This is not a post on the Russia-Ukraine conflict per se, but it’s a critique of what I believe that many Evangelical Christian ministries got wrong when the Soviet Union opened to the Gospel in 1991. It may have contributed to the negative relationship between Russia and the West and even the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

As you may know, I spent many months out of my life and took many trips to both Russia and Ukraine in the 1990s — all the way through 2007. One interesting conversation I had in the early 1990s was with a Moscow cab driver, who asked me what I was doing in Russia, and I told him about our ministry with Bob and Rose Weiner’s Christian Youth International leadership training conferences and Predvestnik, the Russian language Forerunner. He explained to me in so many words that American missionaries were doing everything all wrong.

“You come here and hold big crusades, you distribute Bibles, and then you leave. But the problem with Russia is not that we don’t have churches or Bibles. I don’t attend church every week, but I’ve read the Bible for a long time, and I study it everyday and read it with my family and we pray at our home. I have a college degree, and I used to work in a factory as an engineer, but the factory is closed because it’s missing parts and our country doesn’t produce anything anymore. What you need to do is come here and help us fix our factories, help us with our economy, then when you plant your churches you’ll have lots and lots of converts.”

What he said was true. We saw a big flurry of crusades, lots of Bibles printed, millions of dollars of fundraising spent on missions tourism.” However, the vast majority of these ministries stopped doing anything in Russia once the fad ended and if it came harder for them to raise money for it. Yes, there are some good Western ministries that planted churches and trained leaders, I was part of one of them. The guys I trained went on to be very successful in business, and they told me they learned a lot about publications and media that helped them in these careers.

I was still coming to both Russia and Ukraine at least once a year until 2001 when I got married, but by that time missionaries had become a lot more rare. I worked with one church in Vladimir, Russia to produce Christian video documentaries similar to what Eric Holmberg does, and even translated some of his presentations into Russian They told me that they had two missionaries visit in one year, and I was one of them.

What happened after 1991 was good because communism collapsed, but there was also an economic collapse, that was bad in Russia, worse in Ukraine, and worse in the regions outside the big cities of Moscow and St Petersburg.

The mafia got very powerful. Some of them became oligarchs who bribed officials to buy up the industries, which then produced nothing. And Western leaders including many of our politicians were able to buy influence and make lots of money covertly hiding it in offshore accounts.

This is something that’s well-known inside these countries. It sounds to us like a big conspiracy theory when they describe it in detail to us, but all of it is documented.

There was one major power in the Soviet Union, and then it collapsed into 15 dysfunctional separate countries. There were Russian nationals in each Soviet Republic that went to bed in the Soviet Union one night and woke up the next morning in a foreign country. And most of these people have no support. There was hyperinflation due to the pumping in of billions of dollars into the economy by the IMF. And most of this money either flowed back to the west or into the pockets of oligarchs. The health of Russia and Ukraine declined. The life expectancy actually dropped several years especially for men. Alcoholism became a big problem and suicide became an epidemic.

When Vladimir Putin later described this in a speech as a catastrophe, he meant the deaths and the lives ruined. The context of the speech shows he did not want a return to Soviet communism. In a TASS interview in December 2018, Putin said that “restoration of socialism in Russia is impossible,” but stressed that “certain elements of socialization of economy and social sphere are possible.” He stated that the restoration of socialism “is always related to expenditures and, eventually, an economic dead end.”

There were conflicts that broke out in the Central Asian Muslim regions, and the Russian Federation mediated. Some were minor and they came to an end fairly quickly. One that raged on, because it was in part funded by the CIA, was a series of wars Chechnya and Dagestan. Those regions were part of Russia since the 1700s, before the United States existed, and Western press treated it as though this was an invasion of Russia into a sovereign territory. But the truth of the matter is that these governments were separatist mafia drug lords who also employed Islamic jihadists to do terrorist attacks within Russia itself. Most of the Chechen did not support their corrupt drug cartel regime tat had take \n control of the city of Grozny

Yeltsin himself was a corrupt alcoholic puppet of the West. He was very brave for standing up and dissolving the communist Soviet Union, and allowing the republics to go and the regents of Russia to be federalized, but he was completely unprepared for what happened after that. There was a much higher crime rate and more journalists and politicians were assassinated under Yeltsin in eight years in office until 2000, than in all the time since then.

When Putin was hand picked by Yeltsin as Prime Minister he was tasked with ending the Chechen War, which is actually an on again off again conflict that has been going on for over a hundred years. Yeltsin knew something about Putin’s efficiency and he was able to do so successfully in a few months. He became extremely popular and even though the next election was close, and the rest of the Yeltsin administration had become very unpopular, he won with over 50% in the first round for president. On Yeltsin’s part he realized that he had failed, and he saw in this young former mayor of St Petersburg and honest man who love Russia and would help to bring Reformation. Even the newly elected George W. Bush was very impressed with Putin when he first met, and he believed that he was a good Christian man.

