By the Rev. Verill Richardson Farquhar
As Britannia lies upon her deathbed, the hour is well past for euphemism. There has been enough managed language, diplomatic language, party-political language, therapeutic language and the careful language of professional evasion. There comes a moment when the physician must stop rearranging the sheets and tell the family that the patient is dying.
John Wesley approached his own death after a life of extraordinary exertion. He had crossed the country preaching Christ, organizing societies, forming disciples, confronting social degradation and calling sinners to repentance. Those gathered around him recorded that, summoning what strength remained, he twice declared:
“The best of all is, God is with us.”
It was a fitting conclusion to a robust life of gospel proclamation. Wesley did not imagine that divine presence excused human obedience; he understood it as the source of obedience. God was with them, and therefore they preached, prayed, organized, endured persecution, confronted evil and sought the transformation of men and society.
Britannia’s final confession may be very different.
She lies before us cold, emaciated and frail. Her shield has fallen from her hand. Her trident lies beside the bed. Her white garments are sullied by blood, hypocrisy and accumulated national sin. The nation that once sent missionaries across oceans now prosecutes silent prayer, celebrates the mutilation of human nature, destroys its unborn children and speaks of war with the moral vanity of an empire that has forgotten both its limits and its God.
If Britannia could still speak honestly, the words coming from her lips would not be Wesley’s triumphant affirmation. They would be the terrible antithesis:
“Worst of all, God is against us.”
Let me state the warning plainly at the beginning, because everything that follows depends upon it. I believe that if Britain makes war against Russia in its present condition—unrepentant, self-righteous, spiritually apostate and presuming upon the favor of God—it will not merely encounter Russian arms. It will encounter the judgment of Almighty God.
I shall say it again.
If Britain fights Russia while refusing to repent of its own abominations, Britain must not assume that God will stand behind the Union Jack. A nation can enter battle singing hymns and still march beneath divine judgment. It can possess sophisticated weapons, intelligence networks, aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, yet discover that its greatest adversary is neither in Moscow nor upon the battlefield. The most terrible possibility is that the God whose favor it presumes upon has set His face against it. He has.
The Flags Have Faded
The euphoria has gone. The Ukrainian flags that appeared upon every government building, corporate logo and social-media profile have faded in the weather. What was presented as an imminent triumph of democratic virtue has become a protracted furnace in which Ukrainian and Russian men are consumed while Western politicians congratulate themselves from a safe distance.
Ukraine marked its thirty-fifth Independence Day on 24 August 2026. European leaders arrived in Kyiv to demonstrate solidarity and promise additional military assistance, including further support for Ukrainian missile production. The political theatre was deliberate: a gathering intended to signify that Ukraine still possessed the backing of Europe. Yet the appearance of sovereignty must not be confused with its substance. Ukraine remains militarily and financially dependent upon foreign states for its ability to continue the war. Its independence is proclaimed ceremonially while its next breath depends upon decisions made in London, Paris, Brussels, Washington and other capitals. (
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That does not make Russia’s intervention righteous. Nor does it make the suffering of Ukrainians imaginary. Russia invaded Ukraine. No Christian analysis should conceal Russian responsibility merely because Western governments are hypocritical.
But neither does Russia’s culpability baptize every Western action. It does not render the Ukrainian government incorruptible, every Ukrainian military formation wholesome, every NATO escalation wise or every criticism of the war a species of Kremlin propaganda. A war might contain an aggressor without turning everyone opposing that aggressor into an angel.
Britain’s political class has treated Ukraine less as a nation to be saved than as a battlefield upon which Russia may be weakened. Ukrainian men provide the bodies; Western governments provide enough weapons to continue the struggle but not necessarily enough to end it. Every new escalation is presented as the measure that will finally bring peace, yet peace continually recedes while the graves multiply. The war—the Special Military Operation—is managed at both ends. Consider that.
