In a previous article, Media Lies on Russia-Ukraine, I gave a list of resources that uncover the legacy media lies. Since that time I have discovered a few more YouTube channels hosted by some full-time independent journalists that seek to critique the legacy media narrative. Please note that I do not endorse the views of every one of these sources.

Ukraine on Fire Trilogy

I highly recommend this Global Tree Pictures documentary series. Each one of the three films is a must see. The first two are by award-winning director Oliver Stone. Although I find Stone to be a controversial conspiracy theorist and don’t agree with him much politically, most of what is presented are well-documented facts. The narration does a good job at connecting the dots that inevitably led to the current crisis. In fact, I would call the series prophetic. Although not without bias, the presenters allow viewers to draw their own conclusions. The production and visual quality of these documentary films are unsurpassed. Each one is watchable and intriguing. The age restriction is due to the images and video made during the violent Euro-Maidan coup.

Ukraine on Fire
Revealing Ukraine
The Everlasting Present – Ukraine 30 years of InDependence

Here is the full Ukraine of Fire Trilogy playlist.

YouTube Podcasts

In my last article on Media Lies on Russia-Ukraine, I mentioned the following video podcasts.

Steve Turley
The Duran
The Grayzone
Gonzalo Lira

A brief note on Gonzalo Lira: Reporting from the Ukrainian city of Kharkov near the Russian border, Gonzalo was recently arrested by the SBU (Ukraine’s secret police) and detained for several days. He was released but had to sign a disclosure stating that he would not discuss what happened during his arrest, his phone was confiscated and passwords to his accounts were changed. He is not allowed to leave Ukraine while his case is being investigated. This brought attention to the fact that dissent over the war is not tolerated in Ukraine. In fact, other pro-Russian bloggers and officials who have negotiated with encroaching Russian troops have been assassinated. For a week, many feared that Gonzalo Lira had been killed. However, as a Chilean and American citizen, Gonzalo was not treated as harshly by the SBU. He is back and now has a new YouTube Channel.

Gonzalo Lira II

More YouTube Podcasts

I have discovered a few more that provide daily or almost daily updates from an alternative perspective. The next two are on-the-ground video journalists in the Donbass region, Eva K. Bartlett and Patrick Lancaster. Unlike most recent wars, there are virtually no American reporters on the battle field. Most reports are pro-Ukrainian propaganda fed to western reporters in hotel bars in Kiev.

Eva K. Bartlett

The following video by Eva K. Bartlett exposes the Mariupol “mass graves” hoax. According to Western media, Russian forces secretly buried up to 9,000 Mariupol civilians in “mass graves” in a town just west of the city. “Except it never happened. There is no mass grave. It’s actually just a normal, small, cemetery with no pits, no mass graves, just an orderly cemetery whose grave diggers refuted Western claims.” Instead Bartlett found a normal cemetery setting and spoke with the men responsible for burials who refused the allegations and said they buried each person in a coffin including, they noted, Ukrainian soldiers.

Patrick Lancaster is an incredibly brave crowd-funded journalist who has been reporting on the war in Donbass since 2014. His cache of hundreds of reports provide eyewitness views and uncut interviews with the people of the Donbass region. You can see multiple testimonies from locals in Mariupol and numerous other cities who blame Ukraine for shelling their homes as “Ukraine has been doing for eight years.”

The two members of The Duran podcast have their own individual channels:

Alexander Christoforou is the producer of The Duran podcast with Alexander Mercouris. He is a Greek-American living in Cyprus.

Alexander Mercouris, the other half of The Duran, is a British international affairs expert also of Greek descent. In my opinion, he is the most articulate and knowledgeable source I have heard on world affairs from an independent non-western-biased viewpoint.

Col Macgregor Clips / Fan Channel is a collection of Colonel Douglas MacGregor videos, a Trump administration advisor who is frequently featured guest on Tucker Carlson. He is one of the voices on the war in Ukraine giving factual information.

The George Galloway Show is a British commentator who does a daily talk show with numerous clips on world events.

IEarlGrey is news from the “other side” by a British expat living in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

Redacted is an independent news platform with Clayton Morris, former Fox News anchor, and his wife Natali.

