The city is rubble. Not a single house or building stands—block after block, mile after mile. There is only shattered brick, splintered wood and broken flesh. Tens of thousands of slain men, women and children rot under an indifferent sun.

Russian shells and bombs have hollowed or flattened apartment buildings, hotels, businesses and homes into what the United Nations labels “the most destroyed city on Earth.” The conquerors raised their tricolor over the ruins and proclaimed it part of Mother Russia.

This city is not Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Bucha, Izium, Kharkiv, Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk or any of the other Ukrainian cities where Russian forces have recently perpetrated massacres and destruction.

The city is Grozny, the capital of the predominantly Muslim nation of Chechnya, which declared independence from Russia in 1991. And this extreme Russian devastation took place not in 2022 or 2023, but mainly in 1999.

Three years earlier, Russia had signed a peace agreement with the Chechens, not because Russia accepted Chechen independence, but because its military had been losing to Chechen forces and needed time to regroup. “Peacetime” meant building up firepower. The Russians returned to Chechnya in 1999, bombing Grozny to rubble and killing one in every four people in the entire nation.

With their brutal reconquest of Grozny and the rest of Chechnya, the Russians added some 6,700 square miles to their already vast territory. But they also added something else: people.

Nearly 1 million Chechens survived Russia’s bombs and bullets and became Russians, some of the most fertile in the nation. A generation later, their numbers now exceed 1.5 million.

And here is the twist: These Chechens who suffered so horrendously at the hands of the Russians during the Chechen Wars are now fighting shoulder-to-shoulder alongside Russian forces in a new war.

‘We Will Carry Out His Orders’

“The president took the right decision,” Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said on Feb. 26, 2022. Two days prior, Russian President Vladimir Putin had sent troops by the tens of thousands across the borders into Ukraine, expanding a long-simmering conflict into a full-scale war of conquest. Chechen soldiers, known as “Kadyrovites,” were among the Russians fighting under Putin’s leadership. Kadyrov said, “We will carry out his orders under any circumstances.”

Ramzan and his father, Akhmad, had fought fiercely against Russia in the 1990s, but the Chechen Wars ended largely because Putin formed an alliance with the two men. After the violence ended, Putin gave Chechnya large economic subsidies to rebuild what his forces had destroyed. Ramzan Kadyrov became Chechnya’s leader in 2007 and has used these funds to amass a personal fortune impressive even by Putin crony standards. Putin has also given Kadyrov a relatively free hand over Chechnya: As long as he keeps pro-independence elements suppressed, he can rule how he sees fit. And the way Kadyrov sees fit is to run Chechnya as a dictatorship that brutally eliminates dissent, including the pro-independence sentiment he once fought for.

Putin has successfully purchased Kadyrov’s loyalty and enabled him to create a corrupt Chechen elite who are fiercely loyal to Russia. Chechens, who fought and bled for independence, now operate in full subjugation to Moscow, even to the point of fighting, bleeding and dying to invade another country and “carry out his orders under any circumstances.”

“Putin has actually bought Kadyrov,” said Sheikh Mansur, head of the Chechen Sheikh Mansur Battalion. “He fed him a lavish meal, then ordered him to go and invade Ukraine.”

Kadyrov, who calls himself “Putin’s foot solider,” eagerly obeyed that order. In May 2023, he announced that the Russian invasion had included more than 26,000 of his men, and tens of thousands more were on the way. He said that among the Russian front lines were three of his own sons, ages 14, 15 and 16.

The Kadyrovites helped kill hundreds of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, and other areas near the capital, Kyiv. They have also been used in the notorious Siege of Mariupol, and as barrier troops all along the front lines: Barrier troops execute Russian soldiers who refuse to advance or try to desert.

“They have been co-opted by the Russian regime,” said Jean-Francois Ratelle, a Chechen conflict expert at the University of Ottawa. “They have been given weapons, jobs and billions of dollars from the state.”

