Latest / Centrally Speaking / Latest News from Eastern Ukraine from a Career Missionary to Zaporizhzhya

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Latest News from Eastern Ukraine from a Career Missionary to Zaporizhzhya · Centrally Speaking

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Centrally speaking, is the Central Schwenfelder Church's podcast.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: It speaks about issues that would be of interest to our society.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: In particular, it addresses how a Christian worldview intersects with Western secular culture.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: 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 at the Church.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Today we're talking about the latest missionary news from Eastern Ukraine.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_03: And we're so pleased to be able to have um Ken Sears with us today.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_03: He's uh been on this podcast several times beforehand.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: He's a career missionary with uh the European Christian Mission, North America Inc., and he served in Ukraine since 1995.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: So, Ken, welcome back to the show.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: We're very, very privileged to be able to interview you again today.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's good to be here again.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_03: And latest uh news that we've had uh from around the world, uh Ukraine, of course, had uh quite a bit of coverage uh over the last um uh number of years, but it seems as if in world news there's been much less uh that's been happening uh recently.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: So your thoughts uh today are very uh very helpful for us who uh continue to have uh interests in East Ukraine and uh certainly those of us who are praying for the situation.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_03: So please uh let's see.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_03: Let's start by just talking about your experience uh in uh Zaporizh, which is in East Ukraine.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um, can you tell us about this city?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_03: How long have you spent in Zaporizhia?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I got to Zaporizh in February 1995, and I was there until Christmas 2021.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I was on a family visit in Texas when the Russians invaded, and so I ended up stuck in America for all of 2022.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: The first half I spent a lot of time helping quite a few Ukrainians who had fled Ukraine uh to places in Western Europe and also North America.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And then the second half of 2022, by God's providence, I had already planned on a six-month furlough in PA visiting my supporters so that that was perfect.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then when 2023 came around, I had to make a decision.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, what now?
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I decided to make Poland my my home base.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so since March of 2023, I've been in a Polish city uh called in Polish, uh Wrocław.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: But many of our listeners may be more familiar with its German name, Breslau.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yes, they certainly will be uh more familiar with uh Breslau, as uh uh the Schwenckfelder's uh having uh uh connections uh in that area of the world.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_03: That's uh another thing that would be interesting to us, but uh our uh focus today is uh is on uh Ukraine.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um Ken, you're fluent in uh Russian and uh I bet uh speak a little bit of Ukrainian too.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, and you're you're in regular communication uh with uh those uh who are still in uh the Zaporizhia area.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yes, um corresponding by email or by text or by phone um uh regularly.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Help our listeners out a little bit with uh the city of Zaporizhia.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe you could tell us uh uh what the average income levels are like, uh uh the ways that people live there, or or even maybe something visual.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, what does it look like um uh when one walks into the city of Zaporizhia?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: What are some distinctives that you would tell us?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Zaporizhia has always been a factory town.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And long ago, I decided this is the Detroit of Ukraine.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, you can always see the pollution haze on the horizon from the factory section.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And you always have mixed feelings about that because on the one hand, the pollution is probably killing you, but on the other hand, the factories are keeping the city uh economically alive.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And when I got there in '95, I really had an impression like I'd found myself in 1930s Detroit.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in fact, as the decades went by, I uh or as the years went by, I would say to myself, okay, now I think Zaporizhia is like maybe 1950s Detroit, and maybe a couple of years later.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's more like the 1970s.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: They were gradually catching up.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a blue-collar, you'd say, middle to lower middle class town, people working hard to make ends meet, make better lives for their children.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I got there not long after the USSR's collapse.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And they were just getting out of a real depression.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: The cost of living then was so low that a family of four could probably live on$2,000 a year.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And now today, 30 years later, I'd say if you're making$12,000 to$15,000 a year, you can be pretty comfortable.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're making$20,000 to$30,000 a year, you're really doing well.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: When I got there, the city's appearance I can sum up in one word: gray, everything gray, and dust covered.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Very cold, very Soviet looking, if if you know what that means.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: And over the succeeding 30 years, the city blossomed into color and it developed a nightlife with restaurants and other social activities.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: When I got there, you did not go out.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody went out.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Social life was behind locked doors, around the kitchen table, or in the living room with tea and cookies, and uh the streets were bare.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: But today it's um it's it's a colorful city with a very thriving.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it was thriving before the invasion, even now, to some extent, nightlife and color and it became a happier city.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: Lots of Soviet block flats uh in the city, and then also a very prominent uh dam that uh blocks up the Dnieper River there.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how that's how Zaporizhia as such was born in the 19th century.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: The town it was just a little town called Alexandrovsk.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then after the Soviet revolution, the Soviets uh converted it to a factory town, built the dam for the hydroelectric power, putting in a lot of factories, and imported a lot of Russians into this Ukrainian city, which was also a classic tactic of Stalin's to try to mix populations and uh eliminate any nationalistic feelings.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, and then it also has a very long straight street to it.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the longest in Europe's, isn't it?
