Escaping Putin's War

In 1994 or 1995, the pastor of my church (who also happened to be my dad) held a missions conference where he invited several missionaries in to give presentations. The goal was to recruit missionaries to go to various places around the world and spread the Gospel. It was a resounding success because, by the end of it, two new missionaries had indeed been recruited.

They were my parents. When they joined Mission to the World, MTW asked them where they would like to serve, and without hesitation they said, “Siberia would be nice.” You see, my dad grew up in Alaska, and my mom met him there when they were both in college, so the cold temperatures weren't a deterrent to them. Rather, it was an invitation.

At the time, MTW responded, “We don't have anything in Siberia, or Russia as a whole, at the moment. But since you like cold temperatures, we have an opening in the high mountains of Ecuador. Would you be interested in that?” My parents agreed and began to train for that. If I remember correctly, it was when they were en route to language school that someone caught them and said, “I heard you wanted to go to Siberia. Would Ukraine be close enough?” and immediately my parents accepted that ministry instead.

And so it was that in April of 1996, while I was finishing up my senior year of high school, I was abandoned for several weeks, having to fend for myself against the wilds of civilization, making myself get up and attend high school even though ditching would have been more fun, while my parents took their first trip to Ukraine. And then, a couple of years later (1998—who said high school math taught me nothing?), my parents cured empty nest syndrome by boarding a plane which would take them to Europe, with their final destination being a little known city called Kherson.

I was in college at the time, and I remember getting an email from my dad one day where he posed an ethics question. Quite different from the philosophy classes which were teaching us about the trolley problem, this was a legitimate issue that my dad had to contend with in Ukraine. The scenario posed went something like this (I don't remember the exact values involved, so will be making them up, but they're not actually important to the point of the scenario).

To ride the bus costs 50 kopeks. Normally, you get on and put the coins in a little machine up at the front of the bus, and then you take you seat. But today, when you get on, the bus driver puts his hand over the slot and says, “The machine is out of order. But you can just give me 30 kopeks and I'll let you on right now.”

Now it's plain to see that the machine is working perfectly fine, and you know from what the Bible teaches that you should pay to the lawful authorities what is lawfully theirs. But you also know that the bus company in Ukraine in 1998 is run by a former KGB agent who today is in charge of the local branch of the Russian Mafia. If you put money in the bus, you will be paying the Mafia, not the government of Ukraine.

To make matters even worse, you know that when the bus driver completes his route, the enforcers are going to be shaking him down, because everyone knows that the bus drivers, who aren't getting paid very well by the Mafia, are taking a cut from the money that “should be” going to them. So if you don't pay the bus driver, he will have even less money left after the shakedown.

Hence the ethical question. Who do you pay in that scenario?

This was the reality of Ukraine at the time. The government there was extremely corrupt (there is a reason that while Estonia and Latvia were added to NATO in 2004, Ukraine was not). Most of the politicians in Ukraine had ties to the KGB, and with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, these men had become very powerful in the criminal underbelly of the former Soviet states.

But it is interesting to note the role that Ukraine played in the breakup of the Soviet Union. You see, in July of 1990, Ukraine adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine. In August, 1991, a coup was attempted in the USSR to remove Gorbachev, and after it failed Ukraine adopted the Act of Independence. On December 1 that same year, they voted to dissolve the Soviet Union and replace it with the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and on December 26, the USSR accepted that. But Ukraine never ratified the decree that created the CIS, and as such was never a member of it.

In other words, Ukraine was very keen on keeping their independence and separating from Russia. The Russians were not so keen at letting Ukraine go, however. But given the realities of the breakup of the Soviet Union, they had no power to do anything about it. This was the landscape into which my parents first entered Ukraine.

Then something happened which, while no one at the time could possibly know it, would have a major impact. See, the same year my parents got to Ukraine, a little heard of former KGB agent was director of the Federal Security Service (abbreviated as FSB) in Russia. On March 9, 1999, this man became the Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, and then just a couple of months later, on August 9, 1999, he became Prime Minister of Russia. His name was Vladimir Putin.

Putin wanted more power, however, and there was one office higher than the Prime Minister: that of President of Russia. Currently, it was occupied by Boris Yeltsin. At the time, Yeltsin's health was fading and there was a power struggle over who would take charge of Russia when Yeltsin's time was up.

