THE WAR IN UKRAINE

The ongoing war in Ukraine is a conflict between two nations with a total population of 180 million. The fighting taking place should serve as a warning to all Christians of what is coming in the future when the Antichrist establishes the World Federation and starts persecuting born again believers.

President Vladimir Putin temporarily holds absolute power over the Russian people. He wants to bring Ukraine back into the fold but did not consult his people or the Ukrainians before arbitrarily making the decision. It was a subjective move to invade his western neighbor and the cost in life continues to mount. The Russian military is known for its brutality, even against its own people. Many pre-tribulation Christians think they won’t have to face Satan’s wrath and this is why few pastors will discuss the subject since it is negative and tends to drive people away.

HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF

Peter II of Yugoslavia signed a military pact with Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler felt great because he had lined up Yugoslavia without a fight. Later when there was a coup and Peter II was ousted, the pact with Germany was cancelled, and Hitler mercilessly promised to crush Yugoslavia. On April 6, 1941, the Luftwaffe attacked the capital of Belgrade. The air attack lasted for 90 minutes as wave after wave of German bombers pulverized the city. Some 17,000 civilians died in the attack and fighter planes strafed those fleeing the city. When it was over, the city was totally destroyed. After the war was over in 1945, General Alexander Loehr, the man responsible for planning the attack against Belgrade was arrested and turned over to the Yugoslavian government. He was tried and hung on February 26, 1947 as a war criminal.

Hitler had no more legal right to attack Yugoslavia than Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. What overconfidence and conceit to think that he was going to “de-Nazify” the Ukraine of its ultra-nationalistic men who are MAGA in their mentality about the country.[1] On February 24, 2022, the Russian army invaded Ukraine and headed for its capital of Kiev.

TRUTH BEARER

Being a truth bearer is not a fun job. The Old Testament records the life of men called to be prophets and most of them did not win any popularity contests with the rulers and the common people. In fact, most of them were hated and some were killed for declaring the truth. I am going to bring out truth in this article that will undoubtably anger some people, but I would ask you to think critically before the personal invective rises up. Am I a liar or a truth teller? I am not popular in American churches because of my stance on sin. No one wants their dirty laundry exposed. But I would point out that if wrongdoing is suppressed, then I am just as guilty as the people committing the evil.

Jesus did not perform damage control when it came to the people of Israel. He hung them out to dry as His prophets and preachers recorded events – especially the bad – in the Old Testament. Jesus really liked King David because the Bible says that he was a man after God’s own heart. But David was also a sinner who used his office to commit adultery and murder. The Godhead did not shield the king; he was exposed to the whole world and for generations to come. It is three thousand years later and David is still being exposed for wrongfully taking Bathsheba and having Uriah killed in battle. People still read the account and pastors preach on the subject as a warning not to repeat this mistake. I am sure that David is embarrassed in heaven over his sins. While he was forgiven, his reputation has forever been tarnished.

God is a truth teller. He doesn’t care if offender is embarrassed or that someone is upset; He simply believes in letting the facts speak for themselves.

THE SITUATION IN THE WORLD

The American people are insulated from the turmoil that occurs in other nations. We enjoy many freedoms afforded by the Constitution, namely freedom of speech. The Declaration of Independence spells out our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In contrast, the Russian people have no concept of what it means to have freedom to speak since their lives are governed by their political rulers. The State controls the newspapers, television, radio, and even the internet. Travel was allowed, but domestic passports were needed to take a trip before the war with Ukraine, but now it is even more restricted.

I have previously chronicled how Russia began as a nation created by Swedish Vikings who settled along the Dnieper River north of Kiev in Ukraine.[2] The Vikings were led by Rurik who wielded absolute power over the men he commanded and the conquered people.

Descendants of Rurik expanded their territory to the point that it eventually compassed a large portion of what is Russia. The Vikings ruled Russia until 1547 when the first czar (king) became the absolute monarch of Russia. It goes with saying that none of the czars were elected by the people.

There were no free elections in Russia during the time of the Vikings as each ruler obtained control by force and exercised total power. Laws and regulations were created by the dictator and his advisors and there was no legal system wherein a person could file a grievance. This autocratic type of government would continue until Nicholas II was removed from power and executed by the communists in 1917.

When Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky became co-rulers of Russia, they changed the country’s name to the Soviet Union and turned it into a harsh totalitarian state where human rights were drastically reduced. Freedom of speech was suppressed and dissent was punished. No independent political activities were allowed. The state restricted citizens’ rights to own personal property and private corporations were banned in accordance with the Communist Manifesto. It is estimated that some 20 million Russians were arrested and murdered during the first ten years by the Communist leaders. This brutal form of governing would continue until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991.

BORIS YELTSIN

The West waged an economic war against the Soviet Union since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who increased the defense budget and the Soviets went broke trying to match it. Both nations employed extensive spy networks, and by 1988, it became clear to both governments that the Soviet Union was destitute and would break up into smaller national states that had been conquered by the communist overthrow beginning in 1917. Many of the Soviet leaders realized that they had to show willingness to abandon the Communist doctrine and embrace western values in order to survive and continue to live the good lifestyle.

Communist leaders contacted the CIA to line up with a post-Soviet Union under the leadership of the World Government. The Trilateral Commission (TLC) and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) were tasked with selecting and grooming new leaders for the former Soviet Union. Both of these organizations were located in the US, but run by the World Government. They formed a working group and Boris Yeltsin was selected to be the first president of the new Russian Federation. He was born in 1931 and worked himself up in the Communist party as a shrewd political operator. In 1976 he held the post as First Secretary of the Communist party’s Sverdlovsk Oblast.[3]

Yeltsin realized that the days of the Soviet Union were numbered, and in 1987, he was the first communist leader to resign from the Politburo.[4] In 1990 Yeltsin was elected chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet legislature. What people in the West did not realize was that a number of communist bosses and factory managers were waiting like vultures for the Soviet Union to dissolve. Every factory, mine, oilfield, etc. was owned by the Soviet state. There was no private ownership. Yeltsin was in contact with thousands of former managers and promised them lucrative positions if he became the leader of the future Russian federation. This is how the oligarchs came into being; they were communist bosses who robbed the people and became billionaires.

YELTSIN VISITED AMERICA

Yeltsin was invited to come to the United States in 1989 as a “private citizen” two years before the Soviet Union’s collapse. The world government concealed his visit by having the obscure Esalen Institute issue the invitation.[5] During his eight days visit to America, Yeltsin met with officials from the TLC and the CFR. He also had private meetings with David Rockefeller in New York and met with two senators in Washington D.C. He was scheduled to speak in eight cities at the rate of $25k per speech. The lapdog of the world government masquerading as the mainstream media greatly publicized the event when Yeltsin visited a supermarket in Texas; he was completely awestruck that stores could have so much merchandise and that common people could afford to shop. Yeltsin was instructed to return home and dismantle the teetering 69-year-old Soviet experiment that had ruined the lives of so many.

END OF THE SOVIET ERA

Yeltsin oversaw the dissolvement of the Soviet Union and the removal of its General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1991. Elections were held for the first time in the history of Russia and surprise, surprise, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the newly formed Russian Federation. He was re-elected to a second term in 1996 and served as president until his resignation in 1999. The corruption of his government forced his removal and Vladimir Putin became the next acting president. No one was astounded when Putin won the presidential election some four months later.[6] Ukraine voted for independence early in December of 1991, and a week later Boris Yeltsin met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarus President Stanislav Shushkevich in Belarus where they collectively declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed.

VLADIMIR PUTIN

Vladimir Putin was a low-level KGB officer who rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel. from 1985-1990. He was stationed in Dresden, East Germany under the cover that he was a translator for the embassy in East Berlin. When East Germany was reunited with West Germany in 1990, Putin’s position was terminated and he returned to St. Petersburg.

Putin was not involved in the plunder of the wealth from the Soviet Union. Putin resigned from the KGB in 1991, and for the next six years, he worked for the city government of Saint Petersburg. He was charged with misconduct and bribery, but never was brought to trial.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and was appointed deputy chief of the Presidential Property Management Department. In 1997 Yeltsin appointed Putin deputy chief of the Presidential Staff. In 1997 Putin was promoted to First Class Active State Councilor of the Russian Federation. In 1998 Putin was appointed director of the Federal Security Service (FSB). It is ironic that Putin resigned from the KGB only to become the head of the FSB seven years later. A new name, but the players were still the same.

On August 9, 1999 Putin was appointed as one of three first deputy prime ministers and later the same day he was appointed acting prime minister of the Russian Federation. Yeltsin announced that he intended for Putin to succeed him as president of the Russian Federation.