The Dive with Jackson Hinkle is well done mash-up podcast of many of the sources listed above.

International Media

Each of the following provide an alternative view of world affairs. Each has their own bias. However, they provide an alternative to the propaganda of the western legacy media. All are in English or with subtitles.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia provides the Russian Foreign Minister Sergeĭ Viktorovich Lavrov’s speeches, regular press briefings and other materials on international relations.

ShanghaiEye魔都眼 gives a mainland Chinese perspective.

India Today is India’s leading English News Channel.

TeleSUR English is funded by several of the socialist governments of Latin America. It is biased toward those governments, but gives an alternative view of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

Crux is an anti-Russian, anti-American, anti-western Indian nationalist channel that gives good in depth yet summarized information in short clips.

Cyrus Janssen is an American fluent in Mandarin who produces weekly videos in both English and Mandarin to help people understand China and improve the relationship between east and west. His channel has some Chinese perspective videos on Russia-Ukraine.

Asian Boss is an “on-the-street” interview format that gives views on world affairs from people all over Asia. This is excellent, high quality journalism. The interviews show how intelligent and thoughtful Asian young people are compared with Americans.

It is fascinating to read the comments sections and live feed chats of each of these channels to see that the whole world is not, as we have been told, “united against Russia.”

Two Books

These are two fascinating books I’ve been reading on the emerging multi-polar world.

Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington, 1996. For more information of the Civilization State theory of geopolitics.

The Return of Christendom: Demography, Politics, and the Coming Christian Majority by Dr. Steve Turley, 2019. To understand the encouraging, optimistic and bigger picture of the coming multi-polar world led by Christian civilization states.

The Lies of the Legacy Media

What is meant by “legacy media”?

The mainstream media is no longer mainstream. Many independent video journalists now have a higher audiences per day than the highest rated show on prime time CNN. What is left is the “legacy media,” the remaining network news broadcasts and large metropolitan newspapers who are hemorrhaging viewers and subscriptions. Despite a complete loss of credibility in the eyes of most thinking people, they persist in their self-entitled positions weaving their fabricated neo-liberal and neo-conservative narratives. In a previous article, I described how Jeff Bezos turned The Washington Post into a mouthpiece for the government agencies that his company serves. The largest legacy news media outlets are all owned by parent companies who are tied to liberal globalist political organizations.

From the beginning of Russia’s military build-up on Ukraine’s borders in late 2021, the Ukrainian and western legacy media narrative has been that Russia committed an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign democracy with the baseless claim that Ukraine is “not a real country.” The Russian plan is to conquer and integrate Ukraine as part of a renewed Russian Empire. We hear that Russia’s “playbook” is to commit war atrocities, target civilians, and create numerous “false flags” that justify further military actions with the goal to eventually conquer the Baltic States and Eastern Europe.

Russia claims that throughout 2021, the Ukrainian military aided by ultra-nationalist militias were preparing to invade Crimea and Donbass retaking these territories and forcing Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians to submit to an illegitimate government. Russia also claims that NATO has been goading Ukraine to create a security crisis along Russia’s border. Russia fears the stated plan is to eventually integrate Ukraine into NATO and place nuclear missiles along Russia’s border. Russia’s plan is to guarantee Ukraine remains a neutral, non-NATO country, to recognize the independence of the Donbass regions, and to accept that Crimea is now a part of Russia. Putin claims that Russia has no plans to occupy Ukraine or force regime change in Kiev.

We usually don’t hear that the background of the current conflict is the eight year war in eastern Ukraine from 2014 to 2022. This began with the violent Euro-Maiden coup of 2014 that overthrew the government of Ukraine. This led to the peaceful secession of Crimea aided by the presence of Russian troops. Then came the declaration by pro-Russian separatists that the Lugansk and Donetsk Republics in eastern Ukraine were autonomous regions with the right to self-rule. The Ukrainian government then sent “anti-terrorist” troops to Donbass. A civil war resulted and 14,000 people, including many civilians, have been killed. The vast majority of those killed have been those living in the territories of the separatists. In the early stages of the war, the Donetsk Republic army had surrounded thousands of Ukrainian troops and were about to annihilate them. Then Germany and France brought both sides to the negotiating table to avoid the slaughter. Ukraine recognized the autonomy of Donetsk and Lugansk, but promptly violated the ceasefire. Since that time NATO, led by the United States, has supplied funding and arms to fight a proxy war against the pro-Russian eastern regions of Ukraine. In the west, it has been framed as a “war against Russian aggression.”

