Canada is very closely monitoring the elections in Ukraine, allocating millions of dollars to monitor them, since it understands the high risk of interference in the Ukrainian elections from Russia and similar interference in Canadian elections, Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said in Davos on Jan. 24.
“By working with Ukraine to help it in holding free and fair elections, we help ourselves, because we also have elections this year. Ukraine, unfortunately, a kind of laboratory for intervention,” the minister said at the Ukrainian breakfast organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.
Freeland said a lot of Canadians, in particular from the Ukrainian diaspora, are ready to participate in the monitoring of Ukrainian elections on a volunteer basis.
She clarified that the first monitoring of the elections has been held this week. Freeland noted that presidential elections in Ukraine are democratic.
“We don’t know who will win. There are strong candidates. They are openly competing with each other. This will be a situation when Ukrainians have a choice. Ukraine can have competitive elections – this is very valuable and important, it speaks of the strength of Ukrainian civil society,” she said.
Ex-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry also noted the competitiveness in elections in Ukraine, saying the 2014 Revolution of Dignity made this possible.
He pointed out that in Hungary, in France, in Britain – everyone felt the influence of an external factor in the elections… And that in the U.S. officials are still investigating what happened during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
According to the founder and CEO of Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas, Alphabet Inc.’s subsidiary) Jared Cohen, there is no more important country than Ukraine in terms of building effective tools to combat misinformation, as the country has undergone several powerful cyber attacks and misinformation attempts.
“Ukraine and Israel are unique in that they have remarkable engineers and technical talents who are faced with the most serious challenges and are able to solve these problems,” Cohen said.
In his opinion, it is necessary to combine technical capabilities and diplomatic efforts, and the best that can be done is to support Ukraine technically in this direction. The head of Jigsaw said that a special summit had already been held in Ukraine in December 2018 on how to work together, and one of its outcomes was the fact-checking project for Twitter and Facebook.