Yeltsin at this time was being accused of corruption and there were calls for his indictment. He was 68 years old and not in good health due to heavy drinking. Yeltsin copied what President Richard Nixon did in 1974 when Gerald Ford succeeded him become the next president. Yeltsin knew that when Putin became acting president in late 1999, his first act was pardoning his drunken predecessor, who would quietly live until 2007.

THE REIGN OF PUTIN

Vladimir Putin started to campaign for the presidency while serving as acting president. The election was held in May of 2000, and to the surprise of no one, Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation. He was re-elected in 2004 and served until 2008. The Russian constitution imposed term limits and Dimitry Medvedev served as president from 2008 to 2012 during which Putin was the prime minister. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to know who was really in charge of the government during this time.

While there were term limits, it didn’t outright ban Putin from assuming the presidency again in 2012 after the hiatus. The election was marred with fraud and there were large protests by the Russian people. He ran again in 2018 and that term ended in 2022. During the fourth term, he manipulated the Duma (congress) into changing the constitution, allowing him to seek two more terms, effectively extending his power until 2026.

The 1993 constitution makes it clear that Russia is a federative, law-based state with a republican form of government, but Putin is governing the country like it is his personal fiefdom. During his years in power, he has eliminated a number of people that opposed him with no regard for life, having changed the nation into a gangster state.

Putin has returned Russia to the way it was during the time of the Soviet Union. He controls television, radio and print media. The prisons overflow with men and women who dare to protest the “special operation” of clearing out the Nazis in Ukraine; it is now a crime to say there is a war going on in Ukraine. It does not bother Putin in the slightest that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine is Jewish and that the Nazis were driven out in 1945. Putin equates the ultra-nationalistic men of Ukraine with Nazism, but they are not national socialists, but capitalists that want a free market.

THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE

Russia is a unique country due to its invasion of other nations and subsequent annexations. It contains 190 different ethnic groups, each with their own language and culture. The population was 147.1 million in 2021, with 81% being ethnic Russians. The largest groups are Tatars, Chechens, Bashkirs, Chuvash, Armenians, Ukrainians, Dargins and Kazakhs.

As of 2020, life expectancy for males was 66.49 years and 76.43 years for females. Compare that with the American life expectancy of men at 73.2 years and women at 79.1 years in 2021.

A 2012 religious survey saw the Russian Orthodox Church lead with 41.1%; Baptists, Pentecostals and other evangelicals making up 6.3%, Muslims consisting of 6.5%, Atheists at 13%, and religious people not affiliated with any organized religion at 25.6%. In examining these numbers, we can see that the number of born-again believers is meager and that the vast majority of the population are citizens in the kingdom of Satan and therefore possessed by demons.

The ungodly communist indoctrination was grilled into children. Many accepted the Marxist belief that there is no God. Charles Darwin’s ludicrous theory of evolution also snared the masses. There was little thought of life after death. Children were not introduced to the Bible and they certainly did not hear any teaching from Jesus. Communism was the only true religion and the State was supreme. People were born to serve the State. The Russian public schools today are just as secular as their counterparts in the United States.

Boris Yeltsin was raised as a communist and that is what he knew. He became a ruthless communist politician, lied for gain, and only cared for himself. His life was centered on corruption, sexual immorality, and the consumption of alcohol. Is Vladimir Putin any different? He was raised and trained by the State to be immoral and have no regard for human life. Both men were the servants of the Devil; he is their spiritual father, and they exhibit the same character as the Devil.

“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” (John 8:44)

LYING COMES NATURALLY

Lying is part of the sin nature and it comes naturally to everyone. This is can be seen in children. They don’t have to be taught how to lie. Parents have to catch their children in a lie, make the correction, and continually reinforce it until the child realizes this is not acceptable behavior because God hates it. So what happens when adults embrace lying?

Our church was contacted by a Christian refugee coordinator from Capital Christian Church in Sacramento in 1989. We were told that thousands of Russian/Ukrainian Christians had been given permission to leave the Soviet Union to come to the United States. We decided to participate and some 50 Russian/Ukrainians came to our church. We helped them with furniture, bedding, kitchen items, etc. As refugees, they were given apartments and churches in the area provided the furnishings.

We received families with small children, teenagers, and grandparents. They were all Pentecostals and that suited us. There were no English classes for the adults in the early days and I started teaching English at our church facility using the Bible and having them follow me in their Russian Bibles.