Make no mistake about it, both views of the war are political narratives as far apart as they can be. Both sides are using military tactics called psychological operations (PSYOPs) more commonly known as war propaganda. Even the legacy media sometimes admits that claims on either side are hard to see through the “fog of war.” Regardless, we usually hear only the Ukrainian Euro-Maidan government’s press releases and statements repeated verbatim the western media. The Russian statements are either suppressed or mocked as “baseless” or false. Meanwhile, There is virtually no independent reporting from Ukraine that seeks to discern an unbiased war narrative based on facts.

Our job as Christians ought to be to discern the truth by asking the following questions.

1. What are the known facts?
2. What evidence best fits the claims on either side?
3. Which narrative is more credible?
4. Is there an alternative narrative that seeks to understand the purposes of Christ’s victorious kingdom advancing in history?

Logical Reasoning

There are different ways of reasoning and coming to a logical conclusion. A large part of intelligence is memory, that is, the ability to retain facts and narratives. However, wisdom is something different. It is the ability to connect the dots. We do this essentially by three methods.

1. Deductive Reasoning is moving from a general rule to a specific conclusion.
2. Inductive Reasoning is looking at some specific, individual observations and moving to a general rule.
3. Abductive Reasoning is when we have some incomplete evidence, but we infer a conclusion based on other rules and facts we believe to be true.

We need accurate facts followed by a level-headed and balanced analysis of an emotional situation. The independent reporters linked to above, though they each have their own preconceived biases, present a “parallel narrative” that often contradicts and yet gives compelling information contrary to what we hear in the western press. Given a true premise, we can then use deductive, inductive reasoning to arrive at a valid conclusion that is true. If that is not possible, we can use abductive reasoning to bring us closer to the truth.

For example, we know that in all wars there are unintentional civilian casualties. In general that is a true premise. How do we then determine then if an army is intentionally targeting civilians?

First, we look at both sides of the argument. Ukraine and the western media are claiming that civilian infrastructures are being targeted. They claim that Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are being indiscriminately murdered, tortured and raped in large numbers. On the other hand, Russia claims that all targets are military targets, but Ukraine and the independent neo-Nazi led militias are staging war crimes or faking crimes and balming it on t e Russian army. These militias are using civilians as human shields as they hole up in civilian structures (hospitals, malls, schools, theaters, multi-story apartment complexes, etc.) that have been converted to defense compounds.

Second, we look at a variety of sources, both pro-Ukrainian/western media and pro-Russian media (such as the sources I listed mentioned above). We should also look at non-western media to see how other media outlets — such as Latin America, China, Taiwan, India and the Middle East — are portraying the war.

Finally, we use abductive reasoning to decide which war narrative is closer to the truth.

Abductive reasoning starts with an observation or set of observations and then seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from the observations. This process, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not positively verify it (Wikipedia, Abductive Reasoning).

While it is impossible to know with certainty, which side is correct in every case, we can look at the entire scenario and draw likely conclusions.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict is based on the Russian government’s assertion that NATO expansion is a real existential threat to the nation. America understands this when it comes to our own security, but there is a lot of hypocrisy regarding our own past wars. When other countries threaten American security, we do far more than Russia is currently doing to protect our domestic and foreign interests. Therefore, it is hypocritical that the west presents only the pro-Ukrainian narrative and force fits the data to support that narrative. I take Russian claims seriously and look for independent on-the-ground, eyewitness reporters who can verify this — such as the those listed above in Mariupol and other cities in the Donbass region — who interview survivors of the conflict on video with no cuts or sound bites. I also hold the view that the first aggressor in the war in Donbass in 2014 was Ukraine. Although Russia is not without fault, the current conflict would not have occurred if Kiev had not launched an attack on Donbass or if the Minsk I and II agreements had been taken seriously.