In September, just a month after Putin became Prime Minister, a series of bombs went off several different cities in Russia. By the end, more than 300 people were killed, more than a thousand injured. The first bomb had gone off on September 4 in the town of Buynaksk. The second and third, both in Moscow, on September 9 and 13 respectively. Strangely, however, that same day, Gennadiy Seleznyov announced in the Duma that another bombing had just happened in Volgodonsk.

That bombing did occur. It just happened to occur on September 16, three days after Seleznyov said it had already occurred. As if suspicions weren't already inflamed, on September 24, in the town of Ryazan, police found and defused a bomb that had been discovered in an apartment block there. Putin praised the vigilance of the police, all the while ignoring the fact that those who had planted the devices had been arrested by the local police already.

They were FSB agents. You know, the same FSB that Putin had been in charge of since July, 1998.

But that was no big deal. Those charges were dropped because it was “just a test” to see if the people were vigilant after the previous attacks. The Russian courts ruled that the other bombings had been organized by Achemez Gochiyaev, on orders of Ibn Al-Khattab and Abu Omar al-Saif. Chechnya successfully blamed, Russia launched into the Second Chechen War. And during the course of the war, Vladimir Putin's esteem in the Russian government grew. He was seen as a law-and-order man, and the popularity of attacking Chechnya after they had bombed those innocent apartment blocks meant that when Yeltsin suddenly and unexpectedly resigned on December 31, 1999, Putin became the acting President of the Russian Federation. When the official vote was held on March 26, 2000, Putin won with 53% of the vote.

That same year, a former officer in the FSB fled to the United Kingdom, where he was granted amnesty. This man, Alexander Litvinenko, accused Putin of involvement in the apartment bombings in Russia and the 1999 Armenian parliament shooting, as well as several later terrorist attacks that occurred after he had already fled to the United Kingdom. Russia dismissed it as bitter claims from someone with an agenda seeking to gain influence in the West, but Litvinenko began to publish books on the subject and was spreading the information wide and far.

In the meantime, Ukraine was becoming divided between the hardliners, corrupt politicians, former KGB agents, and the people who had yearned for independence and wanted to turn to the West for help. There were two presidential candidates in 2004, both of them named Viktor. The first was Viktor Yanukovych, a man supported by Putin mainly because he was a puppet for Putin and would enact Russia's desires in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Viktor Yushchenko ran against him as someone who wanted stronger ties to Europe and the West as a whole.

Yanukovych, then prime minister of Ukraine, was declared the winner of the presidential elections. But the Supreme Court of Ukraine ruled that the elections had been rigged. There was a great public outcry which would become known as the Orange Revolution.

And in the middle of it, Yushchenko (the opposition leader) suddenly became extremely ill, to the point of near death. Why the sudden illness? Multiple independent doctors ran tests and determined the cause was dioxin poisoning.

Yushchenko immediately declared that the poison had come from Russia on orders of Putin. There was already evidence that Russia had been involved in the attempted rigging of the election, and with Litvinenko pointing out the other crimes of Putin, an assassination attempt on the opposition leader was not out of the question. By the end of the Orange Revolution, Yushchenko was in power and Putin's ploy to manipulate the country had failed.

The accusations that Putin was behind the dioxin poisoning attempt of Yushchenko gained even more credence on November 1, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko himself suddenly fell ill. It was determined that he had been poisoned with polonium in his tea by two Russian FSB agents. On November 22, Litvinenko succumbed. By January, 2016, British authorities concluded their investigation by stating that Andrey Lugovoy and Dmitry Kovtun were responsible for the murder of Litvinenkio, and that there was a “strong probability” that they were acting under orders of the FSB, with approval by Putin himself.

But back to Ukraine. After Yushchenko became president, the 2008 financial crisis that affected the US also hit Ukraine. There had also been disputes with Russia regarding gas production and theft from the pipeline. But at the same time, Russia was concerned with the country of Georgia, because in 2008 they invaded that country by staging rebels in two breakaway provinces and then entering to “liberate” them. This tactic should seem quite familiar to those paying attention today.

After the invasion of Georgia, Yanukovych—the original president who had been ousted during the Orange Revolution—became president of Ukraine in 2010 with 48% of the vote. He was still a puppet of Putin and immediately began to strengthen ties back with Moscow, against the will of the majority of Ukrainian citizens.

