How the Empire, the Kremlin, and a Bleeding Nation Climb Toward the Fire
A Word Not Spoken From the Pulpits
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over the churches of the empire when the killing is happening somewhere far away and to people whose names we cannot pronounce. We have grown accustomed to it. We heard it during the long agony of Iraq. We heard it over Gaza. We hear it now, week by week, as the war in Ukraine grinds into its fifth year and the men who command the arsenals of the earth feel about with their hands for the next rung of the ladder. The sanctuaries are quiet. The flags still stand beside the altars. And the Prince of Peace, who wept over a city He could not save from its own appetite for the sword, weeps again over ours.
I write, as I always do, not as a partisan of one flag against another, but as a citizen of the empire who is commanded by his Lord to tell the truth about the violence his own nation funds, blesses, and pretends not to see. The truth this week is plain and terrible: the war between Russia and Ukraine is not winding down toward peace. It is winding up toward something far worse. The American intelligence community itself, in its own 2026 threat assessment, has named the danger more honestly than any preacher I have heard: the gravest threat that Russia poses to the United States, it says, is “an escalatory spiral in an ongoing conflict such as Ukraine,” one that could lead to “direct hostilities, including nuclear exchanges.” Read that again. The men who profit from this war, who staff its agencies and write its budgets, have written down in their own hand that we are climbing toward the fire.
The Long Provocation
As with the war against Iran, the citizens of the empire prefer to imagine that this conflict erupted from nowhere on a single morning in February of 2022, the cruelty of one man in the Kremlin descending upon an innocent continent like weather. And as with Iran, this is a comforting lie, and like most comforting lies it serves to absolve us.
Let me be precise, for the radical Christian conscience requires precision and refuses both of the easy partisan stories. The first lie is the one our televisions tell: that Russia’s invasion was an unprovoked bolt from a clear sky, and that the only moral question is how many more weapons we should ship to Kyiv. The second lie is the mirror image, beloved of a certain kind of contrarian: that Vladimir Putin is merely a misunderstood statesman responding reasonably to Western insolence, and that the Ukrainians who die in their apartment blocks are somehow the authors of their own destruction.
Both lies must be refused. The invasion of Ukraine was an act of aggression, a sin, a violation of the commandment that forbids killing, and no recitation of NATO’s eastward expansion can wash the blood of Bucha from the hands that spilled it. And yet it is also true that the empire spent thirty years gathering the kindling. It broke the assurances given to the collapsing Soviet Union. It pushed its military alliance, rung by rung, up to the very doorstep of a paranoid and wounded power, and then expressed astonishment when the wounded power behaved as wounded powers have always behaved. To say this is not to excuse Moscow. It is to indict the entire machinery of empire and counter-empire, the whole demonic apparatus by which great powers convert human beings into chips on a table. Russia struck the match. But the empire, as it so often does, had been stacking the woodpile for a generation. “What causes fights and quarrels among you?” asks the Apostle James. “Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” (James 4:1). The desires of empires are simply the desires of men, magnified to the scale of nations and armed with fission.
The Rungs of the Ladder
Consider, soberly, how far up the ladder we have already climbed, and how casually each rung was taken.
The Russian army, unable to win a swift victory, turned its rage upon the civilian. Through this past winter and spring, it has hurled wave after wave of missiles and drones at the cities of Ukraine, hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles in a single night, knocking out the water, the heat, and the light upon which ordinary families depend in the cold. Only days ago, a strike upon a Kyiv apartment block killed more than two dozen sleeping people. This is terrorism by any honest definition, the deliberate breaking of the bodies of the innocent to break the will of a nation, and the Christian must name it as the abomination it is.
But the empire and its clients have been climbing the same ladder from the other side. Ukraine now strikes deep inside Russia, sending drones hundreds of miles past the border to burn the refineries and rattle the windows of Moscow itself. Washington, which not long ago restrained these strikes for fear of exactly the spiral its own analysts now warn of, has reversed itself: the Trump administration is permitting Ukraine to strike ever deeper into Russian territory, sharing the intelligence that guides the missiles, and tightening the economic noose with new sanctions upon the Russian energy giants and pressure upon the nations that still buy Russian oil. The empire calls this leverage. Scripture calls it adding fuel to a fire one claims to wish extinguished.