The UN Doctrine of “Collective Self-Defense”

Another way of looking at the Ukraine crisis is that the UN’s own doctrine of war would allow for such a military operation if the shoe were on the other foot. Hasn’t NATO and the western coalition of nations used similar justifications for our wars in Yugoslavia and the Middle East?

The UN Doctrine is that the primary war crime is a “war of aggression.” This is useful to consider when the argument is used that every war crime happening in Ukraine is the fault of Russia — the only aggressor. The reasoning is that from the primary crime of an unjust war of aggression all other war crimes come. Indeed the purpose of the UN is to outlaw all war among member nations. In theory, a ban on all wars is a sympathetic idea. There are two exceptions to this: the right to self-defense against an invading army and collective self-defense between allies if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations. A further problem is that NATO members have found all sorts of exceptions using the doctrine of “collective self defense.” They found a convenient runaround in the case of the nations of former Yugoslavia who were not NATO allies or even UN members at the time of the west’s military action.

To really get to the root of who is the aggressor in the Russia-Ukraine crisis, we need to look at Donbass. The current crisis is not a war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine “unprovoked” on February 24th, 2022. It began in 2014 when the Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko came to power after a violent revolution. The previous president Viktor Yanukovich was not impeached with a two-thirds vote. But even prior to the failed impeachment, an interim president had been chosen with the approval of the EU and US government, Oleksandr Turchynov (February 23rd, 2014 – June 7th, 2014), who passed laws outlawing the Russian language in businesses, schools and public commerce. He proclaimed the World War II anti-Russian Nazi leader, Stepan Bandera, a national hero, and named several streets in the center of Kiev after Ukrainian Nazis who fought against the Soviets as an underground resistance movement until 1955. These were people who killed Russians, Poles, Jews and Gypsies in collaboration with Nazis and persisted in these atrocities after the war.

In response to this abomination, Crimea seceded from Ukraine with Russia’s protection, and riots broke out in Odessa with 40 pro-Russian demonstrators being burned alive by a Nazi militia group. Then the two Donbass regions, Lugansk and Donetsk, declared their autonomy and right to self-rule. Turchynov launched a big scale “anti-terrorist operation” against the separatists in eastern Ukraine in April of 2014 and later claimed that Russia was the “aggressor.” The first thing that Poroshenko did when he came into office in June was vow to end the war in eastern Ukraine. But he did this by making unilateral demands against the “terrorists” claiming in a speech that if the separatists did not come back into union with Ukraine, that their children would live forever in basements even while they were being bombed mercilessly.

“We have a job, but they don’t. We will have pensions, but they won’t. We will have payments for children, but they will not. Our children will go to schools and kindergartens, and their children will sit in basements. This is how, and this is how, we will win this war.” ~ Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, speech in Odessa, October 27, 2014

Russia had come to the aid of Lugansk and Donetsk with military hardware and (almost certainly) more troops on the ground. By 2015, the Donbass republics had started to win their revolutionary war. The separatists had thousands of Ukrainian troops and Nationalist Militias surrounded. Then the French and the Germans panicked wanting to avoid a bloodbath. Most Americans know nothing about this turn of events. The Minsk II agreement was a rushed response of the west when they understood that the Donetsk and Lugansk troops were about to annihilate 6000 Ukrainian troops who were surrounded in a cauldron formation in the city of Debaltseve — a suburb outside of the capital city of Donetsk.

In 2015, Minsk II called for a ceasefire and drew a line on the territory that the land forces had taken. Unfortunately, the ceasefire was immediately violated with each side blaming the other. In the following years, sporadic fighting continued. Last year, Ukraine amassed close to 100,000 troops in the south and east planning to retake Crimea and Donbass — in violation of the Minsk agreements and Zelenskyy’s campaign promise to end the war.

The Minsk agreements called the Ukrainians to the table forcing Ukraine to recognize the two breakaway republics, not as part of Russia, but as autonomous regions. But Poroshenko had so many radical nationalists in his government that he was threatened if he implemented the peace treaty. So the war continued. The Minsk treaties were ignored and both sides blamed each other.

