Is Vladimir Putin Really So Bad?

Is Vladimir Putin Really So Bad?

Vladimir Putin ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO/AFP/Getty Images
Stalin was the second-biggest mass murderer in history. Does Russian President Vladimir Putin really have a pattern of evil on that level?

By Richard Palmer • December 22

The following is from the Trumpet Brief sent out yesterday. These daily e-mails contain personal messages from the Trumpet staff. Click here to join the nearly 20,000 members of our mailing list, so you don’t miss another message.

“Putin has a long pattern of diabolical evil on the level of Joseph Stalin.” That’s a strong statement, from Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry’s free booklet The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia.’
Stalin was the second-biggest mass murderer in history. Does Russian President Vladimir Putin really have a pattern of evil on that level?
Anyone who doubts it should read Brian Glyn Williams and Steve Matteo’s article from Real Clear Defense this week titled “Putin the ‘Destroyer of Cities’” (warning: it does include some strong language).
It’s subtitled “8 Reasons for Americans (Including Trump) to Fear Russia’s Brutal Ruler” and here are their reasons:
Putin was a member of the notorious kgb.
Putin rose to power on a lie.
Putin solidified his power via a genocidal war.
Before attacking our democracy, Putin systematically dismantled the free press and subverted democracy in Russia.
Putin invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea.
Putin’s brinkmanship with nato risks war.
Putin committed extensive war crimes in Syria.
Putin attacked U.S. democratic elections.
It’s a long piece that is packed with solid evidence and paints a stark picture of the Russian dictator. Here are some of the highlights: “While some have forgotten just what an evil the kgb secret police, or Committee for State Security, was (or have tried to relativize and claim that the cia is and was the same thing as the kgb), the truth is that the kgb was responsible for the death and imprisonment of millions. The kgb, it should be recalled, ran the trans-Eurasian prison camp system known as the Gulag located primarily in the frozen wastes of Siberia. …
“Putin’s mindset and worldview are irrevocably shaped by his decades spent as a member of a vast army of police who spied on their own people, arrested them, tortured them, and killed them by the millions over the course of 70 years through forced famines, execution, ethnic cleansing, or death-by-prison-camp.”
Of course, there are more recent examples of the kgb’s (now called the fsb) behavior. The attempted assassination of Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 and the successful poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko on the streets of London in 2006 are among the most well-known. There have been many other less high-profile deaths. This organization, along with the gru—Russia’s military intelligence—have been funneling weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Russia’s intelligence service is, right now, helping to kill American troops.
Perhaps the example that illustrates Putin’s evil most clearly is his conduct during the Second Chechen War. Williams and Matteo wrote: “From October 1999 to January 2000, Putin then indiscriminately unleashed the vast firepower of the transcontinental Russian Federation on the breakaway statelet of Chechnya. Ballistic scud missiles rained down on busy markets on the Chechen capital of Grozny, slaughtering civilians; strategic bombers flattened neighborhoods with incendiary bombs in the deadliest air attacks since the Allied destruction of Dresden in 1945, and mountain hamlets were set afire with napalm and fuel-air explosives that turned oxygen to fire.
“He declared anyone living in the capital of Chechnya, Grozny, to be a ‘terrorist.’ In what was to be the heaviest aerial bombardment of a city since World War ii, Grozny, the largest city on the north Caucasus flank, was tactically obliterated in what the Russians gleefully described as ‘rubbleization.’ … As tens of thousands of Chechens were slaughtered to avenge the 300 Russians killed in the mysterious bombings that no Chechens were ever convicted for, hundreds of thousands of this targeted race fled for their lives.
“As the terrified Chechens did so, Russian aircraft bombed the refugees’ columns, and ground troops arrested tens of thousands of Chechen men who were labeled in blanket terms as ‘terrorists.’ Any Chechen fighter was also labeled a ‘terrorist,’ and many who were captured were tortured to death or summarily executed.