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: I hear yes, it's the longest single avenue in Europe.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the time I lived there, it was called Prospect Lenin, Lenin Avenue.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: But after Putin's Russia took over Crimea and invaded the eastern uh provinces, they they proceeded to embark on a de-Sovietizing Ukraine, and they changed a lot of Soviet communist names to uh more Ukrainian names.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: So now it's called Cathedral Avenue.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: Then, of course, the war came, the incursion came, and uh this has led to uh lots of refugees then coming through the city of Zaporizhia, and your involvement uh with the Zaporizhia Bible Seminary, uh, that seminary has been doing an incredible amount of humanitarian work as well as uh church work.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I'm wondering if you could uh uh update our listeners on those things.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the morning of February, what was it, 24th, 2022, when the Russians launched the full-scale invasion.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Classes, of course, were immediately canceled and they went into emergency mode, uh, helped all of our students to get to their homes, and the college uh basically converted itself to a clearing house for refugees coming from the areas under attack, a passing point where people could get a night's sleep, get a shower, get food, get uh medical supplies, clothing if they needed it, and then relocate either elsewhere in Zaporizhia, or many of them were going on to other points in Ukraine or beyond.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Not only the seminary, but our churches, my church, which was uh birthed by the seminary.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: It was planted by the seminary and its founders and uh became a thriving church.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: My church has been heavily involved in humanitarian aid.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh my my oldest, dearest Ukrainian friend, uh who is now in Tennessee, he's been heading up a project to send containers.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: They just sent their 12th container in two years, and these are massive and very expensive to send, filled with food and clothing and medical supplies and computers and I don't know what else, all kinds of stuff.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they go to my church, and my church uses these containers to, of course, help our own people and help the neighborhoods around our churches, which is a form of witness, and go out and minister so to soldiers on the front lines.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, we have many people in our churches going right to the front lines, preaching the gospel to the soldiers and bringing them clothing and food and medical supplies.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really a profound and meaningful ministry that has caught the notice of the Ukrainian population.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: And you also have had uh man named uh Vlad Mikhovsky, who's uh been doing um uh evacuation work.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um fact his story has even been uh featured uh on the BBC News.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: So as being part of the uh the White Angels.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, can you tell us anything about that?
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, uh Vlad is a graduate of our seminary.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: He was my student.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: He himself came out of a hard life, you know, with with, I believe, some uh drug usage and what have you.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: And God marvelously redeemed and saved him and transformed him.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And before the war, he was uh heavily involved in rehabilitation work very effectively.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then this happened, and he has been uh driving out to the front lines and to villages on the front lines, evacuating people.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they don't want to be evacuated, you know, some people don't want to be evacuated.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, he brings them supplies and preaches the gospel.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: He has been arrested and captured by the Russians once and held and miraculously released.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Another time his uh his aid van was hit by a missile and he ended up in the hospital, and he just keeps at it, like like the ever-ready bunny.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: He doesn't stop for for anything.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And his slogan or motto is as the apostle Paul says, you know, ministering, we we do not weary, we do not lose heart.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: No, doing good.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, not uh doing good, we do not grow weary.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: We do not grow weary.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_03: No, it's uh an amazing story.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: Perhaps uh a whole podcast could be done on some of his exploits.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, but oh yeah, one of I know we want to move on to uh exactly what's happening uh currently as we're not hearing this news uh so frequently.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so in Zaporizhia, oh and I I guess I should mention uh too, this is uh the city's not far from the Zaporizhia power plant uh that has uh also received um uh attention over the last uh the the Zaporizhia power plant is in a city which basically grew up around the power plant to service it uh called Energodar.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about maybe a half hour's drive from uh the city Zaporizhia, and the the Russians are holding Energodar, yes.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: So, what is the current um front line in comparison to the city of Zaporizhia right now, where people have boots on the ground?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'd say about 20 miles away, and uh Zaporizhia is the capital city of the Zaporizhia province or oblast, as as they say in Russian.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: And the Russians have taken most of the oblasts, but not the city.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: So our seminary and our church are still in free Ukraine and still ministering and thriving, but Russian missiles are constantly hitting the city, hitting factories and the power grid and apartment buildings and traffic on the roads and killing civilians.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really a frontline existence for the city.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_03: I think that would be very interesting uh for um our listeners.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, when they think about a frontline city, and there have been a lot of air attacks on Zaporizh.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: Can you tell us what's been the latest that's been happening in the last three weeks uh to a month uh with these air attacks?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the most notable recent one, 10 days, two weeks ago, was on the airplane motor factory.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: But the missile hit a bus passing right in front of the factory, killing a number of, I don't remember how many passengers.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: One of the wounded passengers was a graduate from our seminaries back when it was called a Bible college, our early days, uh, a young woman named Larissa.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank God she came, she came through it.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not long before that, within eyesight of the seminary, because I saw a video taken from the seminary porch where you could see the smoke rising in the air.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So in the seminary's uh neighborhood, two houses were hit.