The same thing happened five years later under Zelenskyy. Ukraine’s current president campaigned with the promise to stop the war in Donbass, but did exactly the opposite once he was inaugurated. This is because he was was controlled by Kolomoisky and other oligarchs, radical Ukrainian Nationalists and western interests. In fact, if Zelenskyy had stopped the Ukrainian civil war in Donbass by implementing Minsk II as promised, he likely would have been removed from office or assassinated. Zelenskyy talks about peace, but has absolutely no power to do anything. I consider him to have begun as a partly sincere reformer — like the train of Ukrainian presidents who came before him — only to realize that he was to be a puppet in over his head in a theater of political corruption.

Russia’s war to “liberate Donbass,” launched on February 24, 2022, is predicated on United Nations Resolution 51, which allows a member country to defend an ally on its border.

… the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.”

Russia has cited defense of the two breakaway republics and self-defense in the light of threats against the two collective nations as grounds for applying Article 51. Those breakaway republics were neither part of the UN nor recognized as nations, so they used the doctrine of “collective self-defense.” Regardless of whether Donetsk and Lugansk are recognized by the UN, Russia is a member, so the war is based on the same UN/NATO doctrine on which the military operations in Yugoslavia, Kuwait and Iraq were justified. This is also the reason why Trump got in a lot of trouble with the western press. He called Putin a “genius,” for recognizing the Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. And he was right. Putin claims Russia is stopping NATO’s aggression against its allies by using the UN/NATO doctrine of “collective self-defense.”

This has long been the policy of the US in the Western Hemisphere based on the Monroe Doctrine. In fact, our nation was based on a Revolutionary War for independence, in which we were a breakaway confederation of states fighting against the aggression of the British. We had the help of France and other nations to secure our independence. Just as we have defended smaller countries in the western hemisphere against European invasions throughout our history, Russia is now defending two smaller Slavic nations from aggression by NATO’s supply of arms to Ukraine.

Of course, the Western media frames this as a plan of Putin to occupy all of Ukraine, which is nonsense. Russia does not have the troops on the ground to accomplish that. The purpose of the war is to demilitarize Ukraine, de-Nazify the southern and Donbass regions (and ideally the whole country), and prevent Ukraine from joining NATO by requiring neutral status in their constitution.

In short, if you will find the guilty party in the war in Donbass, you will find the guilty party of the current war — at least according to what the UN says about wars of aggression. Did Lugansk and Donetsk attack Ukraine? Or did Ukraine launch a military action to retake Donbass?

Long Term Consequences — a Multipolar Shift in Geopolitics

Each time there is a paradigm shift in the world order brought about by a cultural and political world view, the seeds of destruction are planted in its foundation. It was inevitable that the world moved from a bipolar world order during the Cold war — to a unipolar “New World Order” form 1991 to the present — to a multipolar world in coming decades. These shifts usually occur ever 50 to 100 years. The Ukraine crisis and resulting sanctions and Russian counter-sanctions against the “unfriendly” nations of the EU and the USA is accelerating this tectonic shift. What might have taken until 2040or later could come upon us in a much shorter time period.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently said countries that maintain their ties to Russia risk isolation from the global economy.

While many countries have taken a unified stand against Russia’s actions and many companies have quickly and voluntarily severed business relationships with Russia, some countries and companies have not. Let me now say a few words to those countries who are currently sitting on the fence, perhaps seeing an opportunity to gain by preserving their relationship with Russia and backfilling the void left by others. Such motivations are short-sighted…. Going forward, it will be increasingly difficult to separate economic issues from broader considerations of national interest, including national security…. Let’s be clear, the unified coalition of sanctioning countries will not be indifferent to actions that undermine the sanctions we’ve put in place (Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen on Way Forward for the Global Economy).

While Yellen’s remarks might sound noble and altruistic to those concerned about western interests, most people don’t realize that the sanctioners can soon become the sanctioned. Russia is the only large national economy in the world that is a net exporter and also has virtually no national debt. Russia is ranked number 10 among all nations in GDP. Further, many economists believe Russia’s GDP and currency is the most undervalued in the world. The power Russia has to sanction western nations has not even been felt yet. Gas for rubles will soon move to counter-sanctions on “unfriendly” countries buying all of Russia’s commodities. In full force, these sanctions could cause a worldwide recession.