From the very beginning, I saw a lot of Christian ministries demonize Putin because he had been a low-level colonel in the KGB in East Germany prior to 1991. They ignored his career as an economist and as the mayor of St Petersburg who had the reputation of being an honest man who was one of the few who refused to take a bribe.

Putin had written a doctoral dissertation on reforming the industry of Russia. His proposal would make it illegal for foreign companies to own more than 49% of any industry. He called for the nationalization of the major industries to get them out of the hands of the corrupt thugs who rose from being mafia underground lords to billionaire oligarchs in a few months after the Soviet Union dissolved.

When he became president, he immediately put that plan into effect, and called a meeting of all the major oligarchs saying that they would either support Russia and the Russian people, meaning to support Putin’s plan, or they could leave. About 90% of them left, and some were killed. Of course that’s brutal, but it was effective.

Russia then began in eight-year climb of their GDP and were actually the fastest growing economy of any nation in the world during Putin’s first two terms. When his term limit was almost up, the United States decided to stoke a conflict in Georgia. Under again another mafia drug lord named Mikheil Saakashvili. Under a previous administration Russia had been invited to help stop ethnic violence and to northern regions of Georgia populated by non Georgians. But in 2008, violence broke out again, in part stoked by the CIA and Russia invaded. The battle was over within two weeks and there were minimal casualties.

This is when the entire West to turned against Putin. It was framed as the Russian aggression against Georgia.

Then when Putin left office, Hillary Clinton tried to bribe their foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to turn the clock back to the Yeltsin years. She presented him with a great “reset” button, but her staff mistakenly put the word “overload” on it instead of reset. It was such a great irony in history that she let her mask fall at that moment, and the Medvedev administration was not buying it.

Prior to that the US helped fund an anti-Russian peaceful revolution in Kiev in 2004, and then again a violent one in 2014. That led to the Crimean secession, the Donbas War, and then the current war in 2022.

The point all this is that Russia has a lot of problems, it still has a lot of corruption, but it’s getting better under Putin. Further our gunboat diplomacy has failed or backfired every time we’ve tried it in the past 80 years. In the future, the West should also work with Russia for free trade agreements that will benefit both sides. The best way to ensure that there is freedom in a country is to build a large middle class, Russia actually has a middle class for the first time in history under Putin. It never has had more than a few percentage of people out of poverty in its entire history until very recently.

In every country in Latin America, Africa, Asia and other places where the middle class is grown, more people have joined what missionaries call third wave churches. These are churches that celebrate the gifts of the Holy Spirit and train the people to become successful and wealthy, have strong families, good health habits and so on.

This is the reason why Putin is immensely popular. The health and wealth of the nation has gotten better, not worse. We are not going to overthrow him and replace him with a Liberal president. The Russian people are actually very socially conservative, but they have a long history of government control of industry on the higher level, and an almost libertarian freedom for small farms and small businesses with very few regulations on the lower level. So the common people believe that Russia is a free nation. They can’t stand on the street corner with a bullhorn and call for the removal of Putin or denounce the government or the war, but other than that people are free to do what they need to do to make a better life.

The way I explain it is like this, in the West freedom is all about individual liberties, the right of free expression and so on. In the east, freedom is internal. Freedom is the liberty to become the person you’re destined to be.

The problem with American Christians is that we ought to be the ones that understand this the best, because we have in our Bibles the teaching that where the spirit of the Lord is there is liberty.

We are content to live in a nation with sexual perversion and all kinds of freedom of expression that is offensive to God, but when anyone defends Russia, the first thing you always hear is that “Well they’re not free there!” Right, but unlike the USA, they’re free to not have homosexual propaganda, and the promotion of all kinds of woke ideology that is destructive to traditional culture and families.

American Christians need to get through their heads is that Russia is a different culture, and they’re never going to be exactly like us. We should respect that. The world is not a unipolar globalist system run by the United States as the policeman of the world. Or it should not be. The unipolar moment in 1991 was an illusion. Actually what happened was the world began the shift toward a multipolar system with rising economies and many cultures returning to their ancient roots after being dominated by either communism, or liberalism.

Christians should celebrate that, and what we should be doing instead of sending Benny Hinn and the Power Team to Russia, is sending people like Joseph who was sent to Egypt to save the world from famine. This Joseph Company can work with the government and the industry there to rebuild. We should do it in a way that is mutually beneficial to us with Russia as a trade partner or at least a friendly competitor. And that will bring some of the civil freedoms that they’re lacking. As soon as businessmen get a stake in the economy, they’re going to push for more personal liberty.

We can also do the same thing in Iran, China, North Korea, etc. We are completely happy to work with communist countries like Vietnam (which is a one-party socialist republic) when it is advantageous to us and when we can control them to an extent, but once the nation is too big or too powerful it frightens us and we need to portray them as a dictatorship that is part of an “axis of evil.”

The defeat of NATO in Ukraine ought to be a wake up call to Christians to experience a paradigm shift in our thinking about missions and our role as salt light in the nations.

This is all I’ll say about Ukraine — it’s not really a war about Ukraine. It’s a small part of a bigger war. Most importantly it’s a war within our minds and a war of worldviews.