SENATORS’ STATEMENTS — Ukraine--Russia's Actions
February 24, 2022
Honourable senators, I rise today to condemn Russia for its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. We are all horrified by the images streaming from Ukraine in the hours since this invasion. It’s a country under siege from all directions. All at once, its citizens are cowering in subway tunnels and people are gathered together with heads bowed in prayer because there seem to be no other options at this point.
As the granddaughter of Ukrainian immigrants who sought refuge in Canada 100 years ago, I feel this invasion deep in my soul. I visited Ukraine in 2014 as an observer for the presidential elections that year. I was struck then by the deep gratitude of Ukrainian people for their burgeoning democracy and was touched by the elderly women from Ukrainian villages who brought fresh flowers from their gardens to the polling station to give thanks for the opportunity to express their democratic right to vote. I am thinking of those elderly women in Ukraine today, honourable senators.
Canada cannot abandon Ukraine’s citizens to the madman Vladimir Putin. We must condemn, in the strongest possible terms, Putin’s brutal and entirely unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and we condemn Putin’s flagrant disregard for Russia’s obligations under international law. But we must do more than just stand by and condemn the evil acts of the dictator Putin. Canada must act now to stand up for a peaceful and free Ukraine.
For years, Ukrainian authorities have been pleading with Canada for defensive arms, but the Trudeau government did not provide them. It only agreed to provide some defensive arms on the eve of the invasion. They were provided so late that I do not know if they will even reach Ukrainian soldiers in the field. Now Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has asked every able Ukrainian citizen to take up arms themselves against Putin’s forces. The Trudeau government’s delay and virtue signalling are ineffective in the face of such a monumental threat.
On February 13, the Prime Minister tweeted, “ . . . we’ll keep standing strong in support of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” That was the same day that Canadian trainers in Ukraine headed for the Polish border and Canada was evacuating its embassy in Kyiv. What have all these words and those uttered by other Western leaders meant for the Ukrainian people? We can see the results of that today, and it breaks my heart.
The least we can do now is open our borders to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who are now fleeing their country. The official opposition will support this motion, but I implore our Canadian government to understand that this is not the time for weak words. It is our moral duty to act now to help the people of Ukraine.
[Editor’s Note: Senator Batters spoke in Ukrainian.]
Honourable senators, I rise today with deep sadness for the citizens of Ukraine and also for the rest of the free world. I am worried about the people of Ukraine, including relatives that I — and many of us in this chamber and across our free and prosperous country — have living there.
This morning, I looked at a map. It showed places where missile and air attacks had targeted. Kyiv, Lviv and just outside of Ternopil. My family is there.
We are witnessing a criminal act against Ukraine — an attack on the international rule of law, an attack on the values all those who live in democratic freedom must resist. Although our resistance is coming late, it must be fulsome and impactful, and it must happen now.
The invasion comes as no surprise. It is not the result of an impulsive act by an unhinged mind but the cunning culmination of years of preparation — years during which we and the free world could have acted but did not, years during which the signs were clearly there for us to see but did not see, or, maybe worse, chose not to see, or, maybe even worse, aided and abetted. It was no surprise that, earlier this week, Trump praised the genius of Putin, and Fox News attacked Canada and fawned over Russia.
Sadly, many Canadians may not realize just how real dictators operate. Russia has long been actively destabilizing Western democracies, including Canada, often by interfering in elections and stoking the flames of populism and libertarianism. As the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and DisinfoWatch have pointed out, during this pandemic Russia has been amplifying anti-vaccine rhetoric, pushing narratives that question the existence of COVID, the legitimacy of Canadian public health protocols, the safety of vaccines and inciting people to attack public health measures that were designed to protect them and their communities.
My family knows these techniques all too well. The destabilization of legitimate governments that stand in the way of Russian interests has always been a hallmark of that regime. My ties are deep in Ukraine. My parents were World War II refugees. They knew real tyranny. They lost everything. Most of my relatives were sent to the gulag. Those who survived were cast aside on the scrap heap of life. Some clawed their way back; others did not.
Honourable senators, let’s see Russia for what it is. Let’s make sure it does not destabilize our country and the international rule of law. We need to stand with Ukraine, and we need to act today, not tomorrow.
As the Ukrainian national anthem says, Ukraine’s freedom has not yet perished.
[Editor’s Note: Senator Kutcher spoke in Ukrainian.]
Let’s do all that we can to prove that phrase correct. Thank you and d’akuju.
Honourable senators, I rise today to tell you what you already know. The world changed last night and not for the better. The shameless, unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine by Russia goes against all norms and rules under international law and previous agreements and violates the United Nations Charter. It defies all decent civilized behaviour and must be resoundingly condemned. This invasion was meticulously planned, and entreaties by Russia to achieve a diplomatic solution were deeply cynical and malign. That the largest country in the world by territory should seek to redraw established agreed-upon international borders through a war of aggression to gain more territory, as Russia did by invading and annexing Crimea in early 2014, is beyond credulity. It reflects Vladimir Putin’s twisted need to rewrite history and is redolent of expansionism by might not seen since Hitler’s Germany.
I support the measures taken by our government and the concerted efforts taken by G7 countries under the current German presidency, as well as NATO partners to put pressure on and take action against the autocratic regime of Mr. Putin. There has been much talk of tyrants lately, colleagues. He is one.