Regardless, it is obvious that the world is moving from a collection of nation states making up 15 percent of the world — yet leading the 85 percent in terms of economics, politics and military force — to a multilateral world made up of civilization states. The United States could be leading this move with a return to the Christian culture of colonial and the early American Constitutional Republic — or we could resist it in a quixotic lurch grasping the last vestiges of neo-liberal globalism, which is nothing more than the religion of egalitarian humanism. Whichever religion we choose, there will be long term consequences in the form of blessings or curses from God.

How I came to this view

I was a short-term Christian worker in Russia and Ukraine who founded a Russian language newspaper with university students from 1991 to 2000 in Kiev, Ukraine. We also worked with a video ministry in an evangelical church in the historic city of Vladimir, Russia. I spent several months out of my life on 12 short term trips in both Russia and Ukraine. In that time, I stayed in at least 11 cities and visited numerous villages. Most of the time I stayed in Ukrainian and Russian Christians’ homes, traveling with them on trains and metros, and getting to know the cities by walking alone and with friends instead of hiring taxis. It was an amazing way to see first hand the dramatic changes in ther former USSR in the 1990s.

One thing I constantly noticed is that the western coverage of events in Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s and early 2000s, even those reported by American missionaries doing large evangelistic events, were nothing like the events I witnessed on the ground. I would often ask my Russian and Ukrainian friends what they thought of such reports. They would agree they were lies, but having been part of the USSR for so long, the people there had gotten used to lies. They would shrug their shoulders, “This is what all Americans missionaries say.” I was honored in fact to be told that my messages given in churches “were not like the other Americans.” When I asked what that meant, they would always say that I was “hard” and “direct” and didn’t try to “say a lot of nice things.” Indeed “nice” American missionaries will often say one thing to their overseas audiences and give a very different report to their donors at home. Ministries claimed large numbers of conversions (usually in the many thousands) in huge evangelistic meetings. Paradoxically, these large evangelistic crusades left the churches in that city at exactly the same size after they left. I was once jokingly told by a fundraising expert when I told him that was critical of the situation on the mission field, “But you can’t raise funds that way!” I sometimes regret that we actually underplayed the effect we were having through Predvestnik. We chose to stick only to what was verifiable from letters and testimonies we collected ourselves.

If that is true among western Christians reporting from the former USSR, then the lies told by our media and the US state department are far bigger. Needless to say, the reports I hear daily about the current crisis vexes my thinking and emotions.

I came to my view on the current Russia-Ukraine crisis primarily through a friend in Ukraine. I have been having political discussions and debates with him for years. He outlined in a message in February about what Russia could do to the United States for sanctions if they so choose. Most of what he told me is in the process of coming to pass. The remaining items would be so devastating that it would plunge the whole world into an economic crisis. In short, there could be a rubles only payment demand for all Russian commodities. This would crash the European economy and devalue the US dollar, euro and British pound. Further, Russia could arm their Middle Eastern allies in Syria, Iran and Yemen with superior military technology and weapons to disrupt the oil flow out of the region.

My friend also explained that the legacy media narrative we hear does not tell the whole story of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I knew from my firsthand trips that much of what we see in the media about the former Soviet Republics is a gross caricature far removed from reality. I then began to hear similar voices that were carbon copies of the language he was using. I was also introduced to the concepts of the “multipolar world” and “civilization states.” I had come to similar conclusions on my own many years ago, but never heard these terms before. It is exciting to see the beginning of this. I find it amazing because I am hearing the same thing from the opposite ends of the political spectrum — the Patriot Movement, the alt-right movement, the populists — but then neo-Marxists, traditional liberals as well as conspiracy theorists have been saying something similar for many years. (We should understand these labels are generalizations and people holding these views usually don’t identify with a “movement”.)

In my discussions with a neo-Marxist professor at UMASS/Amherst, confirmed what I have long thought. I found it odd because he was saying many of the same things that conservatives on the opposite end of the political spectrum are saying. He agreed with me that “the accepted polarity of politics — the old liberal vs conservative oscillation — is dying out everywhere. Both the political and economic processes of this shift are uneven with lurches backwards and forwards. A new global alignment is part of the process. Its chief components are a relocation of the dynamic center of global capitalism from its old locations (Western Europe, North America and Japan) to its new locations (China, India, the United States, Russia, Brazil, etc.)”