It is in the midst of this historical context that some personal tragedy struck. It was December 31, 2012, and my parents were walking through Kherson when my mom fell. She twisted her leg, breaking the bone and severing her femoral artery. My dad applied a tourniquet and they rushed her to the hospital, but in the early hours of January 1, 2013, my mother passed away, the first American to ever die in the city of Kherson, Ukraine.

The local government was embarrassed that an American had passed away in their city, but given the nature of her injuries, if it had happened in the US the result would have likely been the same. My dad returned to the US with my mother's body and we buried her near where my grandparents lived, but soon after my dad returned to Ukraine to continue his missionary work. His heart was still with Ukraine.

Meanwhile, in Kyiv, Yanukovych continued to plot with Putin. Having already ousted him once before, the Ukrainian people began to protest against his corruption a second time. By the end of that year, the Euromaidan protests began (in November) specifically because Yanukovych backed out of an agreement with the EU so he could get closer ties with Russia. The violence escalated, prompting new anti-protest laws enacted on January 16, 2014. This only caused a stronger reaction, with protesters taking over several buildings in the center of Kyiv, including the Justice Ministry building.

Many people today point out that the protesters had support from the West. Yet oddly, none of these people ever mention the fact that it was the same president of Ukraine who Putin had attempted to rig the election for before, and who's opponent had been poisoned, and who had no legitimate business being in Ukraine at all, who the Ukrainians were protesting.

On February 18, police and army opened fire on the protesters. It was rumored that much of the military was coming from Russia since most Ukrainians were on the side of the protesters, against Yanukovych, although I'm not sure that supposition has ever been definitively proven. Needless to say, after three days of violence, 98 dead, nearly fifteen thousand injured, and about a hundred protesters simply “missing”, Yanukovych agreed to an early election. The Ukrainian Parliament nevertheless voted to remove him immediately. On February 22, Yanukovych fled Ukraine via Russian helicopter in the middle of the night.

And on February 23, Putin began preparation to annex Crimea.

Just four days later, on February 27, masked men wearing unmarked uniforms seized the parliament building, airports, and several other buildings in Crimea. It was obvious to all that these were Russian special forces. On March 1, the Russian Parliament granted Putin power to intervene in Crimea militarily, and he pushed his troops in, attacking Ukrainians there and in two provinces in the eastern part of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk. Then, under gunpoint, Putin held “elections” on March 16 in Crimea—elections which were boycotted by the Ukrainians, many of whom had been forced to flee, and in which 97% of those left to vote voted to join Russia.

To put that in perspective for American readers, this election had all the validity of a Mexican cartel infiltrating El Paso, Texas and taking over the governmental buildings and transportation hubs there. Then, having the army of Mexico declare that they are entering into El Paso to “protect” the Hispanic citizens from the racist attacks of the US Government against them. After which, when the army is fully in control of the city and having evicted as many pro-American citizens as they could, they hold an “election” wherein 97% of people vote for joining Mexico, so they declare that El Paso now belongs to Mexico. That is essentially the tactic that Putin used in Crimea.

The other thing that people in the west don't realize is that the war between Russia and Ukraine never stopped. Russia left troops in Donetsk and Luhansk and constantly supplied weapons to the rebels, many of whom were Russian militants illegally crossing into Ukraine specifically to fight there. Putin left these individuals in place precisely so that he could always use the violence in Ukraine as justification for attacking in the future, violence that he initiated and violence that he continued to stoke, constantly breaking any cease fire agreements.

Between 2014 and 2022, more than 14,000 people were killed in Donbas, with at least 5,000 of those being Ukrainian soldiers. This is more people killed than all coalition deaths in the entire Iraq war. But in the West, we pretend that the war ended in 2014 and that Russia “withdrew”.

During the immediate occupation, my dad returned to the States. He had told me that he wasn't afraid of getting killed in conflict, but he was concerned that if it escalated, he would have difficulty getting medication delivered. Furthermore, Kherson was less than a hundred miles from where the Russian troops had stopped in Crimea, so if supply lines were cut it would most likely be there.

Back in the States, my dad later remarried and I know he considered returning to being a pastor. But his heart was still with Ukraine, and after a lot of prayerful consideration, he and my step-mother returned to Ukraine, this time to the city of Kyiv, the capital. And that's where they would remain up to just a few weeks ago.