My own personal involvement with Russia began when I joined our foreign service. At the time, it was the Soviet Union. I watched, and like many, was encouraged by the advent of glasnost, perestroika; all those new words we learned that signified change and an opening to a freer society in Russia in 1989.
I worked with former prime minister Jean Chrétien toward the 1995 G7 summit in Halifax where then Russian president Boris Yeltsin was invited to join for a meeting. This was an important initiative that eventually led to the creation of the G8. It was felt by all that the days of bellicosity were resigned to the history books, and there were many common projects and initiatives on which we could work together.
I had the honour of being former prime minister Stephen Harper’s personal representative, or sherpa, for what became the last G8 summit in June 2013 at Lough Erne, Northern Ireland. Mr. Harper had just visited Dublin and had made some controversial comments about the value of discussion at the G8 where one member was clearly out of step. Indeed, I recall Mr. Putin dominating the foreign policy discussion with his singular view of the crisis in Syria, to the exclusion of almost any other topic. Leaders were exasperated and Mr. Harper was proven correct.
It was Russia’s turn to host the G8 in Sochi in 2014. I attended one sherpa meeting in Moscow in January and then it was all over. Russia had invaded and taken Crimea and had installed proxy forces in the Donbas region of Ukraine. At Mr. Harper’s request, G7 leaders met on the margins of the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague in March, where I also served as sherpa, and a decision was taken. The G8 again became the G7, working together for common global purpose.
What we have seen, colleagues, is Russia moving from global pariah to partner and back to pariah. Its actions are unjustified, unacceptable and reprehensible.
Let us all stand together to condemn this outrageous violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence.
Let us all stand together in support of the legitimate government of Ukraine and the strong and resilient people of Ukraine. Thank you.
Honourable senators, I am an Edmontonian. I begin that way because in Edmonton we are all honorary Ukrainians of one kind or another, but just like so many Edmontonians, my own family roots in Ukraine run deep.
My mother, Oli Dyck, was born in Ukraine in a German Mennonite colony called Felsenbach in the province of Dnipropetrovsk. My father’s mother, Reisa Hardashnikov, was born and raised in the Jewish community in Poltava. The tides of history brought my Jewish family and my German family from Ukraine to Alberta. But this wasn’t entirely an accident since German, Ukrainian and Jewish immigration to Alberta were intimately intertwined.
Today, whatever our roots, we need to unite as Canadians in the face of utterly illegitimate Russian aggression to stand with our Ukrainian-Canadian friends and relations in this time of terror and uncertainty.
But we can’t just say “we stand with Ukraine” unless there is a real commitment behind those words, a commitment to sanction Russia in real terms, a commitment for Canada to work with NATO and its other allies to let the Putin government know, in meaningful terms, that this act of war is not something we will countenance.
There are actions we must take here to insulate ourselves from more subtle kinds of Russian aggression — from the sophisticated propaganda campaign already under way on Facebook and Twitter, designed to undermine our resolve and undermine the truth. We must push back against the Russian propaganda and disinformation on platforms such as RT and Fox News. Because make no mistake: This war isn’t just being fought on the ground in Ukraine; it’s being fought in the blogosphere, on social media and on cable television. And in a borderless online world, Canada, so far away from Kyiv, is a battleground too.
We must arm ourselves with common sense and common resolve. As Senator Boehm has said, our world changed overnight. It is time for us to wake up and stand together and stand on guard for Canada, Ukraine and the world we care for.
Thank you, hiy hiy.
Honourable senators, I speak to you today as a proud third-generation Canadian of Ukrainian background. My grandparents immigrated to rural Manitoba, the Pine Ridge community, from western Ukraine, in 1909. Although I have no existing family ties with Ukraine after a century of my family being here, my Ukrainian identity is strong, and I cherish my ties to friends and family, especially in my hometown of Winnipeg.
I was delighted to shake hands with President Zelenskyy here in Toronto at the Ukraine Reform Conference in 2019.
I was honoured to be a panellist at the Ukrainian Women’s Congress in Kyiv later that year. I could see there with my own eyes what I had been reading about for many years — that Ukraine was becoming a pluralist, open society where people could advocate for social change and vote in free elections.
It was so different from the Ukraine that I first visited back in 1987 during the end days and the dark days of the Soviet regime.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has set out on a path toward democracy and an open economy. That path has taken many turns and has had many ups and downs, but the direction has become clearer and stronger over this past decade.
Vladimir Putin despises this western-facing direction. His goal is to destroy this new Ukraine and return it to the dark days of authoritarian rule.
Russia declared war on Ukraine today, and world history has changed. There is now a world before February 24, 2022, and a world after February 24, 2022. The Europe that was previously at peace has now ended.
This invasion threatens the international order, the rule of law and democracy. The free world must rally to the Ukrainian cause and do so immediately.
We have to implement stronger sanctions against Russia’s economy, banks and the property that oligarchs own, and Russian assets in the West need to be seized.
Ukraine needs more assistance with weapons with which to defend itself. A no-fly zone needs to be implemented over Ukrainian airspace by Ukraine’s friends and allies.
Ukraine will need economic support and humanitarian aid in the days ahead.
In the 1930s, the world was slow to recognize the danger that Adolf Hitler posed to our civilization. We cannot make that same mistake again. Thank you.