Odessa remains central to Russia’s strategic ambitions, but whether Russia will eventually capture it cannot be stated as established fact. It is a prediction, not a report. What can be said is that the war has already placed the future territorial integrity of Ukraine in profound doubt. What remains when the firing stops—an intact state, a partitioned state, a neutralized state or an exhausted rump dependent indefinitely upon Europe—shall shortly become evident. Because I consider the whole conflict to resemble a malign and managed affair, I would say that Ukraine’s end has not yet been decided.
The History Europe Refuses to Remember
The moral fable presented to the British public requires a spotless Ukraine. History provides no such thing.
Ukraine’s struggle for nationhood contains genuine courage, terrible suffering and resistance to both Nazi and Soviet domination. It also contains nationalist movements implicated in atrocity. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army cannot be discussed honestly without confronting the massacre of Polish civilians in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1945. Estimates vary, but historians and Polish institutions commonly place the number of murdered Poles at between 50,000 and 100,000, with approximately 100,000 now frequently cited.
For Poland this is not an obscure academic dispute. It is an inherited wound.
In June 2026, Polish President Karol Nawrocki revoked the Order of the White Eagle—the country’s highest decoration—from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Zelenskyy approved naming a Ukrainian military unit “Heroes of the UPA.” Nawrocki said that honoring an organization associated with the slaughter of Polish civilians was incompatible with the dignity of the award. Former Ukrainian presidents and officials returned Polish honors in protest, deepening the diplomatic rupture. (
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This does not prove that the whole Ukrainian state is neo-Nazi. That charge goes beyond the evidence. It does prove that unresolved Banderite and UPA memory remains embedded within parts of Ukrainian nationalism and that official glorification of such movements carries serious moral and diplomatic consequences. This makes the statement made by Burnham during Ukraine’s Independence Day celebrations—that fighting the Russians is akin to Britain fighting the Nazis—utter nonsense.
The same precision is required concerning Azov. Azov emerged in 2014 with unmistakable far-right and ultranationalist associations, controversial symbols and members who openly embraced neo-Nazi ideas. It was subsequently incorporated into Ukraine’s National Guard and has attempted to distance itself from its origins. In 2024, the United States cleared the present brigade to receive American weapons after finding no evidence that the current formation had committed violations that would disqualify it under US law. That does not erase its history, but neither does its history justify pretending that every present member of the brigade is a neo-Nazi. (
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Ukraine therefore has a far-right problem. Ukraine also has a serious corruption problem. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index gave it 36 out of 100 and ranked it 104th among 182 countries. The US Government Accountability Office has repeatedly warned that wartime conditions limit direct oversight of enormous aid flows and increase the risk of fraud and corruption. None of this proves that all Western assistance has been stolen. It does prove that the public is entitled to reject the infantile picture of an immaculate democracy beyond reasonable scrutiny. (
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US Government Accountability Office
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I Was Part of the Machine
I should give an honest account of my own background. I am what is now called a veteran. I served in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy as a Polaris submariner. I was positively vetted and cleared for top-secret nuclear material. I was a young man and a young Christian, ardently opposed to communist ideology.
I was intellectually at ease with my place inside the machinery of mutually assured destruction. The doctrine was dreadful, but its dreadfulness was part of its design. Nuclear war could not be won. The certainty of reciprocal annihilation imposed restraint upon governments that might otherwise have gambled with millions of lives. Beneath the oceans we carried a weapon we prayed would never be fired, believing that its concealed presence helped prevent the war for which it existed.
The Soviet system was an enemy of humanity. Its prisons, purges, engineered famines, mass surveillance, persecution of Christians and suffocation of whole nations must never be romanticized. Russia has not washed itself clean of that inheritance. The red flag still drips. Soviet crimes await no human permission to be remembered, and, should it so choose, the Russian state remains capable of brutality, deception and imperial ambition.
