Latest / Centrally Speaking / Making Sense of the War in Ukraine: An Interview with a Missionary to Zaporizhzhia

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Making Sense of the War in Ukraine: An Interview with a Missionary to Zaporizhzhia · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, is the Central Schweinfelder Church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's founder, we take the perspective of the middle way, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm Dr.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology of the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: We're very fortunate today to have Ken Sears with us to talk about the current state of the war in Ukraine.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Ken has been a career missionary with the European Christian Mission North America, Inc., and he's been a missionary for 27 years in East Ukraine, living in the Zaporosia area.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm interviewing Ken today on March the 4th, just over a week since the war started.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_02: And welcome to Centrally Speaking and our sincere, sincere condolences for what is taking place in Ukraine right now.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_02: I want to see if you can help those who listen to Centrally Speaking make sense of this war because we're getting bombarded with all sorts of different news.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: And maybe from your perspective, first you could say just how did you end up as an American going to Zaporosia, going to Ukraine?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_02: Where is Zaporosia if somebody were to be looking at Ukraine?
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, why'd you choose to settle there?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, this is a story, of course.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: I could take an hour and a half telling you this, but of course I won't.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: The short version is from my earliest days as a Christian, I for some reason, supernaturally just had this longing to serve God in Europe.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, didn't know where it came from except from the Lord.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't rush, and I felt I needed to go to seminary and get pastoral experience, but the desire was always there.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: For several years, I really felt strongly it was for Ireland, which was the land of my forebears.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I even got all set up to go there.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: I was approved, commissioned, everything.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: The whole world knew I was going to Ireland when suddenly, out of the blue, I had the most mysterious, compelling desires to go to Russia, as I thought at the moment.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it was really disturbing me because I didn't know what in the world this could be.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: But wouldn't you know it?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Practically on the eve of my, not my departure, but my fundraising, my mission director called me and he told me that he and the board had been discussing and praying about me.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: And would I go instead to Russia?
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: It took no further calculus on my part.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: I knew it was God.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: And uh the funny thing was, my director said Russia, but he really meant Ukraine.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: You know, back then people really didn't know the difference.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: That was God's leading, too, because if he had said, would you go to Ukraine?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I would say I would have said, What's that?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: But I knew God had been speaking to me about Russia in the broadest sense, but it was Ukraine.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what got me to Zaporozhia, because that's where my mission uh had established contacts with the Ukrainian Baptists who were pleading for personnel for uh help.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: So my mission sent me to Zaporozhia, Ukraine, which is in the southeast quadrant of the country, quite close, just maybe a couple of hours' drive from the conflict zone that they've had there for the past eight years.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: And my job description was so simple help the church.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: That's what they told me.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: I went there really not knowing what on earth I was gonna do, except, of course, learn the language first.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: That was 27 years ago.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I've never regretted it, never regretted not going to Ireland.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: And God created my job description for me on the spot, and I ended up being a teacher at a seminary and a pastor, minister in a church there.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been my home in my life for 27 years.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: If somebody was looking at Ukraine, Ukraine's about the size of Texas or so, and maybe like the shape of one's hand if one has it sideways.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Where would Zaporosha be?
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: Since many might not know where Zaporosia is.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: So if you take that hand and you divide it into four quarters, okay, so now you're in the the lower uh right hand southeast corner, and if you have any concept of that part of the world, you know where the Black Sea is.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: Crimea sticks out from Ukraine like a little appendix, like a little round appendix into the Black Sea.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: If you go up from Crimea, straight up north, but don't leave that southeastern square.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Zaporozhia is up towards the middle of that cross that divides Ukraine into four parts.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So if you drive east from there a few hours, you're in Russia.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's always been a very risky place, a danger, a hotspot since Russia started its military expansionist adventures eight years ago.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's on the Dnieper River, right?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, right on the Dnieper.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Zaporozhia straddles the river.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's parts of our city on both sides of the river.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: We're at the this kind of a dog leg bend, a big bend that makes the river go east-west for a little bit.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: The Zaporozhia's right on that bend.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_02: And the Dnieper River is not a small river.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's a that's a very large river running uh through Ukraine.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right, all the way from above Kiev, all the way down, empties out into the Black Sea.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: You were talking about Russian aggression, and just trying to now get our mind around how this war started.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: What would you say the genesis was or the beginning point was for this war?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_02: Was it aggression or was it something else?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Vladimir Putin is famously on record as saying that the greatest disaster of the 20th century was the fall of the Soviet Union.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: He's also on record as saying Ukraine was never a real country, that it always belonged to Russia, that it's the birthplace of Russia, and that independence was a was a crime.