Ukraine president visits Canada
Ukraine’s weak judicial system is hurting the country’s prospects for reform, which is the only way it will ultimately overcome Russia’s ongoing aggression, says the Trump administration’s point man on the embattled country.
“You have a judiciary that has been subject to political influences from various directions for a long time,” said Kurt Volker, the U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations and former ambassador to NATO. He offered that assessment on the margins of a major international conference on the Eastern European country’s future that began in Toronto on Tuesday.
The meeting marked the North American debut of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, who projected bonhomie before and after his meeting with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Zelenskiy, a popular actor and comedian with no previous political experience, easily won this spring’s presidential election, unseating Petro Poroshenko.
His appearance in Toronto is partly about allaying concern over whether someone who played the Ukrainian president in a TV drama was cut out for the actual job. Representatives from more than three dozen countries and international finance organizations want to see continued momentum on Poroshenko’s five years of reforms.
Zelenskiy also met David Lipton, the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which has in the past frozen billions in reconstruction money for Ukraine because of concerns over corruption.
Volker said Lipton expressed concerns about the lack of “legal certainty” in Ukraine – the rules-based stability that gives potential investors confidence they need to enter the market.
“Investors do not have that confidence right now,” said Volker. “Some terrible things are holding the Ukrainian economy back because it keeps foreign investment away.”
That being said, the United States is confident that Zelenskiy is up to the task of speeding up reform in Ukraine.
Trudeau was certainly upbeat about Ukraine’s future, touting Canada’s freetrade deal with the country.
“One of the things we’ve seen over the past years and the election of President Zelenskiy is a fresh impetus and strong determination to continue on the path to reform. We recognize there continue to be tremendous challenges,” said Trudeau.
“We recognize that many of those challenges are also external, with Russia determined to interfere with the progress towards full freedoms and reforms that Canada and our friends around the world all want to see for Ukraine.”
In 2014, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in the worst breach of Europe’s borders since the Second World War, an act Canada and its Western allies view as illegal.