After 100 days of fighting in Ukraine, the tough questions about war and peace are getting harder to answer.
But there were candid post mortems — and calls to action — from Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and her Lithuanian counterpart at Toronto Metropolitan University, as they compared notes on how western allies can counter an increasingly unstable global dynamic.
Canada must do its utmost, and will roll out new countermeasures against the Russian invasion, Joly told the Democracy Forum at TMU that I moderated Friday.
“I will have new sanctions to announce soon,” Joly said, blaming Russian President Vladimir Putin for the ravages of war in Ukraine — but also his reckless gambit to starve other poor countries into submission by blocking critical food shipments.
With tens of thousands of lives lost, and more than seven million displaced, the toll in human security, food security and energy security will only get worse. That puts an increased onus on Canada to support Ukraine with more weapons and sanctions to break the stalemate, but also cutting edge solutions to Russia’s mining and blockading of Black Sea ports.
“We need to make sure that the Russian Federation is held to account,” she told the forum (disclosure: I am a visiting practitioner at TMU). “We will be supporting Ukraine… we need to be ready not only to send ships but particularly also cargo ships.”
Sitting beside her onstage, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis — whose country is on the front lines of the spreading European conflict — said Canada and the West have little time left to help Ukraine and the Baltics defend themselves. Too much time has already been lost.
“The first donation of weapons from Lithuania to Ukraine left in December last year,” he reminded the audience — long before other countries woke up to the looming conflict. “I think that there have been several miscalculations.”
Russia is waging a war of attrition, relying on vast military resources to grind down Ukrainians over time: “I know it’s uncomfortable to say this … the victory still depends on how many weapons and which kind of weapons will be sent.”
Joly acknowledged that “the Baltic states were much more clear-eyed than some other European partners” in the preamble to war, but “hindsight is 20-20.”
Zanda Kalniņa-Lukaševica, representing Latvia’s foreign ministry, said the struggle really dates to Russia’s conquest and annexation of Crimea in 2014. By failing to respond sooner, the West only emboldened Russia’s authoritarian ruler.
“Putin thought he’ll win the war in three days, so the Russian soldiers didn’t have any food in their bags, just parade uniforms,” she said. “We need to help Ukrainians really to win this war… so it means we need to supply more weapons.”
Canada’s deployment of more than 700 troops to lead a NATO deployment to Latvia six years ago has served as a deterrent and a tripwire in the Baltics. Now, with the region transformed into a powder keg, Joly stressed that Canada’s commitment has increased to about 1,300 troops, with an additional 3,400 on standby and a frigate deployed to the Baltic Sea.
Our event was briefly interrupted for a pre-arranged exit (stage left) by Joly. I had already forewarned our audience at TMU (formerly Ryerson) that, this being a Democracy forum, it was only fitting that a Canadian cabinet minister had to sneak away, on cue, when an aid alerted her to a parliamentary vote — conducted virtually.
That’s democracy. The show — not least our Democracy Forum — must go on.
But that wasn’t the only programming note. I had already updated our audience that Estonia’s Eva-Maria Liimets would not be joining us onstage as scheduled, because — late breaking news — she was no longer her country’s foreign minister.
The night before, her political party had been dismissed from Estonia’s governing coalition, and so she was making her way home at that very moment. That’s a feature, not a bug, of democracies — giving way when you lose power.
On stage, Lithuania’s Landsbergis described the proximity and peril for his country just a few kilometers from Belarus while Russian soldiers marched on the Ukrainian capital in February. At which point Joly returned to her seat de ella to reassure her counterpart de ella, and those in other countries, that the West will remain vigilant.
“China is looking at what’s going on in Ukraine, but Russia is also looking at what’s going on in Ukraine,” she said. “I understand their anxiety and their fear of occupation…. Their security is our security.”
Diplomatically, Lithuania is fighting on two fronts — mindful of Russian belligerence, but also Chinese bullying. I asked Landsbergis to recount China’s outraged reaction to his government allowing a “Taiwanese” trade office to open in Lithuania (instead of the more muted “Taipei” label referring to its capital city).
“China decided to pick a fight, and they truly wanted to stop the precedent so that nobody would ever do anything like it,” Landsbergis told me. “But it also showed that countries can resist.”
The blowback from Beijing was an echo of the pushback from Moscow.
“Russia was saying that you should never join NATO,” he continued. “China’s position is in the same direction — economic coercion.”
Listening to the account from Landsbergis, Joly noted that freeing two Canadians held hostage by China during the Huawei affair was “at the core of our foreign policy approach.” A three-year official freeze was broken just a few weeks ago when she held her first phone conversation with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Now, Canada must be clear-eyed about the challenges — “from economic coercion to the question of human rights,” Joly stressed. “What we know is that China is looking at what’s going on in Ukraine and taking notes.”
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