The Sacramento area absorbed some 300,000 Russian/Ukrainians. Included in that number were pastors and they started to organize their own churches and rent church facilities. One such location was a Christian Chinese church in downtown Sacramento. I was asked to teach on the coming Antichrist and the Book of Revelation through an interpreter. The building was overfilled and close to a thousand people attended the meetings.

About five or six Ukrainian families opted to worship with our church and one day I was informed through normal conversation that the Russian/Ukrainian pastors were receiving welfare while holding jobs. Evidently, it was common for refugees to file for welfare while gainfully employed. I was advised that all the refugees did the same thing. Every welfare precipitant has to fill out a form stating they have no income, and when I told them that they were lying, they excused it by saying that this is how it was done in the Soviet Union.

After being enlightened on the matter, I spoke in the Chinese church and told them that they cannot lie as Christians and they needed to repent. The main Russian pastor came to me afterwards and told me he did not want me to return. He was unrepentant and his name was Adam Bondaruk. During the next 30 years, he built a Pentecostal mega church called Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. Their campus was located on about 20 acres. He also had purchased a large tract of land and made it into the cemetery and started satellite churches in Oregon.

One of his sons, Pytor, went to prison for real estate fraud in 2015. The heart of this scandal was the acceptance of lying as a way of life by the Bondaruk family members.[7] I would imagine the pressure became too great and this is would explain why Adam Bondaruk decided to hang himself in the backyard while the family was in the house having supper on August 14, 2022. If only he had listened to my rebuke and taken correction decades earlier; how might his life have ended differently?

“But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the LORD: and be sure your sin will find you out.” (Numbers 32:23)

A CULTURE OF LYING

As I interacted with the refugees, I became personal friends with some of them and they told me what their friends were doing. During the 1990s, many of them got into the business of fixing salvage cars and selling them. California law states that when a car has been in an accident and is totaled out by an insurance company, the vehicle can be purchased from the insurance company and repaired, but the title of the car must reflect its salvage status. Many of the refugees set up shops all over the city and fraudulently sold the cars without a salvage title.

I became acquainted with a Ukrainian businessman named Viktor that ran a successful plastering company. He employed some 40 people and an American church member partnered with him. They needed a bookkeeper and a retired engineer in our church took the job. He discovered that Viktor was running two sets of books; an official one for government audits and the real one which featured work under the table and other nefarious things.

Viktor worked on many government projects and his workers were paid prevailing wage that such projects mandate. The hourly rate on federal and state projects is $20-30 higher than normal wages. This meant that his crew was making $40 to $50 per hour. Viktor paid his workers, but instructed them to cash their checks, and pay him the difference from their normal rate of $25 per hour. The refugees working for him were scared of losing their jobs and did as he commanded. I was also told that Viktor cheated on the material used to coat the buildings.

Viktor enjoyed a nice home and several automobiles, and while there is nothing inherently wrong with this, God does not look favorably on ill-gotten gains. I confronted him one day when he came to our church. “Business is business and God is not in it. I live one business life and then I live my Christian life when I am in church” is what he told me. Viktor had a great singing voice and he sang regularly in the choir at Bondaruk’s church. He was never convicted of lying since many of the church members lived the same way.

LYING TO THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT

The Jewish lobby in Washington D.C. put a lot of pressure on President Reagan and Congress from 1986-87. They demanded that the Soviet Union allow Russian Jews to leave and move to Israel. Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to let them go and they were flown to Vienna, Austria. Refugee camps were set up and they were eventually flown to Israel.

Senator Jesse Helms, a strong Christian from North Carolina, was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Christians were being severely persecuted in the Soviet Union, which included Ukraine. Helms stated that for every Jew leaving the Soviet Union, he wanted a Christian to come out as well. Pressure was brought to bear on Gorbachev and he agreed to the plan. This is how the great Christian exodus started in 1988.

There was just one caveat. Gorbachev demanded that when Christians came to Moscow to apply for an exit visa, they had to declare they were Jews and wanted to go to Israel. All the refugees in our church told us this same narrative. They were forced to lie in order to get an exit visa. Once they arrived in Vienna, they informed the staff at the evacuee centers that they were not Jews and wanted to go to America. The United States set up a special refugee camp in Italy where the “Jewish” Christians were flown and processed before their arrival to America.

