A Quiet Trip to Moscow Floats a Peace Summit While Ukraine Braces for More War

Two opposite things are true in this story at the same time. A CIA director quietly opened a channel and floated a summit that could resume in September. And Ukrainian officials, reading their intelligence, believe their adversary may be preparing an offensive aimed at Kyiv and Chernihiv. Peace is being pursued and war is being prepared for — simultaneously, by the same parties, in the same week.

That is exactly the terrain where the hardest command in the verse was first spoken. Love your enemies was not said to people shaking hands across a treaty table. It was said to people living under occupation, for whom the enemy remained genuinely dangerous. The command was never a peace treaty; it was a discipline for the in-between season — when talks might resume and offensives might also be planned, and nothing is settled.

That matters because of what prayer for an enemy actually does. It does not guarantee a summit. Putin may still refuse, and the war may still worsen — the verse promises none of those outcomes, and praying for a leader does not erase the danger Ukrainian officials describe. What it changes first is not the adversary. It is us. Prayer keeps a person we distrust from becoming only an enemy in our own hearts, which is the one thing within our control while diplomats do their slow, uncertain work.

So the discipline is small and concrete: we can hold the people we fear — even the ones whose intentions we question — before God, not as a substitute for wise action but alongside it. The quiet trip to Moscow and the whispered prayer for an adversary are doing the same kind of work: refusing to let a conflict harden into hatred while the real work remains unfinished. Which of the people we distrust most might we bring to God this week?