My parents had gone to visit Lviv by the time the invasion began. They'd had tickets to fly out of Ukraine on March 1, but as soon as Putin attacked the airspace was closed. At that point, they began to look for other ways out of the country. I won't give too many details here, in part because I'm not 100% sure of all of them yet, and in part because I don't want to potentially say anything that Russia might use in the future to hinder further attempts by Ukrainians to get out. But the long story short, after about a week or so, my parents made it to Romania, and then to Poland. As I write this, they have gotten through airport security to fly back to the United States.

They are safe. Their friends they left behind...are not.

What is interesting to a lot of western observers without much knowledge of Ukraine is just how strong the resistance against Putin has been. In part this is almost surely because Putin underestimated the amount of animosity Ukrainians hold toward Russians in general. Ukrainians still remember the Holodomor, a famine engineered by Stalin costing the lives of 3.5 million Ukrainians, well before Hitler ever started killing anyone in Germany. But more than that, Ukrainians had already been trying to get stronger ties with the West for 20 years, with Putin trying to keep them back the entire time.

But I think when you look at the history there's another pretty obvious reason why Putin overestimated his troops. In 2014, when he took over Crimea, he was able to do so with relative ease. Putin didn't count on the fact that Ukrainians have been training for eight years since then, with the Bear on their border this entire time. And probably most importantly, Putin invaded just after his stooge, Yanukovych, had fled Ukraine. This meant two things in 2014. 1) The new Ukrainian government was still trying to get everything under control after the old pro-Russian regime had just gotten kicked out; and 2) Yanukovych would have given all the state secrets he knew about locations of the military and their levels of training, equipment, and tactics to Putin already. Putin had neither of those advantages in 2022, and as a result, has almost universally been seen to under-perform what he had expected so far.

Now, I do want to address several misconceptions out there today. I have many conservative friends who are saying, “The US needs to stay out of this war completely.” I agree that we shouldn't have troops in combat with Russia, but the reasons given by these conservatives show a distinct lack of understanding of what's going on. I'm not just picking on conservatives, because the contrary is also true: the reason that leftists are supporting Ukraine are out of ignorance too.

The first argument I heard was that we shouldn't support Ukraine because Ukraine tried to meddle in the 2016 election. This is a variation of the Russian interference claim that liberals state, and in fact leads to the poor reasoning as to why liberals support Ukraine (i.e, Putin supports Trump, therefore Putin is bad). But blaming the government of Ukraine now overlooks the fact that Zelenskyy, the current president of Ukraine, wasn't even elected until 2019. His party ran in opposition to the party in power in 2016, and in fact he has done nothing to be hostile toward any conservatives, even going so far as to publicly state that he didn't feel pressured by Trump in the slightest when the media pretended Trump was going to withhold aid from Ukraine unless Ukraine investigated Burisma and Hunter Biden's role in it. So if you are a conservative and that is your reason for not supporting Ukraine, it is a very bad reason.

Likewise, for liberals who are anti-Putin simply because they have been thinking that Trump is pro-Putin for the last four years, they do not have a valid reason to be anti-Putin in the slightest. But that aside, it does serve as one of the examples of accidentally being correct for the wrong reasons. Still, it does make for some strange conversations when I have heard people say, “Every person who's wrong on all the issues I care about is opposed to Putin. The enemy of my enemy....”

Hopefully, you can see from the historical context I've provided, that in this case the enemy of Ukraine is also the enemy of the West, and that includes conservatives as much as liberals.

The second argument I've heard recently is that most Ukrainians want to be part of Russia anyway, and it's just the government that is opposed to Russia. After all, they had elections in Crimea, so really Russia's claims on Crimea are sound. They have a valid reason to take over that land.

Of course, I've already illustrated the problem with the so-called “election” for the annexation of Crimea. But on top of that, it is quite clear that most Ukrainians definitely do NOT want to be part of Russia, and Putin's actions against Ukraine since 2004 have only solidified that view all the more. Again, as stated earlier, Ukraine is largely the impetus by which the USSR broke up in the first place, and you can look at how hard they are fighting now against overwhelming odds as proof of how much they do not want to be controlled by Moscow. Furthermore, the wickedness of Putin cannot be overstated. This man lies, manipulates, cheats, murders, and steals. Everyone knows this, yet still people listen to his propaganda and come away thinking he's made valid points about Russia's ownership of Crimea. Historically, Kyiv existed for centuries before Moscow was even formed. The Ukrainians certainly have more of a historical right to govern Moscow than Moscow has to take over Crimea.

