First of all, I want to give you a little background concerning ourselves and the time we’ve spent in this part of the world.

We have lived in Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe for nearly 30 years, 18 of those in Ukraine. We lived behind the “Iron Curtain” for 4 years and made trips to the Soviet Union during that time, as well as living in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Bulgaria. We spent 7 years in Russia.

So, if any of that makes a difference, here is our take on what’s happening:

Putin is an absolute monster! Period!

Any defense of his actions is extremely offensive to us, our friends, and the people of Ukraine.

Timothy Snyder, a leading authority on Central European history and the Holocaust, says Putin’s claim about “de-Nazification” is “grotesque” because he’s trying to justify invading a democratic country — led by a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust — by claiming he’s there to fight Nazis.

Snyder calls Putin’s justification a variation of Hitler’s Big Lie — a Nazi propaganda technique that insists that if a political leader repeats a colossal untruth enough, people will eventually believe it.

“Adolf Hitler had some public relations advice: Tell a lie so big that people will not believe that you would ever try to deceive them on such a grand scale,” Snyder wrote in an essay titled, “Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine.”

By telling lies that Ukraine is run by Nazis bent on genocide, Putin is making a mockery of people who survived the Holocaust, says Snyder, author of “On Tyranny.”

Synder wrote a best seller book on the atrocities committed by the Germans and the Soviets in Ukraine’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. I read the book as well as meeting Mr. Synder.

I’m posting a chart (the one at the top of this article) sent to me by one of our Bible students who attended our classes for many years before his job took him to the United Arab Emirates. He is a Frenchman and has many fond memories of the years that he spent in Ukraine. I thought his chart would be helpful for you to understand the depth of pain that Russia has inflicted on Ukraine over the years and why the Ukrainians will fight to the death before allowing Russia to dominate them again.

Please look it over carefully, as the numbers are staggering.

So that’s my take on the situation. Russia is destroying an innocent country before our very eyes, committing gross atrocities by bombing whole towns into rubble, and killing innocent people and children.

I could go on and on about this subject, but suffice it to say that there is absolutely no justification for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and I believe he should be tried for war crimes and Russia be made to pay for all the damage they’ve caused in Ukraine and withdraw all their troops for Ukraine, including Donbas and the Crimea.

I wanted to comment on what you wrote about your friend (who lives in Japan) not seeing eye-to-eye on the point of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I beg to disagree with your friend, James. There is no such thing as surrendering to Putin. Surrendering would have meant that Zelensky would have been killed along with all members of his government and a puppet regime would have been installed in his place.

I’m not sure if your friend is a student of history or not, but if he is, let me remind him of the brutality of the Soviet Army. Wherever the Soviet Army captured territory one of the first orders of business was the raping of all the women in those areas. Berlin in particular was subjected to mass rape, but so weren’t Poland, Romania, and Hungary. I’ve personally talked to people from those countries and they told me of how their grandparents hid in fear of the Russians.

I know the answer may be that rape is just a by-product of war, but if you do a little research about the subject, you’ll see that the Russians’ conducted this on a massive scale.

Today’s Russians invading Ukraine are cut from the same cloth, so to speak, in this regard.

I believe we can get too lost in conspiratorial thinking to the point that we see someone as evil as Putin as somehow standing up against the globalists.

There are many “Monday morning quarterbacks” out there, dissecting what the Ukrainians should have done, but how many of them were there? How many of them have lived in fear of what the Russians are capable of? Have they ever been subjected to mass starvation like Ukraine experienced in the 1932-33 famine, where more than 4 million of their countrymen died at the hands of their Soviet masters?

It’s very easy to say they just should have given in to the Russian, but do those who make those judgements know the depth of Ukraine’s feelings on the matter. At the time of the invasion, more than 80% of the Ukrainian population didn’t want to be a part of Russia or have anything to do with them. Now, since the war, those numbers have approached nearly 100%.

To say that this was all Zelensky’s doing is to discount the overwhelming sentiments of the Ukrainian population.

Let me point out that I was there, not only in Russia for seven years, but in Ukraine for 18. It would be like saying that I know better the picture on the ground in South Africa or anywhere else for that matter, than someone who has lived for an extended period of time in that country.

Putin is a liar and is being nurtured by his father, the father of lies.

Right up till the very invasion, Putin denied he was going to invade Ukraine. He denied that Russian troops were in Crimea in 2014, he denied that Russia was assisting the, so-called, separatists in the Donbas region, he denied that a Russian surface-to-air missile shot down the Malaysian plane, the Russians denied that they had participated in state run doping of their athletes in the Olympics, they denied that they have poisoned former agents abroad, and the list goes on-and-on.

To answer Biblically the question about whether or not Ukrainians should be fighting for their freedom, let’s look at the book of wisdom, Ecclesiastes, to hear what Solomon said.

ECC.3:1 To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven:
ECC.3:2 A time to be born, And a time to die; A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted;
ECC.3:3 A time to kill, And a time to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up;
ECC.3:4 A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance;
ECC.3:5 A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
ECC.3:6 A time to gain, And a time to lose; A time to keep, And a time to throw away;
ECC.3:7 A time to tear, And a time to sew; A time to keep silence, And a time to speak;
ECC.3:8 A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace.

Throughout the Bible, we have wars happening and the people of God fighting the forces of evil.

David chose to fight Goliath and won. He didn’t surrender to him. The little David, Ukraine, is fighting the mighty Goliath, Russia, and miraculously is winning. From all I can see, God is fighting with them.

When Jeremiah warned the Jews to “take upon them the yoke of Babylon”, it was because God brought the Babylonians as His instrument of punishment to punish the Jewish people for their turning away from God and being joined to idols and other gods.

Ukraine, in contrast, is the most Christian country in Europe, with over 80% of their people professing faith in God.

I don’t believe the Russian invasion is from God, but from the Devil. If that is the case, then Ukraine should fight.

I get worked up about this subject because it is dear to my heart. Putin has wrecked the lives of so many people. How can that be right?

I will leave this subject for now, but there is much more I could write about it.