Church of God News

1696 Portrait of ‘Peter the Great’ Capturing Azov
(Wikipedia)

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Many are concerned about the situation between Russia and Ukraine:

January 22, 2022

MOSCOW (AP) — With tens of thousands of Russian troops positioned near Ukraine, the Kremlin has kept the U.S. and its allies guessing about its next moves in the worst security crisis to emerge between Moscow and the West since the Cold War.

Amid fears of an imminent attack on Ukraine, Russia has further upped the ante by announcing more military drills in the region. It also has refused to rule out the possibility of military deployments to the Caribbean, and President Vladimir Putin has reached out to leaders opposed to the West.

The military muscle-flexing reflects a bold attempt by the Kremlin to halt decades of NATO expansion after the end of the Cold War. In talks with the United States, Russia demands legally binding guarantees that the alliance will not embrace Ukraine and other former Soviet nations, or place weapons there. It also wants NATO to pull back its forces from countries in Central and Eastern Europe that joined the alliance since the 1990s.

Putin has described NATO membership for Ukraine and the others as well as the alliance’s weapons deployments there as a red line for Moscow, warning that he would order unspecified “military-technical measures” if the demands aren’t met. https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-vladimir-putin-moscow-united-states-5fbc86c84dfeb604ebe12e47a753bdcb

Some think Vladimir Putin is only posturing for power, whereas others believe a military incursion into Ukraine may happen next month.

Some think Vladimir Putin is looking at the long haul and perhaps wants to emulate ‘Peter the Great.”

Here is some information about him from Wikipedia:

Peter the Great (Russian: Пётр Вели́кий, tr. Pyotr Velíkiy, IPA: [ˈpʲɵtr vʲɪˈlʲikʲɪj]),^… ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from 7 May [O.S. 27 April] 1682 until his death in 1725, jointly ruling before 1696 with his elder half-brother, Ivan V.

Through a number of successful wars, he captured ports at Azov and the Baltic Sea, laying the groundwork for the Imperial Russian Navy, ending uncontested Swedish supremacy in the Baltic and beginning the Tsardom’s expansion into a much larger empire that became a major European power. He led a cultural revolution that replaced some of the traditionalist and medieval social and political systems with ones that were modern, scientific, Westernised and based on the Enlightenment. … Peter attempted to acquire control of the Black Sea, which would require expelling the Tatars from the surrounding areas. As part of an agreement with Poland that ceded Kiev to Russia,  (Peter the Great. Wikipedia, accessed 01/22/22)

Kiev is the capital of Ukraine, and for a time, was also the capital of Russia. Vladimir Putin believes that Ukraine is basically part of Russia.

Voice of America posted the following related to Russia, Peter the Great, Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin:

Putin, Following in Steps of Peter the Great?

January 22, 2022

Three hundred and forty kilometers east of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, lies the city of Poltava.

At its heart is a semi-circular square with a cast-iron column and nearly two dozen eighteenth-century Swedish cannons captured in the 1709 Battle of Poltava, a decisive encounter in the Great Northern War, waged between Russia’s Peter the Great and Sweden’s Charles XII for supremacy in eastern Europe.

Russia’s tsar won.

Nearly four centuries later, the Ukrainian town located on a bank of the Vorskla River could soon find itself making history again. That is if Russia’s Vladimir Putin decides to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and orders Russian forces to drive deep into the country, as some Western leaders fear he might.

Poltava lies across the route to Kyiv and may become a factor if Putin opts to punch out from the Russian-controlled oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk, and has other forces cross the border near Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, said Robert Fry, a former commandant general of Britain’s Royal Marines.

It was at Poltava in 1709 that “Peter made the first step towards the sobriquet ‘Great’ — a path the Russian president may have ambitions to follow,” the retired British general noted in a military assessment for The Article, a British commentary site.

Fry, though, suspects Putin will be in no hurry to forgo the advantages he has in continuing with hybrid warfare, extracting the Western concessions he has demanded and not courting the dangers of a full-scale invasion with the risks of having to pacify Europe’s second-largest country and counter a likely Ukrainian insurgency.

“The dexterity with which Russia manipulates the threat of escalation has become one of the defining characteristics of its military/diplomatic playbook and it is yards ahead of the West in this respect. If the mortgage was at stake, I would put it on a ferment of sub-threshold activity backed up by lots of conventional military posturing, stopping short of live conflict,” he wrote.

Russian officials say they have no plans to attack Ukraine once again, and armed forces chief Valery Gerasimov has denounced reports of a planned invasion as a lie. NATO’s secretary general has warned the risk of conflict is real and U.S. President Joe Biden this week said his guess is Russia will move in, either with an invasion or a more limited assault.

But what any “move in” might entail is unclear and many Russia watchers suspect Putin has not made up his mind. Ukrainian leaders say it is unhelpful to distinguish between a full-bore invasion and a more limited land grab in eastern and southeastern Ukraine, perhaps with Russia seizing Mariupol on the Sea of Azov and Odessa on the Black Sea.

“Speaking of minor and full incursions or full invasion, you cannot be half-aggressive,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

Whatever Putin decides to do, he has the forces in place for a major attack and could quickly ramp up his forces for a deeper assault on Ukraine, say Western officials. …

If the Kremlin does decide to attack, the operation at its most limited would likely be a repeat of 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and seized Donetsk and Luhansk, using mainly armed proxies. “Russian forces could expand the fighting in Donbass to draw Ukraine into a conventional conflict,” warned Neil Melvin of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense policy group in London.