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so, whatever anybody else wants to say about mistakes that possibly the West has made and the expansion of NATO to include the Baltics, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the expansion of the EU, et cetera, et cetera.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: I would only compare those kinds of arguments to uh maybe writing on a chalkboard and making the chalk screech on the chalkboard so that it annoys somebody in the room and they proceed to pull out a gun and shoot you to death.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing justifies it.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing can justify what Putin is doing now to Ukraine.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: And all the talk about how NATO shouldn't have expanded and Ukraine shouldn't talk about going into NATO.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's all a cover for what has always been in Putin's heart, which was to take Ukraine back.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: He's using these things.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: In his recent tirade, uh, the man has gone over the edge, by the way.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: There is he's definitely ill.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: In his recent tirade on television, he talked about how people in Kiev, they're not speaking Russian anymore.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, they they split from the Russian church.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_01: And anyway, Ukraine shouldn't exist.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: That is the real core of why he's doing this, plus the fact that he likely feels his mortality coming and is going for the glory while he can before he has to face, you know, his maker.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: So the Genesis goes way, way deep, way back to over centuries.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: Russia has always despised any Ukrainian pretense to nationhood.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's really what this is about.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, in its most recent time, it was the 2014 incursions in the east and also in Crimea.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you see, when Ukraine chucked out Yanukovych, who was you know Putin's man in Ukraine, for Putin, that was the last straw.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was the last straw.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: He took Crimea by his subterfuge, his cowardly insurrectionist methods with the little green men without insignia, who he insisted weren't his.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: Once they had Crimea, he gloated and smirked.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they were really mine all the time.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: He thought that was very cute.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: But the man functions by lies.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just a few weeks ago, he was insisting to the world, I'm not going to invade Ukraine.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: He's acting really just like a chip off the old block, because the Lord says that Satan is the father of lies, and he's showing himself to be a true son of the father of lies.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_02: You mentioned Yanukovych, previous prime minister to Prime Minister Zelensky, which of course.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: After him, we had uh an official election.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: Poroshenko won.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then after him, uh Zelensky became president.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I've often seen a post that online, you know, do a comparison.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Since Ukrainian independence 30 years ago, we've had, I don't remember the number exactly, but let's say seven presidents.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: In the last 21 years, it's been Putin.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: That tells you all you need to know.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think many in that that are listening to this from the West will understand that there's been an ongoing, ongoing skirmishes over the last eight years in the Donbas area, which is east of Zaporosia.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, you see.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_02: Can you explain uh a little bit about that to our to our listeners?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: I and I I uh I got started on that.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: You brought that up and I kind of went off on another tangent.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: But okay, so yeah, Putin did that in Crimea successfully, and then he thought, uh, oh gosh, that worked.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: Let me do it in the rest of the country and take the whole east.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: So he started precisely the same game plan in the two provinces immediately next door to my province, actually, the three provinces immediately next door to mine, Kharkiv, Lugansk, and Donetsk.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: Same game plan, same little green men without insignia, supposedly local indigenous uprisings by uh poor put upon Russian speakers who are suffering Ukrainian genocide and only want to speak their language.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: The whole thing is such a lie.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Then they try to take the local police station, they start with that, and then the local government building.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Putin uh ferries his uh spies, his agents in, his thugs and mercenaries in to foment uh this uh you know supposed uprising and by those means take the region.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it worked in Crimea, but it didn't work.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't work in Kharkiv, and it only partially worked in the Lugansk region and the Donetsk region.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: And what a lot of our listeners might not understand is I understand it's confusing.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know how New York City is in the state of New York, or Oklahoma City is in Oklahoma?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_01: Donetsk is the name of a city and the province.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Lugansk is the name of a city and the province.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: Russia's agents have never taken the Donetsk province.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: They have never taken the Lugansk province.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: They couldn't even take the city of Kharkiv, let alone the Kharkiv province.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: So for the last eight years, oh, and by the way, Ukraine was in weeks of defeating these local Russian agents completely.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Putin would not let that happen.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's when he started sending in the trains full of so-called humanitarian aid, which were actually weaponry, machinery, and personnel.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when they were able to beat back the Ukrainians and take larger sections of the Donetsk province and the Lugansk province.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: But to this day, they've never taken both provinces.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so it has been a quagmire with the lines drawn and gunfire going back both ways for the last eight years.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_02: And that sense of tension, of course, has then extended westward out to cities like Zaporozhya, where you live too.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we've gotten lots of refugees from the Donetsk and Lugansk provinces, yeah.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_02: Before this current war.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Right, over the last eight years.