Nevertheless, many of the habits once identified with communism have reappeared in the West beneath new names: ideological conformity, the punishment of dissent, the manipulation of language, the destruction of inherited identity, the elevation of the state over the household and the relentless reconstruction of human beings according to political doctrine. We congratulated ourselves upon defeating the Soviet Union while importing many of its governing instincts.
More dangerously, the principle that kept nuclear states cautious is being dismantled. Political and military strategists once again speak as though escalation can be calibrated indefinitely, as though a limited nuclear exchange could remain limited and as though governments might climb an escalatory ladder without discovering that the final rung has broken beneath them.
The governing classes imagine escape. Some may dream of deep bunkers, technological enclaves or even an eventual refuge beyond the earth. But there is no bunker beneath the throne of God, no orbital station beyond His jurisdiction and no hardened command center in which the rulers of the earth may hide from judgment.
The ultimate problem is not Vladimir Putin. It is not the president of the United States, the British prime minister, Emmanuel Macron or the unelected machinery of the European Union. The problem is God.
The problem is that God cannot be deterred.
Judgment: God’s Strange Work
The prophet Isaiah described judgment as the Lord’s “strange work” and “strange act.” It is strange because God does not delight in destruction. Yet Scripture and history ensure that judgment should never be strange to us.
The Bible does not teach that God uses only righteous nations. Assyria is called “the rod” of His anger in Isaiah 10, although Assyria itself is subsequently judged for its arrogance and cruelty. Habakkuk recoils when God announces that Babylon will be raised as an instrument against Judah. The prophet’s bewilderment is precisely the point: how can a holy God use a nation more ruthless than the nation it chastises?
The answer is not that Babylon becomes righteous. The answer is that God remains sovereign. He may use a wicked instrument without acquitting the instrument of wickedness. Assyria does not become the covenant people because it is used as a rod. Babylon does not receive absolution because it brings Jerusalem down.
It is therefore theologically possible that Russia could become an instrument of judgment upon the West without Russia becoming good, Christian, innocent or permanently favored. But this must be stated as theological interpretation, not as though I had received a private dispatch from heaven identifying the precise movements of Russian armies.
I cannot prove that every Russian advance is the immediate act of God. I can say that Britain has no biblical warrant to presume upon divine protection while it despises God’s commandments. The solemn warning is not that Russia is righteous. It is that Britain is not.
We have killed our unborn children by the millions. We have treated the image of God in humanity with contempt. We have converted sexual confusion into public doctrine, instructed children to distrust their own bodies and prosecuted those who refuse the authorized lies. Powerful networks of exploitation—from the crimes surrounding Jeffrey Epstein to the wider protection of predatory elites—have revealed how easily human beings become commodities when wealth and power are divorced from judgment.
The boot descending upon the human face is no longer merely Orwell’s image of totalitarianism. It is the natural conclusion of a civilization that denies the sacredness of the person. Once humanity is no longer understood as made in the image of God, the person becomes material: measurable, editable, exploitable and disposable.
Britain has received extraordinary gospel light. Its towns and villages are filled with chapels built by generations who believed eternity mattered. Its laws were shaped, however imperfectly, by a moral inheritance it did not create. Its missionaries crossed continents. Its reformers confronted slavery, cruelty, poverty and ignorance. Its ordinary households learned to read from the Scriptures.
Greater light brings greater responsibility.
The sin of the Amorites was not judged until it was “full.” That biblical image is a warning against believing that divine patience means divine indifference. A cup may receive drop after drop without spilling, but the absence of immediate overflow does not mean that the cup has no brim.
The sins of the West are approaching that brim.
The Polluted Ground
Britain acknowledged in Parliament that it supplied Ukraine with armor-piercing ammunition containing depleted uranium for use with Challenger 2 tanks. Depleted uranium is valued militarily for its density and ability to penetrate armor, but residues contaminate air, soil, water and vegetation. The precise health and environmental effects depend upon where and how the ammunition is used and require proper post-conflict assessment. (
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This is the obscenity of modern virtue. Ministers speak of green energy, carbon footprints and environmental responsibility while sending uranium-bearing ammunition to be fired into some of Europe’s richest agricultural land. They pose as guardians of the earth while helping convert the Ukrainian steppe into an artillery range carrying potentially serious and persistent environmental contamination.
