The Ukraine, the Counterfeit Heavenly Jerusalem and 'Greater Israel'
Have you ever stopped to wonder why the media wants Americans focused on "the" Ukraine?
"Instead, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to myriads of angels in joyful assembly, to the congregation of the firstborn, enrolled in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel."
Author’s note: One of the most rewarding aspects of journalism is working on a story, uncovering new information, and realizing you were working on the wrong story the entire time. This is exactly what happened during the creation of this post.
Does anyone else remember when it was called “The Ukraine”? Or is that just another Mandela effect from our collective childhood?
In my nearly half-century of existence I don’t remember ever hearing as much about “The Ukraine” as we have in the last decade.
And for good reason.
The lesson of WWII, we’re constantly and insufferably told, is that nationalism is evil and loving your own people is evil.
Here in 2025, we’re told the greatest threat to our national security isn’t from a foreign nation - especially one that may or may not receive more US aid than the GDP of many nations - but rather the rising “threat of Christian nationalism.”
And yet, we are watching, in real time, the seemingly inevitable snuffing out of Christianity in a historically Christian nation.
By now, everyone has watched the historic excoriation of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, a meeting in which Trump and VP JD Vance deliberately and decisively humiliated a foreign official representing a nation which has received nearly $120 billion in aid from the US from January 2022 to December 2024.
It was the latest political episode in America’s inexplicable fixation with Ukraine, a nation which was once roundly acknowledged to be the Russian Wild West, much like how Americans considered the land west of the Rockies during the 18th century.
It’s a country which, whatever its merits, most Americans have no interest - and no real need - to know anything about.
And yet here we are, once again discussing this far-off land like it’s the 51st state. Bizarre.
Even more so is the face of the Ukrainian regime, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a so-called world leader best known for successfully soliciting billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers and having the gall to wear parachute pants to meetings with heads of state while doing so.
Notably, this man is not only a monotonous dresser, he’s an actor. Literally.
Zelensky would go on to become a household name in Ukraine. His best-known show was Servant of the People, a television series in which he plays a high school history teacher unexpectedly elected president after a video of him ranting against government corruption goes viral. The third season of the show was released in 2019, the same year Zelensky was elected.1
You read that right: the dude who acted in a series as a character who “unexpectedly” became president….actually became president of Ukraine.
It gets even weirder than that.
Ukraine and specifically Zelensky are known for being at the center of an American political scandal after it was revealed the President Donald Trump, in a phone call with Zelensky, had asked him to do a “favor” and initiate an investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who was challenging Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Trump also held up hundreds of millions of dollars in congressionally appropriated military aid for Ukraine, which critics charged was intended as leverage over Zelensky to pressure him to launch the investigation. Both matters became the subjects of a congressional inquiry that ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment in late 2019. He was later acquitted by the Senate.
There is also a conspiracy theory™ espoused by Muslim clerics which states, essentially, the real reason for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the creation of a “new Jewish state”:
The Jews are the ones behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and their goal is to create a new Jewish state to replace the failing Zionist project of Israel, Palestinian Islamic scholar Mraweh Nassar has claimed, as reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)…
According to Nassar, the traditional allies of the Jews – the US and the West – have realized that Israel will “come to an end” within just two years, which has caused them to forsake it. Consequently, his theory goes, the Jewish state has found new allies in Russia and China with a new goal: creating a Jewish state in Ukraine. This, in turn, will be supported by claims that Ukraine is the true home of the Jews, who will even declare that biblical Jerusalem, along with the First and Second Temples, were actually located within Ukraine all along, MEMRI quoted Nassar as saying.2
Granted on its face, this is a ridiculous theory. On its face.
Believe it or not, Zelensky, for one, has proudly stated his hope of this very thing. In 2022, President Zelenskyy described his vision for the future of Ukraine as “a big Israel.”
This was no mere one-liner from the former comedian.