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: My church has had many people from Donetsk, yeah.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_02: And now this brings us to the current situation as of March the fourth.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_02: And we're seeing in the news lots about Kyiv, lots about Kharkiv, some about Mariupol, less about Zaporozhia.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm wondering if you might just say the to your knowledge, what the current situation is as you know it on March the Fourth.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, for the people listening, first let me clarify one thing because last night we heard about the attacks on the nuclear power plant in supposedly Zaporozhia.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And again, this comes back to sometimes the confusion people have.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Zaporozhia is also the capital city of the Zaporozhia province.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the nuclear power plant isn't in Zaporozhia, but it's probably about 25 minutes away in a town called Energodar.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a critical situation.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_02: In the news, we're hearing about cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv and Mariapol, some about Kherson, and then just last night to Zaporozh.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: But to your knowledge, as of March the 4th, what's happening in these places?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: From what I know, like on the streets of Zaporozhia, the city itself proper, the Russians haven't taken or come into the city.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_01: It is, you know, in relative terms, peaceful.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Outlying towns and villages around our city, not far from us, are being bombed.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've heard of Mariupol.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: Mariupol is the major city on the Black Sea coast, the northern shore of the Black Sea, between Crimea and Russia itself.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: So everybody knows that Putin desperately wants to establish a land connection to Crimea because when he annexed Crimea, he had no way to get there by land, because the whole big section of Ukraine is between Crimea and Russia.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: He built a bridge to get there across the water.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: The major hurdle between Russia and Crimea is Mariupol.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what they've been attacking fiercely.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: On the other side of Crimea is the city of Kherson, which I think they have taken, and that's their gateway to uh land um you know boats and ships and push further into the country and reach the city of Odessa.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, what Putin wants is to control the entire northern Black Sea coast that is the coast of Ukraine, from Russia in the east over to Moldova in the west.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, a lot of your listeners won't know about this, few do, but on the border of Moldova in the west, there's a sliver of land between Moldova and Ukraine called the Transnistria.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: Properly speaking, it is Moldova, but separatists supported by Russia took it many, many years ago and have been holding it as a so-called people's republic that nobody recognizes.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: So Putin clearly would like to take the whole Ukrainian northern coast of the Black Sea, uh swallow Transnistria and call it all Russia.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what's going on right now.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, what's also happening now is an unbelievable humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: As of today, over a million refugees going to places like Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and places further uh west, uh, and many more internally displaced people, which there is no number of refugees with that are not leaving the country.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: But your church and many others in Ukraine have been helping those without homes.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_02: What are they doing?
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_02: Can you help our Westerners uh who are listening uh understand?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: The people I know in my personal circles, you know, they're making four different kinds of decisions.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Some are just staying put husband, wife, whole family.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Some are because the men between 18 and 60 are 60 aren't allowed to leave the country.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Some men are sending their wives and children either just to the west, safer part of Ukraine, or out of the country.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Other families are are evacuating entirely to the west, either to stay there or send their wives and children out of the country.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: A few whole families, including the fathers, have managed that I know of, have managed to get out of the country.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: I know one family where the father is exempt from the draft because of severe physical condition.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: They let him out.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: They might not have.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: They could have dismissed that as irrelevant anymore, but they let him out.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: So his family's out.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: All of these things are happening at once.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: I know a little collection of about a dozen of my church families who are gathered together in a city in the West.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think most of them are just going to stay put.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: All these things are happening at once.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I don't judge anybody for the decision they make.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody has their own reason.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: God works in many ways.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't second guess anybody's decision.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Even in the seminary right now, there are where you have been serving faithfully for many years, there are people in the in the basements uh right now uh finding housing and uh yes, so so the churches, the the the churches, especially the people who have stayed in Zaporozhia and the local regional leadership, they're online all the time, trading information, communicating what's going on with who, who needs what, how you can you get help, how you can get help, how you can get help to somebody, where there are bomb shelters, my seminar is using the basement to take in refugees, children from Mariupa.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's just uh a fierce and constant uh round of uh information.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: It seems chaotic, everybody's trying to do, and also trying to sort out real information from fake information.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and you're providing us with some really helpful information here, Ken.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: I appreciate you doing this for us.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_02: In the news, we're seeing just an amazing amount of resolve coming from Ukrainians, and that may seem to be surprising for many in the West.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_02: Having lived in the West and having lived in Ukraine and Zaporosha, where do you feel this resolve is coming from?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, when I when I moved there 27 years ago, there was still a huge statue of Vladimir Lenin at the local dam by the hydroelectric power plant.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: One day I asked, I asked somebody, why on earth is that still there?