Claims about “American bioweapons laboratories” require equal care. Ukraine did possess public-health and veterinary laboratories that received American assistance for pathogen security and disease detection under threat-reduction programs established after the Soviet collapse. That is documented. Evidence that these laboratories constituted an American biological-weapons program has not been publicly established. To call them “biolabs” is technically true but rhetorically misleading if the word is intended to prove biological-weapons production.
Our case must not depend upon claims we cannot substantiate. Truth does not need the assistance of exaggeration.
The established facts are grave enough: hundreds of thousands dead or wounded; cities damaged; agricultural ground mined and contaminated; depleted-uranium ammunition supplied; corruption risks multiplied by the flood of foreign money; nationalist wounds reopened; weapons proliferating; nuclear doctrine loosened; and European leaders continually escalating a war they insist cannot be lost but have proved incapable of ending.
Into that valley of death, what remains of Britannia is ordered to ride.
When Nobody Turns Up
The British governing class may eventually discover that the population it has fragmented, insulted and dispossessed no longer regards the state as worthy of sacrifice. Governments cannot spend decades dissolving national identity, deriding inherited loyalties and teaching that Britain is principally a catalogue of crimes, then summon patriotic unity when they need bodies for a foreign battlefield.
Many Britons will not fight for Ukraine. A still greater number may refuse to die for a British establishment that appears embarrassed by their history, hostile to their faith and indifferent to their future.
If conscription comes, resistance is likely. “Swiftly dispatching” press gangs is not language I can commend. However, I perceive such violence as probable. Even so, Christian refusal must be morally distinguishable from the violence it opposes. The state may command the body, but it cannot compel the conscience; and conscience must be defended by truth, lawful resistance, civil disobedience and a willingness to bear the consequences.
There may come an hour when the Christian must say: I will not participate. I will not kill Russian men to preserve a geopolitical project whose aims have never been honestly stated. I will not offer my children upon an altar built by politicians who will never send their own. I will not call escalation peace, propaganda truth or national suicide duty.
Such refusal need not express love for Russia. But it needs to express fear of God.
Beyond Political Atheism
I have moved from political activism, through political agnosticism, into something approaching political atheism. I no longer believe in politics as a source of salvation. Governments remain necessary. Laws matter. Elections have consequences. Public injustice must be opposed. But politics cannot produce righteousness because righteousness is not manufactured by legislation, messaging or administrative systems.
Peace and righteousness begin in the human heart—and the human heart is precisely what modern politics cannot redeem.
Britain’s condition cannot be solved by changing the occupants of Downing Street while leaving the national altar untouched. It cannot be solved by another manifesto, party, referendum, commission or collection of managerial reforms. Foundations this rotten are not restored by repainting the door. And, such sin cannot merely be reformed. It must be repented of.
Britain must bow before Almighty God, confess its shedding of innocent blood, its sexual rebellion, its hatred of created order, its pride, its greed, its lies and its contempt for the gospel light it once received. It must ask for mercy without assuming that mercy is owed. It must recover the fear of God before it presumes to prosecute another war in the language of righteousness.
This is why the title is not rhetorical decoration. It is the argument.
The worst thing that can happen to Britain is not recession, invasion, civil disorder, defeat or even national dissolution. The worst thing is for God to give us over to what we have chosen. The worst thing is for our rulers to march confidently toward catastrophe while the churches bless their banners and their war machinery and the prophets remain silent. The worst thing is for us to imagine that because Russia is professed to be guilty, that Britain must be favored. Not at all.
Worst of all, God is against us. And if He is against us, no alliance can save us, no deterrent can protect us, no bunker can conceal us and no flag can make an unrepentant war righteous. Only repentance will meet this hour.
