NaziGate: Trudeau and Freeland should face consequences

 

The reception of a Ukrainian Nazi in Parliament has laid threadbare the moral bankruptcy of our leaders and their foreign policy

Canada’s most powerful politicians—Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland—should face serious consequences for their enthusiastic applause of a Ukrainian war vet who fought against the Russians in the Second World War. The prime minister is well educated and should have realized the dire implications of his actions; our deputy minister, who studied Ukrainian and Russian history, has no justifiable excuse for what she did.

Canada’s Parliament can get pretty noisy but on Friday, September 22, there was not a stir in the House when Speaker Anthony Rota introduced his guest, Yaroslav Hunka, as a “veteran from the Second World War who fought [for] Ukrainian independence against the Russians.” Rota took a parenthetical breath before adding that Hunka “continues to support the troops today, even at his age of 98.” At that moment, members of Parliament rose to their feet and applauded the Ukrainian war vet, who sat soberly in the gallery in his brown suit. The acclamation lasted for 20 seconds. “He’s a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero and we thank him for all his service,” Rota went on to say, at which point an enraptured Parliament gave Hunka another lengthy standing ovation.

Prime Minister Trudeau, standing next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who had been invited by Canada to address the nation, rose to his feet and clapped. Zelensky joined in and appeared to salute Hunka in a gesture of admiration.

In the row behind Trudeau and Zelensky stood Freeland in her royal blue blazer, elbows high, bringing her hands together in a forceful jubilance. Freeland, who is of Ukrainian descent, appeared proud to honour a man who had fought against the Russians in the Second World War. In the late 1980s, before the fall of communism, Freeland studied Russian history and literature at Harvard University and was on an exchange in Kyiv when she became involved in the Ukrainian independence movement, helping to organize marches and educate journalists on life in the Soviet Union. Her pro-democracy work drew the ire of the Soviet press and the KGB, which viewed the young woman as a troublesome agitator yet admitted in a secret intelligence report that she was a “remarkable individual… and inventive in achieving her goals.” Freeland, who speaks Russian and Ukrainian, went on to pursue a Master’s degree in Slavonic studies at the University of Oxford and eventually became a Rhodes Scholar.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, she went to Moscow to practice journalism, eventually becoming bureau chief of the prestigious newspaper, the Financial Times.

It therefore defies belief that a woman as intelligent as Freeland, whose ancestry and experience are contiguous with Eastern Europe, could publicly cheer for a Ukrainian soldier who fought against Russians in the Second World War. Freeland knows full well that soldiers from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) collaborated with the Third Reich and took an active part in the Holocaust in Ukraine and Poland. She would also know that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a paramilitary group, carried out massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, and hunted down and killed several thousand Jews during that period. More than any other Canadian politician today, Freeland knows this history. Canadians should ask what was going through her mind as she bestowed praise on a man who fought the Russians during that pivotal time, a man we now know was part of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS whose troops were involved in the mass murder of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians in the 1940s.  (more...)

NaziGate: Trudeau and Freeland should face consequences