“Thousands of the Chechen civilian men swept up by the Russians were never seen again, except in the rare cases where mass graves containing their bodies were unearthed by foreign journalists (Russian journalists were by now too afraid to report on such war crimes). In many cases, the bodies, often wrapped in barbed wire, could not be identified because their faces and hands had been cut off. …
“When the genocidal war that saw many such cases of torture and extrajudicial execution was over, as much as one fifth of Chechnya’s population of 1 million was dead and Grozny was totally obliterated. However, Putin had sealed his reputation as a hard-liner who could protect Mother Russia from its enemies, real or imagined. As Yeltsin retired due to poor health, Putin won the subsequent presidential election, and the unknown kgbnik was now master of the largest nation on Earth.”
Russia’s behavior in Syria, then, should come as no surprise.
“It should be recalled that the Russian Air Force had turned Grozny, once the most beautiful city in the northern Caucasus, into ‘the Caucasian Hiroshima.’ With zero effort to avoid civilian casualties, the Russians similarly obliterated Aleppo, house by house and block by block, using weapons banned by the Geneva Conventions in civilian populated areas. Massive Tupolev bombers carpet-bombed entire neighborhoods, and cruise missiles fired from the Caspian Sea rained down on targets that were inevitably described as ‘terrorists,’ no matter where they landed.
“Tragically, over and over again hospitals filled with war-wounded patients were targeted by the Russian Air Force as the U.S. government, the United Nations and human rights groups loudly condemned the air-born slaughter of civilians. … But Putin was deaf to the universal condemnation and in the end, Aleppo, like Grozny before it, was ‘rubbleized,’ and thousands of bodies lay dead in the rubble of the once beautiful city. It was this attack that outraged the world that earned Putin the grim moniker ‘Destroyer of Cities.’”
Unfortunately, this subject has become heavily politicized in the U.S. To some, criticizing Putin means you’re criticizing U.S. President Donald Trump. But this should not be a partisan issue. Both sides of the political spectrum have underestimated Vladimir Putin. It was Hillary Clinton who launched the reset with Russia. It was Barack Obama who promised that he’d be friendlier to Russia if he was reelected. If anything, it is the Democrats who have the longer history of being soft on Russia.
Unfortunately, Williams and Matteo make this a partisan issue by buying in to the unfounded narrative that Donald Trump won the election with Russia’s help. Trumpet writer Andrew Miiller has the full story on that here.
Nonetheless, Williams and Matteo’s article is a powerful reminder of why America should beware of Russia. It’s a warning that Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry gave shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration in his article “Should Donald Trump Trust Vladimir Putin?”
Mr. Flurry wrote: “This man is not just an authoritarian leader! He is an evil, ruthless, vindictive agent with Soviet-style methods of psychological warfare, assassination and war! As one Russian journalist put it, Putin ‘is a supersize model of the kgb.’
“This is a man with beastly power and with a beastly desire to rule the world! He is a vengeful, monstrous friend of the devil with all sorts of anti-God policies. He is steeped in secrecy, deception, manipulation, aggression, intimidation, coercion and force, and there is far more about him that we do not know.
“What will happen to a country that will ‘get along very well with Vladimir Putin’?
“That’s not just a rhetorical question. The closer our president and our nation gets to Putin, the further it gets from what is good and what is right—the further it gets from God! That is deadly dangerous.”
The rise of Putin in Russia is also a detailed fulfillment of a Bible prophecy that exactly this type of evil individual will lead Russia in the end time.
It’s something I talked about in a recent lecture, which was played on Monday’s Trumpet Daily Radio Show.
And it’s something that’s discussed and proved in much greater detail in Mr. Flurry’s free booklet The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia.’ I really encourage you to request, read and study this booklet. It’s a wonderful opportunity to prove how accurate and detailed the Bible is when discussing current events. And because of that, it’s inspiring. It is unpleasant to talk about evil men like Vladimir Putin and the things he has done. But there are few things more positive than seeing that there is a great God in control of world events—one who has a plan to bring all such evil to an end.