Some Chechens have not forgotten or forgiven Russia’s 10 years of brutal war against them. Some are currently fighting for Ukraine against Russia, partly for vengeance and partly hoping for eventual Chechen independence. But their numbers are measly compared to those Chechens who have been co-opted by their captor and are now risking their lives to help Russia capture another nation.

Kadyrov’s Chechnya is not the only recently conquered region supplying cannon fodder for the Russian Army.

Eastern Ukraine

In early 2014, Russians and Russian-backed separatists took over government buildings in Eastern Ukraine. They proclaimed the region to be two new nations: Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. In September 2022, Russia officially annexed these two “nations” and merged their armed forces into the Russian military.

Many of the men from these areas willingly fight for the Russians. Many others remain loyal to Ukraine.

And yet, as Hugh Williamson of Human Rights Watch says, “Russian authorities openly and unlawfully force men in occupied areas of Ukraine to fight against their own country. Less visible is their practice of pressuring Ukrainian civilians in detention, who have nowhere to hide or flee, to join the Russian forces.”

The numbers of the willing and the forced add up to some 35,000 Ukrainians who have fought on Russia’s side since the war went full-scale.

Demographic Death Spiral

Recruiting Chechen and East Ukrainian soldiers is of considerable value to Putin, partly because Russian society is rapidly aging and dying.

Since the early 1960s, Russians have not produced enough children to replace themselves. Russian women now bear an average lower than 1.5, far below the 2.1 rate necessary to keep a population from shrinking.

Combine that abysmal fertility rate with soaring emigration and stratospheric excess deaths, and it is clear that Russia’s demographics are terminal. This is especially true of ethnic Russians, whose fertility rates are generally far below those of Russia’s many ethnic minority groups. Putin has often warned about this problem: He told his people in 2021, “146 million for such a vast territory is insufficient.”

But the decline has only accelerated, partly due to increasing despair among Russians and partly because many are dying in the war or fleeing Russia to avoid it. Russia’s population today is around 143.9 million and falling.

This equates to only 8 million men of traditional military age, many of whom are needed to man civilian jobs. Since Russia is on course to hit half a million casualties by the end of this year, it is clear that these numbers are painfully finite.

In April, Russian Gen. Andrei Gurulyov explained to 3PTK a major factor that has kept Russia from quickly conquering Ukraine: “If we mobilize people en masse today, what are we going to pull them away from? Away from the steering wheel? The machine shop?” he asked. “We already have a very serious labor shortage.”

By conquering regions such as Chechnya and Eastern Ukraine, Russia does more than merely gain strategic territory against the West. It also subjugates millions of people to counter its dwindling manpower shortage and slow its demographic death spiral.

As commentator Jake Broe said last year, “This land grab in Ukraine was always also a people grab” (emphasis added).

There are 44 million Ukrainians. While many adults would never willingly assimilate into Russia, Broe explained that children are a different story. “The goal was always to steal the children of Ukraine,” he said. “Russify them, make them loyal to Putin and the Russian empire.”

In July 2023, Russian legislator Grigory Karasin, head of the upper chamber’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, dropped a bombshell: “In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine.”

Seven hundred thousand children.

This is a stunning number. While bombing and shelling Ukraine, the Russians have “given refuge” to what might by now be approaching 1 million children of their Ukrainian victims.

There is evidence that many have been undergoing “patriotic” training to indoctrinate them into the Russian mindset of unyielding victimhood and extreme historic revisionism. An investigation by Russian-language news organizations iStories and Verstka published in April found that many of the kidnapped Ukrainian children are now wards of the Russian state and attending a cadet school in Saratov region.

This is twisted beyond words.

Fodder for Future Wars

One of Putin’s objectives for his current wars is to conquer new peoples, indoctrinate them, train them, and make them take their turn as “Russian” soldiers, conquering new peoples and nations in Russia’s future wars.

Wait. Future wars? What about arguments that, if Ukraine just surrenders parts of its eastern territory, Russia will be pacified?

