So Michael Savage tells me “Trump wants to work with Putin.” Hmmm… On what specifically? Putin’s invasion of Crimea – and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine? His ambitions for reclaiming the Baltics? Perhaps they’ll confer over the “dozens” of underground bunkers being built in Moscow and around the country over the last few years. Or maybe they’ll chat about the hacking Russia has been doing into U.S. election systems?…
 
Here’s something I’m pretty sure many evangelical Christians would like to see the two “work” on ~ Putin Signs Law Restricting Religious Expression, Invitations to Church.

In July Vladimir Putin signed a new bill – “Yarovaya Law” – a piece of legislation that looks likes an ominous return to the bad old days of soviet repression. Authored by Irina Yarovaya, it’s ostensibly an anti-terrorism measure, but critics are calling it the “Death of the Russian Constitution.” New policies include ~

• the new law makes it a crime not to report information about terrorist attacks and other, even much smaller crimes (throwback to the days when in the Soviet Union neighbors were writing false reports on each other out of fear being punished)
 
• requires telecoms to assist the government to break into encrypted messages (the stocks for those telecoms crashed the day the law was signed)
 
• increases the strongest penalty for “extremism” from four to eight years of imprisonment (posts on Russian social network VK that promote something unappealing for Kremlin are considered extremism as well)
 
• children as young as fourteen are now considered old enough to be locked up

 
Most unsettling for evangelicals, pentecostals, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists and other religious minorities is how the law will significantly curtail missionary activities ~

(P)roselytizing, preaching, praying, or disseminating religious materials outside of “specially designated places,” like officially recognized religion institutions are considered a punishable crime.

That this provision is directly aimed at Christian – or marginally Christian – faiths, other than the state-endorsed Russian Orthodox Church, is plainly evident because it prohibits proselytizing in people’s homes, where many evangelicals gather for worship and home groups, as well as on-the-street evangelism. (Source: FEBC.NZ)
 

As John Murdock wrote at The Stream back in July ~

The Russian Orthodox Church which has increasingly become intertwined in a nationalistic dance with the state since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 will likely retain legal access to the people, but all others will be forced to either jump through hoops that may be well closed to them or take their message underground. Russian believers have been praying and fasting and asking their brothers and sisters around the world to join them, but amid holiday activities celebrating freedom few in America have any inkling of what is happening.

 
And most still don’t.
 

Since the “Yarovaya Law” was passed in July, numerous Christians have been arrested, charged and fined. World Watch Monitor lists several of the known incidents in this report on a missionary couple, Don and Ruth Ossewaarde who have lived in Russia for 14 years ~

The Ossewaardes received a visit from three police officers on the morning of Sunday 14 August, as they conducted a service. They requested that the police waited until the service had finished, after which they were driven to the local police station. Mr. Ossewaarde was then charged and taken straight to court. He was declared “guilty” two hours later and fined (40,000 roubles – US$640)
 
After his appeal was rejected this week, he wrote an update on the couple’s blog: “Obviously, this is a disappointment. I was hoping to wrap things up here and return to my family as soon as possible [his wife has returned to America], but the issue is an important one, and duty demands that I press the case as far as I can […]
 
“I assured [my lawyer] that I would keep pressing the appeal all the way to the highest court, and he assured me that this case will play an important role in determining the future of religious freedom in Russia, not just for foreign missionaries, but also for ordinary Russian believers.”

 
Ossewaarde added that his court-appointed lawyer had advised the couple to leave Oryol “because anything might happen to him and his family”.

 
Yep, that certainly sounds like the old totalitarian Soviet Union doesn’t it? Submit – or it’s off to the gulag.

 
If Donald Trump truly wanted to appeal to evangelicals, and was serious about defending Americans’ religious freedoms, he surely could have denounced this draconian legislation. Or might there just be a conflict of interest in doing so? ➡ Russia lodges complaint about UN official’s criticism of Donald Trump ~

(Sept. 13, 2016) Apparently (Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN) angrily protested two of (UN’s high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein’s) speeches in which he denounced ‘demagogues’ and specifically targeted Trump, as well as several populist leaders in Europe – going as far as likening their tactics to Isis propaganda.
 
In a speech delivered three months before the Republican National Convention, Zeid said: ‘Less than 150 miles away from where I speak, a front-running candidate to be president of this country declared, just a few months ago, his enthusiastic support for torture.’

 
So Putin’s got Trump’s back? Or perhaps working with Putin means drafting similar measures here? Just saying…
 
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Related:
Manafort out amid scrutiny of covert lobbying campaign ~ Trumps’ former campaign chairman was awful chummy with Russia