Canadian Defense Minister Anita Anand will soon visit Ukraine following her Liberal government’s announcement that it has extended the Canadian Armed Forces’ (CAF’s) military training mission in Ukraine.
At a Jan. 26 news conference in Ottawa with Anand, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that Operation UNIFIER would be extended for another three years beyond its end-of-March deadline.
He said the CAF will deploy 60 personnel “within days” to join the some 200 troops on the ground. The deployment could rise to 400 CAF members, added the prime minister.
“The decisions on increasing levels will very much depend on the situation on the ground, on the need, on the capacity of the Ukrainian military to avail themselves of the training that Canadians have been offering,” Trudeau said.
Canada will also provide Ukraine with non-lethal equipment, intelligence sharing and “support to combat cyber-attacks,” said the prime minister.
Trudeau stressed that Canada’s military presence in Ukraine “is not a combat mission.”
“This is a training mission,” he said, and noted that “the solution to the tension” created by the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine “must be diplomatic, not military.”
The prime minister was repeatedly asked why Canada was not providing Ukraine with lethal weapons that its government has long sought.
“The solidarity that NATO members, that allied countries across Europe are demonstrating in our support for Ukraine – our support for the Ukrainian people in their ability to defend themselves, is a significant deterrence in itself,” he said.
Anand told reporters that “the biggest contribution Canada can make to Ukraine right now is people.”
“Our soldiers have trained over 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers” through UNIFIER - Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly
Joly said that when she met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Jan. 18, “the most important ask from him – actually the single one – was for Canada to provide a sovereign loan, which we were able to offer within three days.”
On Jan. 21, the Canadian government announced that it would provide its Ukrainian counterpart with a loan of up to about US$94 million in response to requests from Zelensky and senior government officials that Canada help Ukraine “reinforce the resilience and the strength” of its economy “faced with Russian destabilization, including economic destabilization,” said Trudeau at a news conference that day.
Joly also told reporters at the joint Jan. 22 news conference that Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba also asked that Canada extend UNIFIER.
“Canada has a very strong footprint with the National Guard and the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” she said.
She said that Canadian soldiers with Operation UNIFIER are deployed at 13 sites across western Ukraine – and that “all of our Western allies, we have one of the most important presence[s] onsite.”
At the news conference, Anand said that other countries’ militaries have expressed interested in joining Canada’s training mission “because of the leading role that we play in the region.”
As the defense minister outlined, Operation UNIFIER includes unit and brigade-level tactical training; combat engineer training, such as improvised explosive device disposal and explosive ordnance disposal; sniping reconnaissance; military policing; development of non-commissioned officer corps; and medical training.
Trudeau was asked whether UNIFIER would move eastward in Ukraine, where Russian intimidation is far greater.
He acknowledged that the mission’s presence in western Ukraine is “where the risks are lowest,” but where CAF members “can concentrate most directly on training Ukrainian troops to be able to continue to defend the integrity of their territory.”
However, the prime minister emphasized that
“Russia’s threat to invade Ukraine isn’t just something that should concern Ukrainian Canadians or Europeans – but all of us who cherish democracy.“
“The threat to invade a sovereign democracy of people who have chosen a path and elected a government to make progress and standing up for rights and freedoms and economic opportunity — to see an autocratic country like Russia choose to use its military might and its heft to bully and threaten an independent democracy to bow to its will, to be constrained in its path forward, is a threat not just to Ukrainians but is a threat to all of us who believe in the rights of citizens to elect their governments and pick the direction for their country,” he said.
At the Jan. 26 news conference, Freeland declared that she is “proud to be Ukrainian Canadian” and “proud of the contributions that our Ukrainian Canadian community has made to Canada for more than 130 years now.”
But she echoed Trudeau’s words when she said that “Canada’s policy towards Ukraine in the current crisis is not guided by those human connections or the special relationship they have created.”
“The stakes in this conflict are stark and directly relevant to Canada and the Canadian national interest,” said Freeland, who launched her previous career as a journalist in Ukraine where she served as a correspondent for the Financial Times, The Washington Post and The Economist in the early 1990s.
“This is a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. This is a direct challenge to the rules-based international order and an attempt to replace it with a world in which might makes right, and where the great powers — the nuclear-armed powers — have the authority to redraw the borders, dictate the foreign policies, and even rewrite the constitutions of sovereign democracies, whose only fault is that they are smaller and their militaries are not as powerful.”
“That rules-based international order is today facing its most serious challenge since it was first established,” said the deputy prime minister, who also serves as Canada’s finance minister.
But Canada’s Conservatives believe the Liberal government has failed “to take real action to support Ukraine,” the Official Opposition said in a Jan. 26 statement.
“Ukraine has been clear in its request to the Trudeau government of what it needs to defend itself: lethal defensive weapons,” said the statement from Michael Chong, the Conservative shadow minister for foreign affairs; Kerry-Lynne Findlay, the shadow minister for national defense; and James Bezan, the opposition deputy whip who is also of Ukrainian descent.
The Conservative Members of Parliament noted that the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Czech Republic have all provided Ukraine with lethal weapons.
