The Star’s View

We must stand by Ukraine,

Russia has stepped up its military pressure on Ukraine. Fighting between pro-Moscow militias and Ukrainian forces in the eastern part of the country is more intense than it’s been in months. And Ukrainians worry they may be thrown under the bus by the Trump administration, with its focus on making nice with Moscow.

In the face of all this, it was entirely right for the Trudeau government to announce this week that Canada will extend its military deployment in Ukraine for another two years.

In strictly military terms, “Operation Unifier” doesn’t amount to a great deal. Some 200 Canadian soldiers based in western Ukraine will train Ukrainian troops in areas like bomb disposal and logistics.

But it’s an important political gesture of support for Ukraine at a time when it can no longer take Washington’s backing for granted. Abandoning the Canadian presence at this point would have sent exactly the wrong signal to the government of Vladimir Putin.

Yet instead of focusing on the stakes involved in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe, what debate there has been on this has been hijacked by an entirely bogus controversy about the tangled family history of Canada’s foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland.

Various pro-Russian blogs and websites have been pushing stories about Freeland’s grandfather, Michael Chomiak, who died back in 1984 when the minister was a teenager.

It’s complicated but the essence is this: Chomiak was a Ukrainian journalist who edited a Ukrainian-language newspaper in the Polish city of Krakow when the Nazis occupied the territory in 1939. The newspaper, Krakivski Visti (or News of Krakow), published all sorts of pro-Nazi and anti-Jewish propaganda.

Chomiak emigrated to Canada after the war, and his involvement with the pro-Nazi newspaper was discovered by his family after his death. Freeland’s uncle, a respected historian of eastern Europe, has written about it at length. Now pro-Russian and conspiracist websites are reviving the story and portraying it as a “Nazi skeleton” in Freeland’s family closet.

The clear suggestion is that the minister can’t be trusted to handle Canada’s foreign relations, especially insofar as they involve Ukraine and Russia. The implication is that she is infected, at two generations’ remove, by some sort of pro-Nazi, Ukrainian nationalist virus that fuels a blind hatred for everything Russian.

This is ridiculous on the face of it, the type of misleading dezinformatsiya (disinformation) that Russian sources have trafficked in for years, during and after the Soviet era.

Freeland’s history with Ukraine and Russia is wellknown. She was bureau chief for the Financial Times in Moscow in the 1990s and knows the country well.

Her support for independent Ukraine is also well-known. In fact, she was one of a dozen Canadians banned from travelling to Russia in 2014 in retaliation for sanctions imposed by the Harper government because of Moscow’s military pressure against Ukraine. That travel ban is still in effect.

More to the point, Freeland’s strong support for Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression (including the outright annexation of Crimea in 2015) is entirely in accord with long-standing Canadian policy.

Stephen Harper took a hard line with Putin, personally calling him out over the Ukraine issue when the two men met at a conference three years ago.

Harper sent Canadian troops there in 2015 as a gesture of solidarity, and the Trudeau government’s decision to extend the mission was essentially a continuation of that established policy.

Canada is right to stand with Ukraine as it resists military and political pressure from Russia. The country has every right to its independence and territorial integrity, and to fight Russian-sponsored aggression.

To portray Canada’s policy as a personal vendetta by a minister in thrall to her ethnic background and her grandfather’s murky past is an insult both to her and to the intelligence of Canadians.

To portray Canada’s policy in support of Ukraine as a personal vendetta by a foreign minister is an insult to her and to the intelligence of Canadians