Worst of All, God Is Against Us
I have no intention of ending with a vague appeal for peace. Nor will I disguise this warning beneath the language of diplomatic concern. I believe the hour for such careful evasions has passed.
If Britain takes this war further toward Russia, Britons will be killed. If our government sends an army to fight Russia, the young men and women placed in its path will be sent toward death. If parents surrender their children to that cause, they must reckon with the possibility that those children will return wounded, broken or enclosed within coffins—or will not return at all.
Do not tell them that God must be with them because Britain sent them. Do not drape the Union Jack over their bodies and use the flag to conceal the spiritual condition of the nation that dispatched them. Do not call their deaths inevitable sacrifices for freedom when the road to war was paved by arrogance, provocation, deceit, geopolitical ambition and the refusal of Western rulers to seek an honorable peace.
Russia is not righteous. Russia does not need to be righteous for God to use it. Assyria was not righteous when God called it “the rod of mine anger.” Babylon was not righteous when God raised it against Judah. The instrument may itself be wicked and still become an instrument of judgment. Indeed, after the instrument has completed its work, God may judge the instrument for its own pride, cruelty and bloodshed.
The question is therefore not whether Russia is innocent. It is whether Britain is repentant.
It is not.
This country has shed innocent blood. It has destroyed children in the womb, confused children outside it, profaned marriage, mocked created order, persecuted truth, celebrated rebellion and received immeasurable gospel light only to turn that light into an ornament of national nostalgia. Britain wants Christian heritage without Christ, social restoration without confession, military protection without obedience and the favor of God without the fear of God.
There is no such covenant.
The prophet Amos watched judgment fall in successive blows: hunger, drought, blight, pestilence, military death and destruction. Human observers could name the immediate causes. They could speak of weather, crop failure, disease, war and enemy armies. But above those secondary causes stood the terrible declaration of God:
I gave you cleanness of teeth.
I withheld the rain.
I smote you with blasting and mildew.
I sent pestilence among you.
Your young men have I slain with the sword.
I overthrew some of you.
In other words:
I did this.
And after each blow came the same lament:
“Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.”
That is the horror of judgment: not only that bodies fall, cities burn and nations break, but that those who survive still refuse to return. They blame the enemy, the government, the generals, the markets, the weather and one another, but never ask whether the living God has entered the controversy.
Therefore, hear the warning plainly.
If Britain carries its war into Russia, do not presume that God will protect our armies. If you join that undertaking, do not presume that patriotism will preserve you. If you give your sons and daughters to it, do not imagine that a uniform, a flag or a chaplain’s blessing can shelter them from the consequences of national rebellion. They may be killed, and their deaths may form part of the judgment descending upon an unrepentant nation.
I believe that if Britain persists upon this road, God’s judgment will ensure that the bloodshed we have chosen returns upon us. Russia will be the visible instrument, but Russia will not be the final explanation. Behind the missiles, armies, failures and graves will stand the sovereignty of the God we rejected.
And when the bodies are lifted from the battlefield, when the coffins are carried from the aircraft, when parents ask why their children were taken and politicians retreat behind memorial speeches, the most terrible answer will not be, “Putin did this.”
It will be:
God gave us over to the war we demanded.
God removed the protection we presumed upon.
God allowed our pride to bear its appointed fruit.
God did this—and still we did not return to Him.
That is why no electoral adjustment will meet this hour. No military alliance will meet it. No stronger army, tighter border, louder anthem or reconstructed Christian heritage will meet it.
Heritage without repentance is a museum with hymns. Restoration without repentance is nostalgia with a flag. A civilization cannot be restored while Christ is retained merely as its mascot, memory or moral accessory.
Only repentance will meet this hour.
The disease is spiritual. The call is repentance.
Return before ruin.
Because the worst of all is not that Russia is against us.
Worst of all, God is against us.