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one house was pretty much obliterated.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: The house next door, you'd say, was totaled, not uh leveled to the ground, but nobody can live in anymore.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And both these houses were the residences of my church members.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, thank God the family in the obliterated house were away.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Thank God, because they wouldn't have made it.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that young couple, since they were children in our church, and they have a couple of tiny children of their own, and they were away, thank God.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the family in the house that was totaled, they were home, but thank God they were all fine.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: They might have suffered some minor injuries, but their lives are now.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this family that were home, they were refugees from the Donetsk Oblast.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: They came to the Zaporizhia Oblast 10, 12 years ago when that Russian invasion forced them out of their homes.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: And now a Russian missile forced them out of their second home.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: So they feel like what has Putin got against us?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why are they coming after us?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: And these are just two of millions of stories of human lives and families torn apart by this barbaric Russian uh aggression.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, we're not hearing uh the stories that frequently at most now on the news.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: So we're just getting general, even if that, uh general updates.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_03: I should mention too uh our listeners we're recording on January the 28th of uh 2025.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: So this is the the news from the last month, essentially, that uh that Ken is sharing uh with us here.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: Can you tell our listeners what takes place when missiles or drones attack the city?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: Um and how frequent uh are these?
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so of course I can't tell you from personal experience, I'm not there, but I know that the sirens sound frequently daily, many times a day.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: So much so that, you know, people kind of ignore them.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: They just become background noise, but they wear on your nerves and your psyche.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: And you can imagine the whole population is deeply traumatized.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how frequent the strikes are, but it seems like not a week goes by that I don't see news about a new missile hit in the city.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you never know where or when a missile is going to hit.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And they, you know, the local people say if you hear the missile coming, your chances to survive are good.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: If the missile hits you, you probably never heard it.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the reality they live with day by day.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's gotta be traumatic.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh oh, yeah.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_03: Think you've been uh you've been in Lviv uh too, Western Ukraine, when these things when these uh sirens have gone off too.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: I was teaching there in the fall, and funny enough, I was there for a week and the week went great, and I didn't hear any sirens.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And wouldn't you know it the day I left, I get to the train station, and everybody's standing outside the train station.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: I said, What's going on?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, sirens, and uh everybody had to evacuate the train station.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh funny enough, I didn't hear the sirens, but that's what was happening that very day.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I've had we we have friends and colleagues in that city who uh finally felt the need to evacuate, who were able to get out because it's just a terrible way to live.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and Lviv, hundreds of uh uh kilometers from uh Zaporizhia, so way, way far away from the front line and close to Poland.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's only an hour's drive to the Polish border.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: So there's no place in Ukraine that can be called safe.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's important for our listeners uh to know.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: Are these attacks from your perspective against uh military sites, or do they seem rap uh rather random and haphazard?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: The answer to that question is yes and yes.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Russians bomb military sites and everything else.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, Russian propaganda would love the world to think they're just doing surgical strikes, you know, on military bases and military factories, uh, which is not the truth at all.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: The majority of them, in fact, are hitting civilian population areas, hitting hospitals and schools and buses and cars and traffic and and homes, private homes.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's just uh obviously Russia's attempt to terrorize the Ukrainian population into submission, which is the old playbook.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing has changed for for the Russian bear.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: So this has happened in in in other places in other conflicts too.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh yeah, it's it's their modus uh apparandi.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_03: Such as in uh Georgia, or maybe you have other parallels?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they've always been indiscriminate.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Even even in World War II, they've been indiscriminate.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a uh what what do you call it?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: A um a buckshot approach.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it's a buckshot approach that counts the foreign population's lives as nothing and counts their own army's lives as nothing.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, this is why Putin is ready to just keep throwing men into the meat grinder in order to save himself politically.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, now it's not only Russian men, it's North Korean men.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but that means nothing to him.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it means nothing to devastate cities like he's done in Mariupol and uh Bucha, and they just come in and they they massacre the local population.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we we would we thought in modern Europe this couldn't happen.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like, isn't this something out of the Middle Ages, the dark ages?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it is, and it's still, I'm sorry to say, characteristic of the Russian psyche.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and of course, now that uh in America we now have a transition to the uh Trump uh presidency, and there's been discussion about what might happen with the Russia-Ukrainian conflict.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: Can you tell us what the feelings are among those you know in Zaporizhia about possible changes with the way that the United States might be viewing uh this conflict in this area?