Within 48 hours of his comments, the Atlantic Council – NATO’s semi-official think tank in Washington – published a “road map” exploring how to transform Ukraine into “a big Israel.” That “road map,” it turns out, was authored by Daniel B. Shapiro, U.S. Ambassador to Israel under President Barack Obama. Shapiro has said that “the two embattled countries [Israel and Ukraine] share more than you might think.”
This is the same Zelensky, by the way, who less than a year ago, signed into law a bill banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) which has historically been linked to the Russian Orthodox Church, also known as the Moscow Patriarchate.
That’s right: the former TV actor and now-unelected leader of Ukraine, whose five-year term officially ended in May 2024, just months later shut down an entire Christian denomination for “potential ties to Russia.”
Does that phrase ring a bell?
More Christians were killed in the Holodomor than WW2
For those unaware, the vast majority of Ukrainians are Orthodox Christians. A 2022 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) found 85% of Ukrainians identified as Christians. Of those, 72% identified with Eastern Orthodoxy, 9% to the Catholic Church (8% Eastern Catholic, 1% Latin Church) and 4% adherents of a Protestant Church or other Christian movement. In fact, Ukraine is a historically Christian nation which stands at the center of a rich heritage said to date back all the way to the Apostolic Age.
Andrew the apostle is believed to have traveled up the western shores of the Black Sea, to the area of present-day southern Ukraine, while preaching in the lands of Scythia. Legend (recorded in the Radziwiłł Chronicle) has it that he traveled further still, up the Dnieper River, until he came to the location of present-day Kiev in AD 55, where he erected a cross and prophesied the foundation of a great Christian city.3
The first Christians lived in the territory of Ukraine during the first missions at the turn of the first and second centuries. The Apostle Paul, meanwhile, made reference to Scythians - another name for those residing in what was then known as Scythia - in his New Testament epistle to the assembly at Colosse.4
For nearly 2,000 years, Christianity shaped both the history and identity of the Ukrainian people, an identity which through the Roman and Byzantine eras and all the way up to the 20th century event known as the Holodomor, or the Great Famine.
According to the Library of Congress,
The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay."
Conventional history tells us the Stalinist regime were the perpetrators of this genocide - which is what it was, according to the Vatican and 15 other nations who consider the Holodomor an act of genocide carried out by the Soviet government.
A death toll between 6 and 7 million would mean the Holodomor, by all official accounts, was even more horrific than the Holocaust.
Yet we never hear anything about it. Despite a college education and a general thirst for history, I personally never learned about the event until I was well into my 40s.
Why is that?
According to a Jerusalem Post article published in January 2019, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, whom Zelensky replaced, pushed Israel to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide.
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"Ukraine, as a state that suffered from the Holodomor of 1932-1933, when millions of Ukrainians were tortured by the communist Stalinist regime that committed genocide against the Ukrainian people, reverently keeps the memory of the Holocaust victims [alive] as well," Poroshenko said at the time.
Despite the president’s plea, Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Jerusalem office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, replied by declaring that the Holodomor was "definitely not a genocide" because it was not "ethnically" motivated. Because of this, he urged Israel to deny that the Holodomor constituted genocide - even as Israel passes laws for the same response to the Holocaust.
As schoolchildren, Americans are taught at an early age, almost immediately, about Adolph Hitler and the millions of Jews killed under the National Socialist regime - the true number of which has been revised by the Polish government
Yet we’re never taught about Genrikh Yagoda, who headed the Soviet secret police under Stalin from 1934 to 1936.
This is Yagoda, by the way.
Now that is an uncanny resemblance to Adolph Hitler, is it not? What are the chances?
Yet most Americans are totally ignorant of Yagoda’s role in history - and apparently so are most Israeli students.
