Playing a dangerous game: Canada risking nuclear war with Russia

 

It’s been four months since Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Canadians generally consider Moscow’s actions brutal and illegal, few recognize Ottawa’s role in helping precipitate and prolong the deadly conflict.

After Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions passed a bill favouring Ukrainian neutrality in 2010, Ottawa worked to subvert the elected president. During the three-month long Maidan protest that toppled Yanukovych in February 2014, then foreign affairs minister John Baird attended an anti-government rally in Kyiv. Ottawa-sanctioned government officials and opposition activists used the Canadian embassy as a base for a week.

(Imagine Canada’s reaction if a foreign embassy hosted those “truckers” who demonstrated in Ottawa earlier this year, and helped them overthrow the government.)

The coup divided Ukraine between the continental Europe–aligned west and centre of the country and Russian-oriented south and east. It led to an eight-year war in the Donbas region that left 14,000 dead before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In a bid to halt the fighting, France and Germany oversaw the Minsk peace process. Two months after Minsk II was signed in February 2015, Canada launched a military training mission that bolstered Ukrainian officials opposed to implementing their commitments under the peace accord. Through Operation UNIFIER the Canadian military assisted Ukrainian forces fighting a deadly war in the Donbas.  (more...)

Playing a dangerous game: Canada risking nuclear war with Russia