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he said to me, Well, for one thing, it's it's a very expensive to take it down.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: And for another thing, well, you never know.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the prevalent spirit when I got there 27 years.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: They had only been a few years, three three years independent.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And Ukraine's history is a tragic, a scarred history, you know, of uh subjugation and um being used by many different powers and overrun by different empires.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: There was a dark cynicism back then, and uh many people would shrug their shoulders and say, ah, who knows, who knows?
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Tomorrow, tomorrow will be Russia again.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And many people did feel a loyalty to Russia and felt an ethnic connection to Russia.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Putin destroyed the last remnants of that eight years ago.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so many Ukrainians I know said, that's it, no more.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: There was a popular song on the radio eight years ago because the Russians loved to talk about fraternal love and the friendship of nations.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: And a song that was very popular on the radio eight years ago was We're Not Brothers Anymore.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: The Ukrainians, including the Russian-speaking Ukrainians, really became a nation in the last eight to ten years.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: And this whole lie of Putin's, you know, Zaporozh is a Russian-speaking uh city.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a Russian speaker.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: He foiced this lie that Russian speakers in the East aren't being allowed to speak their language and they're suffering genocide and they're longing for Russia to come save them.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's a complete lie.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: And all my Russian-speaking friends in Ukraine want nothing to do with Putin.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's as ridiculous as saying that Italian speakers in Brooklyn want Italy to come save them from America.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's that ridiculous.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: But Putin, he'll mouth any lie to get his way.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: Ukraine's also known as the Bible belt area of much of the former Soviet Union and also of East Europe.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_02: Do you feel some of the resolve that we're seeing, the courage, is coming from faith?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: I really do think so.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know why?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like I said before, Ukraine has had what, six, seven presidents since independence?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, they've got a lot of troubles, they've got a lot of corruption, they've had it, you know, the closer you get to the to the core of the former Soviet Union, the hard it is to break out of that authoritarian structure.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's why Putin's, that's why Lenin's statue was still standing there 27 years ago, when they had long since torn him and all remnants of you know Soviet power out of places like the Czech Republic and Hungary, places like that.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: But still in all, Ukraine has had six, seven presidents because they've had elections.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, some were a little bit corrupt and twisted, but the Ukrainian people stood up against it.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's why they had the Orange Revolution to their own shock.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: And they realized, hey, yeah, we're a people.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have to take this.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: Russia has had two, what's his name, who preceded Putin, and then Putin.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so the Russian faith is Russia, to put it bluntly.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: The Russian faith is Russia.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: They dress it up with a strong man and Russian Orthodoxy.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Suddenly Putin's an Orthodox Christian, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what they put their faith in.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ukraine has suffered a vacuum of faith.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: But what did that make them do?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: It made them search for what do we fill that with?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a strong man, it's not Russia, it's not the Soviet Union, and not all of them have come to Christ, but it's family and a sense of Ukrainian identity and yes, faith too.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: And these things have coalesced to create something to fill that vacuum that isn't there in Russia.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: And what's filling it in Russia is a lie.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why Putin has to jail journalists or kill them or send assassins to London with their poison pellets.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's paranoia and megalomania.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the difference between Russia and Ukraine.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Well, many of us in the West are now watching what's uh taking place and feeling a bit helpless, maybe as someone who has lived in Zaporosia and also understands the West too.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_02: Could you give us some direction as to how we can be of help right now?
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Keep praying.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen miracles.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: With God, nothing is impossible.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: So pray fervently, pray passionally for God to crush this evil, to end it, to crush it and bring deliverance.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_01: My mission, European Christian Mission, has started a fund.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: They're calling it the Ukraine Crisis Fund.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're channeling funds directly to people I've known for almost 30 years, a former student of mine who's responsible for humanitarian aid in our region to get that money to the most dire needs in our churches and in the community.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: So if people could get a hold of my mission, European Christian Mission of North America, its offices in uh Delta, British Columbia, Canada, that money is going to help help support our people over there.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: I've done well so far.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: I've been trying.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: No, you've done very well on a on a difficult day.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: I I should let me give you a lot of things.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: I know how to compartmentalize, but maybe not so well.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: No, you're you're doing fine.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: And it should say that if our listeners are listening to this and want to contact the Central Schwenkfelder Church, uh, we're also contributing through this fund.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: And you can reach us at our office 610-584-4480, or you can look for us online at cscfamily.org.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_02: Ken, we're very uh appreciative of you taking uh time uh to share with us uh your thoughts uh on uh on this day and our our very best wishes uh to you and to your family as well as uh the church in uh in Ukraine.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_02: If you have a any final word you would like to give us, you certainly may.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna get through this.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: God is good.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's all I can say.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: We'll trust with you, with our all powerful God and a God who is good.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_02: God bless you.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: Amen.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much.