An Israeli student finishes high school without ever hearing the name "Genrikh Yagoda," the greatest Jewish murderer of the 20th Century, the GPU's deputy commander and the founder and commander of the NKVD. Yagoda diligently implemented Stalin's collectivization orders and is responsible for the deaths of at least 10 million people. His Jewish deputies established and managed the Gulag system. After Stalin no longer viewed him favorably, Yagoda was demoted and executed, and was replaced as chief hangman in 1936 by Yezhov, the "bloodthirsty dwarf."5
When will we finally be free to openly discuss this dark moment in the Christian era? Yagoda is acknowledged by his own people as the “greatest Jewish murder of the 20th century” who killed 10 million Christians, and yet his name isn’t found anywhere alongside Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc.
Again, it begs the question: why not?
Israeli Jews fleeing to the ‘Heavenly Jerusalem’
Ukraine is known to have one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, with some estimates reaching as high as 400,000 Ukrainians who are technically eligible for Israeli citizenship, meaning that they have identifiable Jewish ancestry.
That number continues to grow as thousands more Jews have fled Israel following the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimated in September that 40,600 Israelis departed long-term over the first seven months of 2024, a 59% increase over the same period a year earlier, when 25,500 people left. Monthly, 2,200 more people departed this year than in 2023, according to CBS News.
So where are they all going?
In Oct. 2024, a former Russian diplomat Viacheslav Matuzov appeared on Lebanese TV and claimed as many as 100% of Ukrainian parliament members - including Zelensky - hold Israeli passports and “that millions of Jews from Europe and America are prepared to move to Ukraine to build a ‘second Israel’ there, citing the country's natural resources and wealth as motivations for this relocation.”
According to MEMRI, the diplomat, identified as Viacheslav Matuzov, said:
"It is being said more and more that 5-7 million Jews from Europe and America are ready to move to Ukraine, the wealthiest republic of the former USSR, in terms of agriculture, industry, and natural resources, including uranium mines, natural gas, and coal of the best kind... This is why Israel wants to build a second Israel on that land, and people in Russia undoubtedly understand this."
Then you have this.
The man in the video is identified as “Igor Berkut,” or “I. Berkut,” a mysterious chap about whom there is little to no public information available. Berkut, incidentally, is the name for the Ukrainian riot police made up of ex-military personell used to quell protests and stifle dissent.
Do with that what you will.
Here’s a screenshot of Berkut in the video with a scantily-clad woman pointing to a “Map of Heavenly Jerusalem and Ukraine.”
A portion of this video is translated as follows:
Therefore, in order to develop normally, Israel must find another territory for itself for 200-300 years. It was one of the purposes of my visit to this country […]. This is where the concept of "Heavenly Jerusalem" or "New Jerusalem" comes in. According to my knowledge, this "Heavenly Jerusalem" is located in the south of Ukraine and includes five provinces: Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhia, Odessa, Kherson and Mykolaiv [...]. In these lands, a New Jerusalem will be established, which will allow the development of the entire nation of Israel. But it is not everything. Jews from all over the world, the largest banking houses and transnational corporations, will collect their intellectual riches, technologies and hand them over to New Jerusalem. And this New Jerusalem will begin to develop dynamically. And so quickly that European countries will become an ordinary province for it […].”
This is a high-resolution image of what the map looks like.
In another video posted to the PACCBET YouTube page - which has nearly 90,000 subscribers - Berket sits in front of a “flag of Heavenly Jerusalem” which appears to be a composite of the current Israeli and Ukrainian flags.
For what it’s worth, PACCBET appears to be linked to The Dawn, a Russian political party formed by failed presidential candidate Yekaterina Duntsova.
All the channel’s videos on Ukraine date back to at least 2020 and have amassed over 12 million views. Just because you and I have never heard of it doesn’t mean it’s not influential.
Perhaps that’s even deliberate.
And it’s not just this mystery man Berket.
In July 2010, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church - which began shortly after Ukraine’s independence from Russia in 1921 - issued an official statement calling Kiev the “New Jerusalem,” adding that Ukraine's capital is "a religious ideal that for centuries defined the spiritual, cultural and political priorities of the People of Ukraine."
