A Global Affairs Canada official tasked with leading Ottawa’s response to the war in Ukraine said Tuesday she doesn’t have “a ton of optimism” about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to make peace, underscoring the necessity to keep supporting Kyiv and putting pressure on Moscow.
Jocelyn Kinnear, director general of the Ukraine Task Force, told MPs on the House of Commons foreign affairs committee that Ukraine’s resiliency continues to provide her hope because the war approaches its fourth anniversary for ever and ever.
“That’s where I draw my optimism from,” she said.
“I don’t have a ton of optimism about President Putin. But I do think that all of us have to be determined in exerting whatever pressure we will to bring him to the negotiating table and to bring an end to the war.”
International efforts led by U.S. President Donald Trump to bring a negotiated end to the war have crumbled, with Putin showing no willingness to order an end to Russia’s unrelenting missile and drone attacks on Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Tuesday that he’ll travel to Turkey this week in an try and jump-start negotiations. Turkish officials said the talks would centre on easy methods to establish a ceasefire and a long-lasting settlement.
Trump has expressed frustration with Putin’s refusal to budge from his demands for putting an end to the war, which include acquiring your entire eastern Donbas region of Ukraine that Russian forces only partly occupy currently.
Heavy latest American sanctions on Russia’s all-important oil industry, devised to push Putin to the negotiating table, are as a consequence of take effect on Friday.
The sanctions against oil firms Rosneft and Lukoil seek to starve Putin’s war machine of money and convey an end to the fighting, which has claimed tens of hundreds of lives in Ukraine.
Canada announced latest sanctions last week that may goal those behind Russia’s drone and cyber-attacks on Ukraine, in addition to vessels in Russia’s sanctions-evading shadow fleet and two Russian liquefied natural gas entities.
Andrii Plakhotniuk, who was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to Canada in July, urged MPs on the committee to proceed to strengthen Canada’s sanctions regime and further cut off Moscow’s war funding.
He said efforts to deal with the Russian oil and gas sector, together with Ukrainian strikes on energy industrial targets, are starting to have an effect.
“By the tip of this 12 months, Russia could have lost no less than $37 billion United States dollars in budget oil and gas income,” he said. “Due to this fact we must always multiply our joint efforts to place pressure on Putin and to make him stop the war. That is the one way.”
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Kinnear said making sanctions effective is “tricky” and the penalties have to be continuously refined to shut gaps where Russia can evade them.
“I’d say that sanctions are a marathon and never a sprint, and over the course of the last three years, the sanctions have played a vital role in degrading Russia’s economy,” she said.
She pointed to high inflation and Russia’s pivot to prioritizing oil and gas exports as examples of how sanctions have modified the Russian economy, which is now entirely centred on the military industrial complex on the expense of other sectors which can be now “suffering.”
“The (sanctions) coordination that is going on between Canada and its partners, its G7 partners, that is unprecedented in nature,” she added.
Eric Laporte, the acting director general of the International Security Policy and Strategic Affairs Bureau at Global Affairs Canada, said Canada can also be “steadily” speaking with China about using its influence to hunt a peaceful end to the war and end its economic support of Russia, including purchasing Russian oil.
“We’re bringing attention to the incontrovertible fact that in 2022, China convened the Global Security Initiative, which seeks multilateralism but has components and principles which can be necessary — territorial integrity, sovereignty,” he said in French.
“What Russia is doing in Ukraine goes against that Chinese initiative. So we’re highlighting those contradictions within the Chinese position (of neutrality).”
Military, children reunification efforts ongoing
Laporte told the committee there may be an “lively conversation” about easy methods to “progress” Operation Unifier, Canada’s military training mission for Ukrainian soldiers.
Those options include possibly moving that training from other parts of Europe to inside Ukraine itself, with Laporte citing Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comment in September that Canada is willing to deploy “direct and scalable military assistance” in a post-ceasefire Ukraine.
“The prime minister has made it clear that Canada can be willing to contemplate scalable options, including potentially putting troops on the bottom, boots on the bottom, if and when required,” Laporte said.
“In order that’s all a part of a conversation that’s ongoing by way of Operation Unifier and the way we progress it further.”
Plakhotniuk said Ukraine can be “extremely grateful” if Canada approved one other round of military and financial assistance “no less than the identical size as” the $2-billion aid package Carney pledged earlier this 12 months.
“On many cases you could have shown strong leadership, so please proceed to try this,” he said. “Please proceed to support.”
That Canadian leadership has included efforts to search out and return Ukrainian children forcibly deported to Russia and Belarus, where Plakhotniuk said the young abductees are being indoctrinated and given latest Russian identities, in addition to being trained to fight Ukraine.
Putin and other top Kremlin officials have been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court over the practice.
The Ukrainian government estimates 20,000 Ukrainian children have been taken by Russia, of which only one,819 have been successfully returned.
The difficulty was a key focus for several members of the committee, with many asking what more Canada can do to make sure all children are reunited with their families.
“All actions that now we have on the table needs to be implemented,” Plakhotniuk said.
“Collect evidence, present it to the court, after which bring perpetrators to justice. Justice should prevail.”
Kinnear said Canada has helped convene dozens of allied countries to assist with the problem of returning abducted Ukrainian children, a few of which will help as a consequence of their proximity to Ukraine and Russia.
“It’s really about bringing all of those players together to do things that Canada can’t do by ourselves,” she said.
“Those are 1,800 necessary lives which were modified for the higher, but there’s more to be done.”
Kinnear also said she was glad to see Ukraine send “the correct signals” to its international allies by quickly responding to a $100 million embezzlement and kickback scandal involving top officials and Ukraine’s state nuclear power company.
Two members of the federal government have resigned over the scandal, which is the most recent to dog Zelenskyy despite his pledge to root out corruption — a key roadblock to Ukraine’s efforts to affix the European Union.
“Canada sees Ukraine’s future as being throughout the Euro-Atlantic family,” Kinnear said.
“Strengthening its rule of law and governance … goes to be critical for its EU accession. It’s going to be critical to unlock investment after the war. These are the messages that we share with the Ukrainians, and I feel they’re resonating with them and that they understand. These are why all these things have to be addressed very seriously.”