And the Kremlin answers in the only grammar it knows. It fired its new intermediate-range Oreshnik missile into western Ukraine, near the Polish frontier, a weapon designed to carry a warhead far heavier than high explosive, precisely to remind the watching capitals of Europe what it is capable of. It has staged vast military exercises rehearsing the use of nuclear systems. Its aircraft and drones have violated the airspace of Estonia, Latvia, and Poland, forcing the Atlantic alliance to convene its councils and to ask, each time, whether this is the incident that triggers the clause by which a war between two nations becomes a war among thirty. Each rung looks small from below. Each is taken with the confidence that the men on the other side will surely be reasonable, will surely stop, will surely not climb higher. This is precisely the confidence that has preceded every catastrophe in the history of the species.
The Peace That Is Not Peace
We are told, of course, that peace is at hand. The emperor has produced a plan, twenty points and then nineteen, shuttled between Abu Dhabi and Mar-a-Lago by army secretaries and envoys, and we are invited to believe that the slaughter is nearly over. Would that it were so. But let us not mistake the management of a war for the making of a peace. The likeliest fruit of these negotiations, the analysts tell us, is not reconciliation but a frozen conflict, a war merely paused, its causes intact, its hatreds banked like coals, its territories carved between exhausted armies who will rearm and resume when the season turns. Russia rejects any Western peacekeepers and promises to treat them as targets. Ukraine cannot accept the amputation of its eastern provinces. And the empire, having helped to engineer the disaster, now offers itself as the indispensable broker of a calm it cannot guarantee.
This is what the empire calls peace: a ceasefire on imperial terms, with the war machine intact and the next war already gestating. It is not the peace of Christ. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you,” said our Lord. “I do not give to you as the world gives” (John 14:27). The world gives peace as a pause between profits. The Kingdom gives peace as the end of the love of the sword altogether.
What the Disciple of the Lamb Must Do
So, what are we to do, we who confess that Jesus is Lord and that Caesar, in Washington or Moscow or Kyiv, is not? Jean Lasserre, in his great work War and the Gospel, reminds us that the Christian’s first allegiance is never to the survival of a state but to the commandments of God, and that those commandments do not pause for emergencies. “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus told Peter in the garden, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). He said this, let us remember, in the one situation where armed defense seemed most justified of all: the defense of the sinless Son of God against an unjust arrest. If the sword was forbidden there, it is forbidden here.
The radical Christian refuses, therefore, to choose a side in the contest of the sword-bearers, because to do so is to bless the sword. We do not cheer the missiles that fall on Moscow any more than we cheer the missiles that fall on Kyiv. We do not pretend that one empire’s bombs are righteous and another’s wicked. We weep for the Russian conscript and the Ukrainian grandmother alike, for both bear the image of God, and the God of the Gospel does not divide humanity into the deserving and the disposable, however eagerly the empire does.
And we refuse, by every lawful means available to us, to finance the spiral. This is the unglamorous heart of the matter, and it is why I have spent so many words on this site teaching the citizens of the empire to understand the economy that funds the warfare state. Every weapon that climbs another rung of this ladder is paid for with money, and a great deal of that money is rendered up by us, willingly, on the fifteenth of April and in every transaction the warfare state taxes and inflates. To withhold unto Caesar what our consciences cannot in good faith surrender, to starve the machine rather than feed it, to refuse the silence of the churches that have for too long blessed what Christ would have wept over: this is the obedience the hour demands.
The doomsday clock of this conflict is being wound by men who believe, as men climbing toward fire always believe, that they can stop one rung short of the flame. They cannot. “He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth” (Psalm 46:9), and He has appointed no other instrument for it but a people who will not pick up the sword, will not pay for the sword, and will not be silent while their neighbors are fed to the sword.
Let us be those people. Let us refuse the bloody ladder whole.
May we have the courage to climb back down.
Praise Be to God.
