Hand on heart, Volodymyr Zelensky thanks Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau – “my dear Justin”, he says – for “Canada’s unwavering support for Ukraine”. By videoconference from kyiv, the visibly exhausted Ukrainian president addressed the Canadian Parliament and, on March 15, moved his audience: “I know that you support Ukraine, we are friends, allies, but I would like you felt what we feel,” he says.
Then, he describes the explosions, the shelling of schools and hospitals, the hunger that is spreading to Mariupol… “Imagine the CN Tower in Toronto [NDLR : l’emblème de la ville qui culmine à 553 mètres] struck, imagine Vancouver besieged!”, He continues. A few moments earlier, Justin Trudeau had called the Ukrainian leader a “champion of democracy, courageous and exceptional”. NATO countries, refuses to grant the latter what it is asking for: the creation of a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
Apart from this refusal (the West wants to avoid an escalation with the Kremlin), the Ukrainian head of state knows that he can count on Canada. And for a simple reason: the ties between the two countries are historic. After Russia, the country with the maple leaf hosts the second largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world. The first immigrants arrived by boat on this vast territory at the end of the 19th century, attracted by the local authorities who promised the settlers land to cultivate in the West. Other waves followed: during the Great Depression, during the Second World War, during the Soviet era and after the end of the USSR.
This diaspora now totals 1.4 million souls, out of 38 million inhabitants. These “Ukrainian-Canadians” have spread throughout society: in the media, among artists, among ice hockey players, in business circles and, of course, in politics. Which perhaps explains why Canada was the first Western country to recognize Ukraine’s independence on December 2, 1991.
“Anti-Soviet bourgeois”
Icing on the cake, it is not excluded that one day the pinnacle of the Canadian state will be represented by a Canadian of Ukrainian origin. Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, Chrystia Freeland, 53, is regularly presented as the natural successor of the Liberal Justin Trudeau. This prominent politician is the daughter of a brilliant lawyer and feminist activist, Halyna Chomiak, who arrived in Canada with her parents in 1948. Married and then divorced from Donald Freeland, a Canadian farmer also involved in politics, she found her roots in the 1990s in kyiv, where she participated in the writing of the Ukrainian Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedures.
This woman of character passed on to the current Deputy Prime Minister her two passions: politics and Ukraine. Polyglot Chrystia Freeland – she speaks English, French, Russian, Italian – speaks to her three children in Ukrainian. During her university years (Oxford, then Harvard), she too had reconnected with her roots. While she was in kyiv in 1989 to study Russian history and literature, she was spotted by KGB radars. The Russian secret services then classified her among the “anti-Soviet bourgeois”, because she took advantage of her stay to meet dissidents.
Moscow has never really closed the “Freeland file”. After the invasion of Crimea in 2014, the one who became an opposition MP under the liberal label declared in effect: “It’s not a civil war, it’s a fascist coup!” The Kremlin tells her that she is banned from staying in Russia. This complicates her task when she is appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2017.
In the meantime, Chrystia Freeland has been a journalist for the FinancialTimes in Moscow between 1994 and 1998. There, she witnesses as a privileged witness the decomposition of the Soviet system from which she draws a book: Sale of the century: Russia’s wild ride from communism to capitalism (“The sales of the century, or Russia’s mad dash from communism to capitalism”, 2000, untranslated).
“His perfect knowledge of the system allows him today to know where effectively hit the oligarchs on the wallet“, explains one of his former colleagues. “Within the Trudeau government, where she is experiencing a meteoric rise, she is the one who guides Canada’s Ukrainian policy”, points out Jocelyn Coulon, researcher at the Center for International Studies and Research. at the University of Montreal.An example: she weighed in so that Washington endorses the idea of targeting the Russian Central Bank, the best way, according to her, to asphyxiate Putin’s war economy.
Expanded penalties
Supported by the Canadian-Ukrainian community – and beyond -, Chrystia Freeland, pledges today all her political credit against the “barbaric attack” of the “dictator Putin”. In the early hours of the war on February 24, the Canadian government announced the shipment of military equipment to support the Ukrainian resistance: bulletproof vests, helmets, night vision goggles, drones, but also lethal weapons like grenades, machine guns and anti-tank weapon systems.
The $50 million in aid is flown to Poland by two Canadian Armed Forces transport planes. At the same time, the country’s Orthodox churches are organizing fundraisers and have already welcomed more than 6,000 refugees. An “express” procedure for issuing temporary visas has just been adopted by the government to facilitate their arrival.
The North American country was also one of the first to brandish the economic weapon against the invader. As of February 28, an initial list of 18 senior Russian officials, including Vladimir Putin himself, designates the personalities with whom Canada now prohibits all transactions and whose possible assets in financial institutions it freezes. “President Putin’s contempt for freedom, democracy, international law and human life must have consequences,” said the Canadian Prime Minister.
Over the days, the country has extended the sanctions to dozens of Russian oligarchs, including Roman Abramovich: the owner of the London football club Chelsea is a shareholder of the British multinational Evraz which manages a major steel mill in western Canada . Even before the Americans, Ottawa also banned all imports of Russian oil and sanctioned the energy giants Rosneft and Gazprom. In retaliation, the Kremlin named Justin Trudeau – and 300 other Canadian political and business figures – persona non grata.