Others assess Putin’s ambitions may be bigger.

“Putin has begun exploring coercive options beyond the annexation of Crimea and occupation of the Donbass, neither of which has given him what he wants,” according to Michael Kimmage and Liana Fix of the German Marshall Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization.

Their assessment: “Perhaps war is the course Putin has already chosen. If so, it cannot be a minor war. A minimal objective would be to topple the Ukrainian government — not necessarily through overt military force — and to install a puppet leader. A more ambitious objective would be to divide the country in two, with the line between Russia and a rump Ukrainian state one of Putin’s choosing. The most expansive goal would be to conquer Ukraine entirely and then either to occupy it or to demand that its independence be negotiated on Putin’s terms.” https://www.voanews.com/a/putin-following-in-steps-of-peter-the-great-/6407149.html

Whether or not Vladimir Putin is attempting to follow in the footsteps of Peter the Great can be debated.

Yet, the fact that his nation has a strong military is a reality–and it will be used.

How can we be so certain of that?

The Bible has several end times prophecies that involve a nation that in modern times would have to be the one now called Russia.

Several of those look to be fulfilled within the next decade. They show a northern power leading other nations to eliminate the end time ‘daughter of Babylon,’ which will be the European Beast power.

Notice the following prophetic scriptures:

41 “Behold, a people shall come from the north, And a great nation and many kings Shall be raised up from the ends of the earth. 42 They shall hold the bow and the lance; They are cruel and shall not show mercy. Their voice shall roar like the sea; They shall ride on horses, Set in array, like a man for the battle, Against you, O daughter of Babylon.

43 “The king of Babylon has heard the report about them, And his hands grow feeble; Anguish has taken hold of him, Pangs as of a woman in childbirth.

44 “Behold, he shall come up like a lion from the floodplain of the Jordan Against the dwelling place of the strong; But I will make them suddenly run away from her.And who is a chosen man that I may appoint over her? For who is like Me? Who will arraign Me? And who is that shepherd Who will withstand Me?”

45 Therefore hear the counsel of the Lord that He has taken against Babylon, And His purposes that He has proposed against the land of the Chaldeans: Surely the least of the flock shall draw them out; Surely He will make their dwelling place desolate with them. 46 At the noise of the taking of Babylon The earth trembles, And the cry is heard among the nations. (Jeremiah 50:41-46)

24 “And I will repay Babylon And all the inhabitants of Chaldea For all the evil they have done In Zion in your sight,” says the Lord.

25 “Behold, I am against you, O destroying mountain, Who destroys all the earth,” says the Lord.”And I will stretch out My hand against you, Roll you down from the rocks, And make you a burnt mountain. 26 They shall not take from you a stone for a corner Nor a stone for a foundation, But you shall be desolate forever,” says the Lord.

27 Set up a banner in the land, Blow the trumpet among the nations! Prepare the nations against her, Call the kingdoms together against her: Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz. Appoint a general against her;Cause the horses to come up like the bristling locusts. 28 Prepare against her the nations, With the kings of the Medes, Its governors and all its rulers,All the land of his dominion. 29 And the land will tremble and sorrow; For every purpose of the Lord shall be performed against Babylon, To make the land of Babylon a desolation without inhabitant. 30 The mighty men of Babylon have ceased fighting, They have remained in their strongholds; Their might has failed, They became like women; They have burned her dwelling places, The bars of her gate are broken. 31 One runner will run to meet another, And one messenger to meet another, To show the king of Babylon that his city is taken on all sides; 32 The passages are blocked, The reeds they have burned with fire, And the men of war are terrified.

33 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel:
“The daughter of Babylon is like a threshing floor When it is time to thresh her; Yet a little while And the time of her harvest will come.” (Jeremiah 51:24-33)

Russia is the leader from the north and it controls most of the kings of the Medes. These prophecies show a powerful Russian dominated force destroying the final Babylonian Europe.

Here are more of those prophecies:

17 Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.

18 Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.

19 And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. (Isaiah 13:17-19)

11 Make the arrows bright!
Gather the shields!
The Lord has raised up the spirit of the kings of the Medes.
For His plan is against Babylon to destroy it,
Because it is the vengeance of the Lord,
The vengeance for His temple.  (Jeremiah 51:11)

And what about the Medes?

Well, their descendants are in many places including Russia and Ukraine.

The Medes and the Russians seem to have shared some history. But it is not clear to many. Notice the following:

The history of the Medes is dark and unknown. — Dmitri Ivanovich Ilovaisky …

In linguistic terms, the Russians are identified as East Slavs, that is, speakers of East Slavic, which eventually evolved into three distinct languages: Greater Russian, often simply called Russian; Ukrainian; and White Russian, or Belorussian (Belarus).

(Riasanovsky NV. Russian Identities : A Historical Survey: A Historical Survey. Oxford University Press, 2005, p.7)

The above is at the beginning of the first chapter in the book cited on the origins of the Russians and Ukrainians. The author, a professor of history emeritus from UC Berkeley.

Because of prophecies involving the Medes, I believe that Russia must either end up with more territory that Ukraine claims and/or Ukraine will ultimately cooperate with Russia militarily one day against the ‘daughter of Babylon’ European Beast power.

More on the Medes, Russia, and Ukraine can be found in the article: Russia and Ukraine: Their Origins and Prophesied Future.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 22nd, 2022 at 8:30 am and is filed under Prophecy.

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