Attempts to silence russia ‘un- Canadian’: diplomat
TOSSED OUT AFTER GRANDFATHER OF FREELAND LINKED TO NAZIS
The Trudeau government’s attempts to silence Russian statements is un-Canadian, and it won’t work in the long run, says one of the Russian diplomats booted from Canada.
Kirill Kalinin, press secretary at the embassy in Ottawa, confirmed in an interview that he is one of four Russian diplomats told to leave Canada. He has been accused of being involved in an effort last year that outed Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s Ukrainian-born grandfather, Michael Chomiak, as a Nazi collaborator.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday the Russians had tried to undermine Canadian public opinion, citing the campaign aimed at Freeland.
“We all can remember the efforts by Russian propagandists to discredit our minister of foreign affairs in various ways through social media and by sharing scurrilous stories about her,” Trudeau told journalists, when asked for details about the removal of the Russian diplomats.
But Kalinin, who sent photos and links to the stories about Freeland’s grandfather to Canadian news outlets, said the material was already in the public domain, thanks to the work of Ukrainian Canadians who objected to the man’s Nazi past.
“Trying to silence an official spokesman of the embassy doesn’t mean you are right,” Kalinin said in an interview. “Expelling someone for voicing an alternative opinion or giving a different analysis of a situation is very un-Canadian.”
Last year, a Polish history magazine and a number of pro-Russian media sites revealed Chomiak’s role as a Nazi collaborator during the Second World War. At first, Freeland suggested she was the victim of a Russian disinformation campaign. Her office later claimed Chomiak, a Ukrainian nationalist who came to Canada in 1948, didn’t collaborate with the Germans.
However, it soon became clear that Chomiak had indeed worked with the Nazis, editing an anti-Semitic newspaper in Poland.
Photos showed him partying with senior Nazi leaders and files from the newspaper revealed pro-Nazi propaganda and cartoons aimed at denigrating Jews.
The newspaper’s office and printing presses had originally been seized from a Jewish family who had been sent to a concentration camp, where they were murdered.
As Russian forces advanced into Poland, Chomiak fled to Nazi Germany, where he continued to edit the newspaper.
The Los Angeles Holocaust Museum noted the newspaper also promoted the Nazi-approved formation of the 14th Waffen SS Division, which was composed of Ukrainian volunteers.
In October, Kalinin also raised the ire of Canadian officials by tweeting photos of monuments erected in Canada to Ukrainians who served in that SS unit.
Kalinin said the information about the monuments was already available online.
“I gave our point of view on this issue in terms of World War Two history,” the 32-year-old diplomat explained. “These people pledged allegiance to Hitler. What they were notorious for was killing innocent people.”
But Kalinin’s tweets on the monuments sparked a flurry of concerned emails among government officials who tried to figure out how to respond publicly, according to documents obtained by Postmedia under the Access to Information law.
The officials, who indicated they were “under pressure” from senior levels of government to come up with something, wrote a response that said the government remained concerned about what it called inappropriate Russian efforts to “spread disinformation.”
The response also included highlighting Russia’s attempts to undermine democracy. But that sentence sparked debate about whether a tweeted photo of monuments to Ukrainian SS members fell into such a category.
“Framing them as ‘destabilizing western democracies’ seems a step too far,” one public servant noted in an email.
Some experts accuse the Russian embassy of intentionally sowing discord as part of a broader strategy to disrupt or discredit the political process in Western democracies. Canada is training troops in Ukraine and has consistently condemned Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Highlighting the support in Ukraine for the Nazis during the Second World War is part of Russia’s efforts to raise doubts about the Canada-Ukraine alliance, Russia’s critics say.
Canada’s expulsion of the diplomats, three of whom worked at a consulate in Montreal, is part of a response from western nations to the Kremlin’s alleged involvement in the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter in Britain.