable reign of conscience-less, criminal terror, and on the other hand,  the hard place of ongoing armament and support to Ukraine to repel the invader in order to maintain self-determined independence.

No real peace option is in sight - just ongoing armed conflict.

Pray for the Spirit to Prod

At this point I can only try to keep informed and aware, but also to pray that the invader will be driven out and Ukrainians can embrace peace and pursue the restoration of their country.  I pray that somewhere in the hearts of key people the Spirit of Christ will enable those in power to move toward a peace that merits the label of justice.   But till then we need to stand with and arm Ukraine.

I acknowledge that there are many places that are equally problematical, if not quite as bloody, but all in need of humbler and more peaceful ways which the Spirit endows in us all and await full awakening:  Canada’s Indigenous / Colonial Settler relationships are urgently in need of transformative change; Palestinians are waiting for justice and order that isn’t maintained by Israeli guns and legal manipulations; Brazil’s and Central America's Indigenous peoples are terrorized by colonizing powerful resource developers and armed ranchers; Iraq’s “democracy” is maintained by American power and money after an unjustified war; and China still oppresses the Dalai Lama’s homeland of Tibet, while Taiwan is being threatened China’s expansionism and Uyghurs face cultural genocide.  This human disease of colonizing and oppressing others is rampant in your earthly household, Holy One.  Maranatha!

When, O holy Creator, will your human family learn to live with humble respect, goodwill, and justice as your intended way of peace?