Finally, I've heard the extreme claim that the war is really just fake news, that “it's the first war without any bodies.” The sad reality is that there are plenty of bodies in this war, and there is plenty of video of it out there. The media isn't showing you it, but it definitely exists, as I have seen it with my own eyes. This brings up a strange paradox in our high tech world. For the first time ever, two huge armies are engaged in combat where every single soldier has the ability to have a cell phone with a camera, to show everything that is happening. Security cameras are all over the place in every city. Livestreams are going 24/7 showing downtown Kyiv and other cities under siege right now.

But on the other side of the coin are the regulations of social media platforms. If you show video of any of the bodies, you will be banned from social media. And the news won't show it either. So simultaneously we have the most available means of showing what war is actually like while we have only the most sanitized versions of it being shown to anyone.

I'm not arguing that it's a bad thing that social media won't permit the bodies to be shown. The Lord knows there are enough evil people out there who are gore voyeurs that it would be very bad for that to be so public, and of course there are so many children who use the platforms who would be scarred for life if they saw what is depicted. I don't necessarily think that should change. But I do think adults have a responsibility to understand what is actually going on, because if you intentionally stick your head in the sand about the realities of who is being killed and how they are dying, you will not be informed enough to have any useful input into how our own country should respond to it.

Bringing up the social media videos does bring up one final aspect of these events. I've seen the videos of Russian troops marching through the streets of Kherson. And I would be lying if I said it didn't anger me. My mother's literal blood is still in that city, even though her body was returned to the US for burial. To see Russian soldiers marching over that land, polluting that city by blowing up civilian buildings, killing them by the dozens, and arresting hundreds more... All of it simultaneously angers and saddens me.

But as I've said, I have also seen the videos of column after column of destroyed Russian convoys, including those videos they don't show on the news. And my heart also begins to ache because I know several people currently in Russia. Most are teachers, one of whom has only foreign students and who is now completely bankrupt and unemployed because she has no job in Russia itself, just her online teaching role. The sanctions are definitely hurting the Russian people, and I fear that instead of causing them to revolt against Putin, as the West is hoping, that it will probably only result in the average Russian citizen hating America and Europe all the more. Putin's propaganda is the only choice for news in Russia, and if his propaganda can sway those who are outside Russia, how persuasive must it be in Moscow itself?

Yes, the suffering of Russian citizens is nowhere near what the Ukrainians are going through, but to pretend it's not happening is no more just than ignoring what is going on in Ukraine either. In military operations, we require our soldiers to use precision weapons to minimize “collateral damage” and the deaths of civilians. The sanctions that we have imposed are the economic equivalent of carpet bombing Dresden. The rich and powerful Russian elite will suffer the least, while the average ordinary citizens will suffer the most.

But is there an alternative that would do anything better for Ukraine? I don't know of any. Often in war there are no good choices available, and you know that the innocent are going to suffer either way.

But one thing is clear. No matter how bleak the outlook for Ukraine, Ukraine actually has the advantage in this war. You see, for Putin to win now, he must pacify the entire country of Ukraine. Anything less and he cannot achieve any of his goals. He cannot extricate from this war with a so-called “white peace”, where no sides give up anything and a return to the status quo happens. Nor can he achieve his goals of getting Ukraine to give up parts of her land to Russia, including Crimea, by exiting. He certainly will not be able to install another puppet government without leaving behind a strong enough military force to keep the average citizen from simply assassinating the puppet. So his only option for a win is to completely occupy the entire country, root out all opposition, kill all opponents, and dictate with an iron fist. Something that is going to get back to Russians who still, for the most part, do look at Ukrainians as family.

On the other hand, Ukraine only needs Putin removed from power. Whether it's because he has a heart attack, someone feeds him some of his own polonium, or his generals decide enough with the bloodshed and simply arrest him, the instant Putin is removed from power, this war is done. It has very little support in Russia. Every single citizen I've spoken with was against the war. Granted that is anecdotal, but the cost in casualties and monetary loss in Russian equipment is piling up.

Russia miscalculated and is running through a meat grinder at the moment. The Russian people have to decide how they can convince Putin to end this. There are only a limited number of options remaining, and none of them show a Russian victory at this point, even if they tried to claim one. In fact, I'm reminded of a quote from the end of the movie, We Were Soldiers:

“And the end will be the same, except for the numbers who will die before we get there.”

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