“And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.” Matthew 24:6-9

The following headline is taken from The Australian May 1st, 2022, one of our leading conservative newspapers in Australia

It’s a whole new war … and one Putin can’t win

The West has moved from supporting Ukraine to actively seeking the total defeat of Russia.

Welcome to the new cold war. That is the blunt message from Washington to Vladimir Putin this week as the fighting in Ukraine increas­ingly threatens to spread beyond its borders.

After more than two months of the war, the Biden administration this week recast its ambitions for Ukraine well beyond its initial aim of trying from a distance to help Kyiv repel the Russian invaders.

An increasingly confident US is now framing the conflict as a generational battle to weaken Putin’s Russia and stop Moscow from any future military adventurism.

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things it has done in invading Ukraine,” said the usually cautiously spoken US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin.

“It has already lost a lot of military capability, and a lot of its troops. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

This was no thought bubble. Austin’s comments were backed by other senior administration figures, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken who, along with Austin, visited Kyiv this week.

“We don’t know how the rest of this war will unfold, but we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around for a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene,” Blinken declared.

During their visit to Kyiv, Blinken and Austin announced an additional $US713m in financing to pay for weapons for Ukraine and allied countries. In a sign of Biden’s determination on Ukraine, his administration this week unveiled a massive $US33bn request to Congress for a new round of aid – an eye-watering amount that is equivalent to about half the size of Russia’s defence budget.

This new and more assertive posture by Washington has been strongly backed by other Western allies but it also carries with it a greater risk that the war in Ukraine could eventually spread beyond its borders.

Biden and European leaders have been buoyed by what they see as a sniff of an unlikely victory in the Ukraine conflict or at least the avoidance of the catastrophic defeat that was once feared.

More than $US5 billion in Western arms has now been committed to Ukraine including new American battlefield aerial drones, modern US and Canadian artillery, antitank weapons from Norway and others, armoured vehicles, anti-ship missiles from Britain and Stinger counter-air missiles from the US, Denmark and others.

Austin said he wanted America’s allies to have “a common and transparent understanding of Ukraine’s near-term security requirements because we are going to keep moving heaven and earth so that we can meet them”.

What’s more, both Britain and the US have willingly provoked Moscow by expressing open support for Ukraine using Western-supplied weapons to strike Russian territory. Ukrainian forces are suspected of having caused a series of explosions in southern Russia and a fire at an ammunition depot this week.

British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace this week claimed that 15,000 Russians have been killed, 2000 armoured vehicles destroyed, and 60 helicopters and jet fighters downed in the fighting so far. That casualty toll, if accurate, is more than double what the US lost during 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Wallace also said Russia’s massive invasion army of 120 battalions had suffered a staggering 25 per cent loss in combat strength.

Jesus said this is but the beginning of birth pains but we know that birth pains intensify and this is what we will see as we approach the prophesied last seven years prior to Jesus’ return to this earth to establish His Millennial Kingdom.