The Telephone Room

Inside the War Museum at Kyiv is a room that hangs heavy with a silence broken only by the faint, static-laden voices from telephones suspended in the air. Each receiver whispers intercepted calls between Russian soldiers and their families captured by Ukrainian intelligence. It’s a room that doesn’t just tell a story; it screams the grotesque truth of war.

“I killed so many of those Ukrainian pigs. Mum, you would be so proud of me!” 

A young voice brags through the static. Proud. The word lingers like poison. Every receiver holds another gut-wrenching confession, another twisted monologue. These are not stories of survival or regret. They are boasts, almost gleeful in their disregard for humanity.

And then, a mother’s voice cuts through:

 “Keep doing God’s good work son!” 

Her words are laced with a chilling encouragement. She urges her son forward, not towards home, but towards more bloodshed, more destruction.

These are a tiny fraction of what the museum staff has curated—not artifacts, but stuff of pure nightmare fuel. Walking through this exhibit, the weight is unbearable. Each step feels heavier than the last, each story a new blow to my soul. And as you leave the room, you realize: these conversations are not history. They are happening right now, this very moment on some Russian’s TikTok. 

Down the hall, photographs of Russian soldiers line the walls. These “soldiers” are so young, you’d swear they should be at home playing video games or texting their mates about last weekend’s party. Instead, they stand in rubble-strewn streets, rifles in hand, eyes half-dead with confusion. Someone, somewhere, sold them a nightmare dressed up as a noble cause. They call Ukrainians “Nazis,” as though they are all comic-book villains who deserve nothing but a hail of bullets. But the tragedy is, they believe it with every fiber of their being—like some cursed gospel hammered into their skulls from childhood.

This isn’t just a matter of teens duped by propaganda; we’ve got documented war crimes on our hands. Many of these wide-eyed soldiers—too naïve to spot the con—are directly participating in acts that blatantly violate the Geneva Convention. The museum’s recordings serve as grim proof that these aren’t baseless accusations - they’re prideful confessions of real people tearing lives apart.

But war crimes don’t happen in a vacuum; they’re the monstrous harvest of a leadership that has chosen cruelty as a political tool. Nationalism - the seductive cancer has turned a generation of Russians into raging zealots. It doesn’t matter if you’re well-educated in the textbooks or the Scripture: once nationalism grips your mind, compassion and reason shrivel up, replaced by blind obedience to a flag or a charismatic leader.

Their youth and inexperience drips from them in sad little moments. I’ve watched them scavenge broken apartments, snatching up cheap washing machines, battered microwaves, and—God help us—ceramic toilets. The walls sometimes have luxurious items left behind—like a Gucci fur coat that would fetch a fortune on the black market. But they leave it hanging, untouched, because they don’t recognize its worth. They only see immediate survival: a washing machine that could be sold for a handful of rubles, or perhaps a toilet to replace the half-frozen latrine back home. It’s a window into the kind of despair they’ve crawled out from—so poor and so cut off from the world that the concept of “expensive fashion” might as well be alien technology. It crushes me because it lays bare just how limited their world is—how they’ve never been allowed to dream beyond a second hand washing machine.

And so we have children—because let’s be honest, many of them are children—convinced they’re the saviors of Russia’s honor. They’re not just foot soldiers in a geopolitical chess match; they’re brainwashed pawns, slashing and burning through towns, kidnapping futures on the orders of those who’d never stoop to picking through the wreckage themselves. You see them blink in genuine confusion when a Ukrainian mother clings to her dead child and cries, “Why?” They don’t have answers—just rifles, stolen toilets, and a sense of moral certainty hammered into their heads by propaganda.

I think about their mothers, waiting in villages so remote they barely exist on a map. Mothers who once tucked them in at night, who whispered lullabies about hope and love, who sent them off to school with the promise of a better future. Did they know, even then, that the world had nothing to offer their children but rifles and ruin?

And even now in Canada, I still think about them —so young, so lost. What do they dream about, if they dream at all? Do they see their childhoods in flashes as they lie awake at night in the freezing cold, clutching stolen toilets like lifelines? Do they remember their first loves, their first laughs, their first sense of belonging? Or has propaganda stolen that away from them too?

I’ll be honest: I hate them for what they’ve done to my Ukrainian brothers and sisters. But I hate the vile man who created this generation of Russians even more. His insatiable greed and monstrous ambition cast a shadow darker than any comparison could ever capture.

We foolishly believed we had closed the book on the darkest chapters of totalitarian cruelty. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the “end of history,” suggesting that liberal democracy had secured its ultimate victory. He couldn’t have been more wrong—what he mistook for the grand finale was merely the intermission to an even darker second act.

The reemergence of authoritarianism and raw nationalism is now playing out in real time, and the body count climbs higher every day. This new wave of darkness devours not just Ukrainian lives but Russian lives, too—slowly and painfully erased from existence by bullet and drone, all for the sake of one man’s twisted ambitions.  This is truly the war of our lifetimes. 

One question gnaws at me, day after day, as I pass by these ghostly-eyed invaders: How do we deprogram them ethically? If I tried to show them footage of their own crimes, would it pierce the ironclad indoctrination, or would it break them beyond repair? Is it more cruel to reveal that they’ve been lied to, or to let them stumble on in ignorance until a merciful bullet finds them? 

Kuyperian ethics talks about acknowledging the sovereignty of God over every sphere of life and that we should respect the dignity of every human—even these brainwashed aggressors. But what do we do when their dignity is buried so deep beneath militaristic lies and hatred that they can’t recognize common humanity anymore?

This is where I struggle with Kuyper’s call for grace. He would urge mercy even for the most deluded soul. Frankly, this is where I part ways with my Calvinistic education. I believe Kuyper is wholly mistaken—these souls are far too tainted, too poisoned. Redemption is no longer theirs to claim.

Though I sense the real path to salvation lies in creating spaces—both literal and figurative—where truth can be revealed in small, survivable doses. Spaces where they have a chance to unlearn their prejudices before guilt consumes them entirely.

You may think me cruel, but if you had seen the atrocities I’ve witnessed, you might understand. For the unconvinced, I implore you: watch Intercepted (2024), the haunting, award-winning documentary by Oksana Karpovysch, or look up the harrowing images of mass graves in Izium. Only then will you grasp why I write with such cold finality—there is scarcely a shred of humanity left in these Russian children.

Surely, the zombie children will relentlessly march on—another wave of half-trained, half-frozen youths, blindly trying to unmake a country they barely comprehend. And I keep wondering: who truly wins when the only trophies are cheap washing machines, stolen toilets, and an endless river of tears? Certainly not the children who will grow up without fathers, nor the mothers who sift through rubble for a final glimpse of home. And definitely not the Russian soldiers who may one day wake to the bitter truth: the real enemy was never across the border—it was inside their own heads all along.