Gorbachev lied to the Russian people that only Jews were being let out. This deceitful behavior continued until the Soviet Union was dissolved and he was removed from office. The sad thing is that the account I just related has been removed from the history books in much the same way the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre has been whitewashed in China. I’m not saying that Russian and Ukrainian people are bad, but 74 years of communism morally corrupted these people to the point that lying and deceit became a normal way of life.

I had a lot of contact with Russian and Ukrainian families in the Sacramento area from 1989-1995. I was greatly disturbed when a number of friends told me that some of the refugee pastors had worked with the KGB. These men sold their souls to the communists and informed to the KGB who was attending church and which Christians spoke negatively about the Soviet régime. I was told that Pastor Bondaruk was one of them. Again, we see the spirit of lying, working in secrecy and hiding the evil work that was done against the Christians in the Soviet Union.

COMMUNISM IS A SCOURGE

Communism has been a scourge since it was invented by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 and their insidious manifesto was published in England. The people who have suffered more than all others are the Russians and Ukrainians.

The Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in 1945 gobbled up Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Albania. These nations suffered under the brutal rule of communist bosses and Christianity was eradicated from public schools. The people in these countries would suffer the oppression of communism until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

China was captured by the communists in 1949, North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia around 1955. Cuba came under communist control in 1961. One of the trademarks of communism is lying and this moral scourge destroys people. Most people from communist nations have been infected with dishonesty that comes from deceit and outright lies. Only through Christ can people be set free.

MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

The Russian and Ukrainian people who stayed in our church realized through my preaching that lying is a sin. These families became very dear to me and my wife and we have many wonderful memories of them.

My nephew, Charles, married a Russian gal from Moscow. Yekaterina came to the United States in 1993. She is a wonderful mother to their six children and her knowledge of truth has positively shaped her children. Her brother, Aleksey, is a pastor in our ministry and he has been trained in deliverance. His honesty is impeccable. Their mother is a strong prayer warrior.

I have worked with other people from former communist nations, and once they are free of its clutches and given solid teaching from the Bible, they become strong believers in Christ. But as pointed with the Bondaruk family, some Christians in the Slavic churches still tend to have problems with lying and deceit because the pastors do not preach against it, and why would they since they are caught in the web themselves.

BRUTALITY IN THE WAR IN UKRAINE

Since the war in Ukraine began in 2022, I have been following it by reading Swedish newspapers, watching the daily news coming out of Israel, and scanning American news outlets. I am well aware there is relentless propaganda in any war by the combatants. Listing heavy casualties for the enemy and lying about their own casualties. As of July, 2023 it is estimated that some 200,000 Russian soldiers have died on battlefields and the Ukrainians have suffered some 100,000 casualties.

Russia has a much larger population of 144.5 million people compared to Ukraine’s 41.4 million. Thus, the losses are more severe for Ukraine since its population is 3.5 times smaller.

As of April 2023, a United Nations report states that some 8,490 civilians were killed and 14,244 were injured in Ukraine.[8] Most civilians were killed or injured in the parts of Ukraine due to the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets by the Russians.

Most people saw the television footage from Bucha after the Russian troops retreated. They found 458 bodies of civilians who had been shot, most of them with their hands tied behind their backs. Nine children under the age of 18 were slaughtered. Many of them were tortured and girls as young as 14 years old had been raped before they were shot.

A UN report from 2022 reveals that the Russian military command encouraged their troops to torture captured Ukrainian soldiers, raping women, and gathering up children to be flown to Russia to be raised in foster homes. The UN commission has documented cases where children were raped, tortured and held against their will.[9]

Ukrainian soldiers took out their rage on captured Russian soldiers and they were as brutal as their counterparts.

SUMMARY

The majority of the people in Russia and Ukraine are not born again. Thus, we can see that the masses have no scruples when it comes to waging war and brutalizing the enemy, including civilians. In the future, the world will see the Antichrist rise to power and rule a World Federation. Jesus warned us in the Book of Revelation that Christians will be persecuted during this time. Looking at what the soldiers are doing to one another in Ukraine, it takes little imagination what a future generation will do to Christians who refuse the Mark of the Beast. You are mistaken if you think you will be raptured out before the coming of the Antichrist. For those of you who don’t believe me, we can have this discussion in the future when your faith is shaken and I have been proven right. In the meantime, every Christian pastor should prepare his flock for the bad times that are coming.

“And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write; These things saith the first and the last, which was dead, and is alive; I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; He that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death.” Revelation 2:8-11

From the Desk of John S. Torell