In 2017, Ukrainian Catholic leader Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk announced Kiev was being “transformed into the spiritual capital of the world.” This was just days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Now, we can dismiss this “I. Berket” as a crackpot, or delusional, or whatever. But when all his assertions are compared to those made by Zelensky himself, and the Atlantic Council, and Viacheslav Matuzov, and Islamic scholar Mraweh Nassar, don’t we have an obligation to at least inquire about these matters?
Would this not explain a great deal about American foreign policy over the last 15 years?
The counterfeit can never replace the authentic
To quickly recap:
Islamic scholar says Ukraine is the true home of the Jews, who will even declare that biblical Jerusalem, along with the First and Second Temples, were actually located within Ukraine all along
Mysterious Russian billionaire says Ukraine will become known as the Heavenly Jerusalem
Russian diplomat says millions of Jews from Europe and America are ready to move to Ukraine
Ever since the Russian invasion of 2017, I have struggled to understand why Ukraine was such an important objective for both MSM outlets and our own federal government. (Remember Biden boasting how the US paid off a Ukrainian diplomat? Remember the former Ukraine PM getting poisoned? Remember the infamous Trump call to Zelensky in 2019 that led to his second impeachment?)
Was it all just a weird coincidence?
Why Ukraine?
Why wasn’t the American media focused on Western nations like Britain, Spain or Ireland? Why was Ukraine so important?
I believe this stated plan for a counterfeit “New Jerusalem” is the reason why Ukraine is always making headlines.
Conspiracy theory™ or no, there are legitimate religious and political voices who are staking their reputations and livelihoods on this claim. In fact, simply by asserting a future "Heavenly Jerusalem” in Ukraine risks attracting unwanted scrutiny from Christians and others who may take exception to someone, y’know, stealing Bible prophecy for their own nefarious purposes.
We as Bible-believing Christians know there is only one New Jerusalem, and Scripture tells us it will be a massive cube-like domicile coming down from heaven itself.
In Revelation 21, the Apostle John describes with precision the true Heavenly Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” and he calls it “the bride, the wife of the Lamb.”6
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband…
Then one of the seven angels with the seven bowls full of the seven final plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, shining with the glory of God. Its radiance was like a most precious jewel, like a jasper, as clear as crystal. The city had a great and high wall with twelve gates inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, and twelve angels at the gates. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south, and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
First, as clearly stated by John, the New Jerusalem is in fact the Bride - or the Wife - of the Lamb of God, Christ Jesus. This in and of itself challenges all our Churchianity misconceptions about the “Church” as the “Bride of Christ.”
Furthermore, this foursquare New Jerusalem happens to be a 3D version of the ephod worn by the Aaronic priesthood of ancient Israel. In fact, the twelve stones found in the New Jerusalem correspond to the stones in the ephod:
Now compare it to those found in Rev. 21:
It’s almost a perfect match, and certainly too close of a similarity for the Apostle John to have overlooked. These are the colors of ancient Israel, eternally coded in the words of Scripture for our benefit and understanding of what the Lord’s purpose is at the end of the age.
None of this, of course, has anything to do with Ukraine, or Russia, or the modern state of Israel - and that’s precisely the point. This is all from Yahweh Elohim, the God of Israel, and Scripture tells us it is His purpose to deliver this coming Heavenly Jerusalem to Christ Jesus, who in turn will hand it over back to the Father to His glory. 7
However, the mere existence of a political “Heavenly Jerusalem” in the context of a perpetual war in Ukraine should give us pause as to the ultimate objective of this conflict.
Who benefits? And to what end?
These are not questions for political pundits or theologians.
These are questions for us, brethren, to press further into as we await the coming of that heavenly abode.
Well we have a reality TV star for a President who couldn’t find Ukraine on a map. That’s about as weird as it gets. You sound as though you know nothing about history prior to WWII and why the UN and NATO were established in the first place. Ukraine is fighting to maintain the world order that the US established that says no nation can attack another to take over its territory and resources—a world order that created the longest stretch of peace and prosperity the world has ever known, and which Trump seems determined to destroy.