Candace Owens is wrong about Russia
Candace Owens has a Russia problem. Not the one her critics usually cite — not the geopolitics, the propaganda, or even the parroting of Kremlin talking points disguised as conservatism. Her problem is simpler, and more damning: she claims to admire Russia, yet she cheers for the regime that is destroying it through war.
If Candace Owens truly loved Russia, she would pray for its defeat.
This is not a provocation. It is a theological claim, one that she, as a self-professed Christian, should seriously reckon with.
The prophetic tradition is unambiguous: Isaiah 10 describes God using Assyria as an instrument of judgment against Israel — not because Assyria was righteous, but because Israel needed correction. Defeat, in the Biblical imagination, is not necessarily punishment for its own sake. It is sometimes mercy. The prodigal son's father did not rescue his son from the far country. He let him reach the bottom — because that was the only thing that made return possible. And Hebrews 12:6 is direct: the Lord disciplines those he loves.
Putin’s war on Ukraine has made life systemically worse for ordinary Russian citizens. No honest accounting of that suffering can be reconciled with the posture of someone who claims to care about the Russian people or Christian civilization.
Start with the children. Russia's war economy has rerouted resources, labor, and attention toward the machinery of death, and the most vulnerable have paid the price. Russia is considering lowering the working age to 12, while reviving Soviet-era summer labor camps for children. Food insecurity has deepened. Putin is choosing guns over bread, and children are going hungry.
Then there is the HIV epidemic. Russia accounts for nearly two-thirds of all new HIV diagnoses in Europe, and ranked fifth globally in new infections. The war has accelerated the crisis: before the invasion, over 90 NGOs provided HIV services to vulnerable populations in Russia. Most have ceased operations. In 2024 alone, treatment was interrupted for nearly 44,000 people.
Then there is the demographic collapse. Russia is recording the fewest births in over 200 years. Falling for the eleventh consecutive year, and compared to 2014, the annual birth rate has dropped by a third. This is a country that, even before the war, ended roughly one in three pregnancies in abortion. Demand for abortion drugs jumped 60% in 2022 as women cited the invasion, mobilization, and economic collapse as reasons not to start families. The population decline has become so acute that the Kremlin has resorted to the abduction of Ukrainian children to offset the losses. To cheer for the continuation of this war is to cheer for human tragedies.
And the economy. What looks like growth is almost entirely war spending: war-related manufacturing grew 20% while all other manufacturing branches remained flat. Before the invasion, Russia had amassed $113.5 billion in liquid reserves in its National Wealth Fund. Nearly two-thirds of that has been consumed by the war — drawn down to roughly $50 billion, with the 2025 budget deficit alone exceeding what remains in the fund. Oil and gas revenues fell 24% in 2025 to their lowest level since 2020. Interest rates sit near 16%. And economists now warn that a ceasefire could itself trigger recession — because Russia has so thoroughly restructured its economy around military production that peace has become economically painful. The economy is held hostage by the war.
Military spending now exceeds Russia’s spending on healthcare, education, and social policy combined. Social welfare spending has been cut nearly 16% year-on-year. Programs fighting cardiovascular diseases and cancer have lost funding or been cut completely. The propaganda budget, meanwhile, rose 13%, to a new record high. Before the war began, roughly 30 million Russians — more than the population of Texas — lacked access to indoor plumbing, giving Russia the worst sanitation record of any developed nation.
Faithful Christians should not be comfortable celebrating Russia. For the Russian people, the end of this war, even in defeat, is the precondition for national reckoning that produces genuine renewal. That is what a Russian defeat could offer: not humiliation, but an off-ramp. An end to the bleeding, a step toward healing.
The irony of Candace Owens' support for Russia during this war is that it is neither Christian nor supportive. It is aesthetic. It is the projection of culture-war fantasies onto Russia being hollowed out in real time — its men fed into trenches, its hospitals defunded, its children going hungry. This past weekend, Russian attacks set fire to the Dormition Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra — an 11th-century Orthodox monastery founded in 1051, nearly a century before Moscow itself existed, one of the holiest sites in all of Eastern Christianity. France's Foreign Minister called it the equivalent of bombing Notre Dame. Russia, predictably, denied targeting it.
Candace Owens is the most visible symptom of a broader infection on the far right — a romantic attachment to Putinism that mistakes authoritarian stability for civilizational strength.
Some Christians respond with a simple instinct: just stop the fighting. That impulse is not completely wrong, but a ceasefire that freezes this war in place rewards the aggressor, extends the occupation, and guarantees another round. Praying for peace without praying for justice is not a Christian prayer.
If you love Russia, pray for its defeat. Pray that Putin’s war ends. And the children eat, and the epidemic slows. Pray that this country stops spending its future on a war it cannot win, and its people cannot survive.
Colby Barrett JD, PE, is an entrepreneur, filmmaker, and former U.S. Marine Corps Captain who led infantry and scout/sniper platoons in the Pacific Rim and Middle East. He is the producer of ‘A Faith Under Siege.’
Steven Moore is a former chief of staff in the U.S. House of Representatives and Founder of Ukraine Freedom Project. He is an executive producer of ‘A Faith Under Siege.’