Recall the peace deal Russia signed with Chechnya in 1996. Three years later, it unleashed even greater devastation on Grozny and Chechnya. Serious analysts understand that any peace agreement with Ukraine now would likewise be temporary, foolish and deadly. They also look at Russia’s recent history with Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Crimea and even Syria, and see that the current war on Ukraine is not an anomaly. Nor is it the final piece of the puzzle.

“Perhaps the scariest takeaway from the Ukraine War is that it’s just beginning,” geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan wrote on Feb. 9, 2023. “Russia is looking to reclaim enough land for them to reach the geographical strong points that were once part of the Soviet Union.”

Putin famously called the Soviet Union’s collapse the 20th century’s “greatest geopolitical catastrophe.” It is clear that he aims to reverse the “catastrophe” by retaking the Baltic nations, Moldova, the Caucasus and even Central Asia and parts of Poland and Romania. Russian leaders believe they need control over all this peripheral land to withstand—and to make—strategic threats. And they know they cannot win the future wars over those territories with an army of 80-year-old soldiers.

If Russia is successful in the current war, many Ukrainians—maybe millions—will likely be Russified and absorbed by the Russian war machine. They will then perpetuate this same dark cycle the Chechens are currently perpetuating, conquering more peoples from other nations so that still more nations can be attacked.

Yet even with such conquests, Russia’s demographics are still worsening. For aging ethnic Russians and for Vladimir Putin, 71, the window of opportunity for rebuilding the Russian superpower is closing.

The ‘Prince’ of Russia

Vladimir Putin’s ambition is as vast as his evil is glaring. And it takes on great significance when examined in light of Bible prophecy. In the September 2014 Trumpet, editor in chief Gerald Flurry explained: “We need to watch Vladimir Putin closely. He is the ‘prince of Rosh’ that God inspired Ezekiel to write about 2,500 years ago!” (theTrumpet.com/11979).

Mr. Flurry’s article examines Bible prophecies about a multinational Asian power that will emerge in the near future and field an army of 200 million soldiers (Revelation 9:16; 16:12). He called special attention to Ezekiel 38:2, which calls the man who will lead this army the “prince of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” (Young’s Literal Translation).

Meshech and Tubal are the ancient names of the modern Russian cities of Moscow and Tobolsk. Rosh is a variation of Rus, an ancient name for Russia. These designations are supported by the Benson Commentary on the Old and New Testaments, the Jamieson, Fausset and Brown Commentary and other sources. (Vladimir Putin himself justifies his invasion of Ukraine largely by appealing to the history of the “Ancient Rus.”)

The book of Ezekiel describes future military campaigns that will be carried out by this Asian power led by the “prince of Rosh.” Placing these prophecies alongside Putin’s history of aggression, Mr. Flurry wrote: “I strongly believe Vladimir Putin is going to lead the 200 million-man army. Just look at the power he already has. Can you think of any other Russian politician who could become so powerful and have the will to lead Russia into the crisis of crises? I see nobody else on the horizon who could do that” (ibid).

This army will be far larger than any ever assembled in human history. Most of the troops will come from nations that ally with Russia under Putin’s power, such as China. But Putin’s campaigns to conquer other nations such as Chechnya and Ukraine could also help the forces reach this stunning size.

Calamitous years lie ahead for Russia, Ukraine and the entire world. And the “Prince of Rosh” is thinking “now or never.” But in his booklet The Prophesied ‘Prince of Russia,’ Mr. Flurry stresses that the coming age of extreme calamity will be short, and it will give way to a hope-filled future.

“Vladimir Putin is a sign, literally a sign … of one of the most inspiring messages in the Bible,” he writes. “What we are seeing in Russia ultimately leads to the transition from man ruling man to God ruling man! … A great transition is about to occur.”

The same Bible that foretold the evil that Putin’s Russia is unleashing and will increasingly unleash on the world forecasts that beyond all the violence and suffering, there is extraordinary hope. There will be real peace for the peoples of Russia, Chechnya, Ukraine and the whole world.