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, this might be surprising, but at least among the Ukrainians that I know, there's a sort of guarded, cautious optimism that the Trump administration is gonna force Putin to make a deal.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: And even if it involves a bitter pill to swallow in losing uh territories, which is probably gonna happen, that in the long term that's gonna work to Ukraine's benefit.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: It could ultimately be very good for Ukraine and very bad for Russia.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: We just want the war to end, end now, and start rebuilding and recovering from there.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: So there's there's less uh less fear and more, would you say, hope?
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: I would say there's a cautious hope.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: We all know the stereotypes, you know, Trump is palsy walsey with Putin, but I think that's a surface impression.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Initial reports I hear about Putin not being happy with Trump's proposals encourages me.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: That suggests to me that Trump is not trying to uh appease him.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I take that as a good sign.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_03: Do you feel that an effective peace could be made uh that would bring safety and security to Zaporizhia as well as the eastern Ukrainian uh uh region?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: I do, and I'm hoping for it.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like I said, we want the war to stop.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Russia needs to be stopped right now, where they are, and not take you know an inch more, at the very least.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: And starting from there, I think there's great hope uh for Ukraine if a border can be solidified with strong Western backing.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: And from there, Ukraine can finally begin deep economic integration with the West, effective, if not yet formal, integration with NATO and the European Union.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Even if Ukraine doesn't go immediately into NATO, I would betcha that the level of defense and security will be just as good as if, because the West is going to make and has already made so much investment in Ukraine's survival, they're gonna do everything to make sure that this can't happen again.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: So this is very good for Ukraine.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's very bad for Russia because, and I think that's why Putin really doesn't want a peace.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: He wants this war because he's got nowhere left to go and nothing left to live on politically without this war.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Once this war ends, what's he got to show for it?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we can be cautiously optimistic.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And if even the years following this war saw some kind of political chaos, even a breakup of Russia, I easily imagine Ukrainian territories that were lost to Russia coming back, knocking on the door, begging to join Ukraine again.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm no prophet, so I'm not claiming uh, you know, that I know the future, but I could see it.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see anything bad in this war ending as soon as possible.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Especially I want my city's apparition to stay free.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: The sooner the better that uh things end.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um in your your mind, uh, from your uh perspective on all the contacts you have in East uh Ukraine, this this would be for the best.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: I would think so, yes.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you so much for answering these questions uh for us today, Ken.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_03: I know you're uh supplying a lot of information that we that we don't have.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: I wonder if you would uh be willing to do this uh uh as we close this time.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh many who listen to uh our podcasts uh may enjoy the information that we have, but uh sometimes we we have uh uh these type of uh interviews where uh things are heavy on our hearts.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um and uh we would like to be led in prayer for things such as peace as well as uh protection for those in uh in East Ukraine.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_03: Would you mind closing this uh podcast with a word of prayer uh in that way for our general listeners?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, let's pray.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Almighty and gracious Heavenly Father, who knows the hearts of all men, women, and children, and you know our needs and our griefs, our pains and our hopes.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: We pray, Lord, that by your mighty hand, through those in power, for the heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, move, we pray, move at last, we pray, after these long sufferings, move powerfully, bring an end to this war, bring new hope, we pray, and a new beginning, bring comfort to griefs and new hope to despair.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Charge your church, we pray, in Ukraine, in Zaporizhia and Dnipro and Kiev and Lviv and Odessa and so many cities and in the countryside.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Charge your church, inspire your people, Lord, radiate your power and love through your children in Jesus' name to awaken the hearts and souls of those who don't know you yet.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Make this, Lord, we pray, your victory, the victory of your kingdom.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name, amen.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you very much, uh, Ken, for uh sitting this interview with you, and we wish you uh the very best uh in your mission work uh in East uh Europe.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: God bless you, and you too.