Each “civilization state” will have its own democratic processes. In some cases, these will be foreign to what neo-liberals consider to be “democratic.” Instead, there will be self-sufficient republics that cannot be threatened with economic pressure to change their cultural values precisely because they have self-sustaining economies. The epicenters of the multipolar world will be national civilizations that have little or no national debt and are net exporters, not relying on foreign powers to sustain their economies. They may make military alignments with neighboring countries, but won’t rely on a unipolar force such as the United Nations or NATO for their security.

The important thing to understand is this is not a forced movement, but a natural flow. The natural resources, deep cultures and locations of these civilizations have already existed for hundreds and even thousands of years. The “nation state” order was forced on them sometime in the last 500 years either through colonialism or 20th century military alignments.

The Providential Meaning and Purpose of the Russia-Ukraine crisis

This war is God’s judgment on Russia, Ukraine and the western NATO alliance for things only known to God. It could be judgment on the licentiousness of the west that has promoted one abomination after another in the name of a false liberty, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, transgenderism and “wokeism.” It could also be a judgment on the communistic thinking that is still embedded in the minds of the people of Russia and Ukraine. It could be a judgment on the Russian government for the tightening of restrictions on their minority evangelical churches. It could be for the purpose of defeating the Nazi and racist philosophy of the western Ukrainian nationalists — and similar hatred among Russian nationalists. It could be for the purpose of defeating and neutering NATO, a military alliance that has killed over six million people in the wars of the past 30 years, including hundreds of thousands of civilians. It could be for many reasons, but we will not know the Providence of God until we see the conclusion of the current crisis.

Putin believes the NATO alliance is a threat to Russia. He is right. It has been the western policy since 2004 to impose sanctions on Russia for military actions on its borders. The goal is to impoverish Russia until, like the former Soviet Union, it might break up into smaller republics. Western Russia would remain as a smaller third-world country near the level of Ukraine’s current economy. The Caucasus and Black Earth regions of Russia along the black sea would be separated into several smaller states. Crimea would revert to Ukraine, giving Russia no warm water port. Karelia might be returned to Finland. Parts of Russia along the Mongolian border might be ceded to that Asian nation. Parts of eastern Russia long subject to border disputes might go to China and Japan. The Ural and Siberian regions might become one or two independent states that hold most of the oil reserves yet controlled by international corporations.

I don’t justify the war in Ukraine. I don’t justify the restrictions on evangelical churches in Russia. I don’t justify the restrictions on free speech and press in Russia. But there is great truth in much of what Putin stands for in terms of reestablishing a Christian worldview and culture in Russia and hopefully the nations of the west.

Putin believes it is not fair to have a unipolar world that is militarily and economically controlled by the United States and the European NATO powers. He sees that the United States comes to Muslim nations and Christian sub-Saharan African nations and threatens to sanction them unless they legalize abortion and same-sex marriage. Putin believes that the west wants to turn the moral order of older conservative civilizations upside down. One has to look at it objectively. He believes the center of influence must be multipolar. For now, we should not demonize any of the sides. God might use any of these things to glorify His name. Remember God used Pharaoh for his own purpose. He used Cyrus for his purpose too. He said Cyrus is His servant. Sometimes there are some things God would not mind using ungodly people to do so he could have his way. ~ An anonymous Christian in Ukraine

I agree with this assessment. It is valid to disagree with Putin’s actions. It is valid to oppose him as an autocratic leader and to view the war with disgust and horror. However, it is not valid to say the war was totally unprovoked. The war has a cause that is not entirely due to Russian aggression. Part of it resulted from western leaders’ realization that they are losing unipolar control over the world economy. Likewise, the west’s military ability to control the outcome of conflicts around the globe has collapsed. This is apparent by NATO’s failures in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq. The rest of the world sees that western control has resulted in wars that killed millions including hundreds of thousands of civilians. Although most oppose Russia’s wars as well, they see that these are largely conflicts on or near their borders with casualties far less than NATO’s operations. NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine sadly is a last ditch existential battle to preserve western control over the 85 percent of the world who are now resisting western dominance. The Ukraine conflict is a microcosm of how God is winnowing the nations on a much larger scale.