My colleague Leyland Cecco is talking to the huge Ukrainian diaspora community in Canada.
I have a knot in my stomach. I can only imagine what it’s like for people in Ukraine who are living with the shelling,” said Taras Kulish, a Toronto-based charity lawyer and member of the Ukrainian-Canadian Congress and Ukrainian Canadian Social Services. “We’re all concerned and there’s a definitely a shock factor in processing it.”
A number of organizations across Canada are quickly raising funds for relief projects. Kulish, who works closely with humanitarian organizations in Ukraine, says colleagues on the ground have described the surreal experience of shelling near their homes and the constant worry of loved ones:
I’ve been checking in with colleagues telling them we’re here. We’re praying for you. We’re looking to see what we can do in response. We’re trying to give them that knowledge that people are concerned about them and who love them. But you can’t imagine what it’s like. It’s almost unfathomable.”
He adds that since 2014 he has worked for trauma therapy clinics in the country’s eastern region. “We’ve been living this for the last seven years, so in one way, we’re terribly prepared for it.”
Cecco adds:
In addition to solidarity rallies across Canada condemning the invasion by Russia, the prairie province of Alberta announced it would donate C$1m to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, a recognition of the large diaspora population in the region – and the long history Ukrainian residents have farming the area.
Is Putin unwell?
My colleagues Julian Borger in Washington and Angelique Chrisafis in Paris have reported on new questions being raised about the mental status of the leader of a country with 6,000 nuclear warheads.
His decision to voluntarily start a land war, and the “sheer weirdness” of his recent public appearances, has worried leaders and Russia watchers in western capitals, they say:
They worry about a 70 year-old man whose tendency towards insularity has been amplified by his precautions against Covid, leaving him surrounded by an ever-shrinking coterie of fearful obedient courtiers. He appears increasingly uncoupled from the contemporary world, preferring to burrow deep into history and a personal quest for greatness.
The French president Emmanuel Macron is well-placed to analyse changes to Putin’s demeanour. Macron once drove a cooperative, if self-conscious, Putin round the gardens of the palace of Versailles in a tiny electric golf cart in the summer of 2017 and welcomed him to his holiday residence at a fortress on the Mediterranean coast the following summer, where Putin descended from a helicopter carrying a bunch of flowers and complemented the Macrons on their tans.
After Macron held five hours of talks with the Russian leader in Moscow at opposite ends of a 15-metre table, he told reporters on the return flight that “the tension was palpable”. This was not the same Putin he had last met at the Elysee palace in December 2019, Macron said. He was “more rigid, more isolated” and was off on an “ideological and security drift”.
Following Putin’s speech on Monday, an Elysee official made an unusually bold assessment that the speech was “paranoid”. Bernard Guetta, a member of the European parliament for Macron’s grouping, told France Inter radio on Thursday morning, after military invasion began: “I think this man is losing his sense of reality, to say it politely.” Asked by the interviewer if that meant he thought Putin had gone mad, he said “yes”.
Stay tuned for their full report.
Bernie Sanders has responded to the recent praise of Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression toward Ukraine expressed by a former US president.
(@SenSanders)
It is outrageous, if unsurprising, that Trump would praise Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine as an act of “genius.” It should concern us all that Putin is exactly the kind of leader Trump would like to be, and that so few Republicans have the courage to say this out loud.
The Democratic senator said:
It is outrageous, if unsurprising, that Trump would praise Putin‘s murderous invasion of Ukraine as an act of “genius.” It should concern us all that Putin is exactly the kind of leader Trump would like to be, and that so few Republicans have the courage to say this out loud.
The former president in question had described the supposed “peacekeeping force” entering eastern Ukraine as “the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen”, adding: “There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right.”
He had also become confused on the Laura Ingraham show last night, appearing to believe that US troops were landing in Ukraine (rather than Russian ones) – and saying he thought that that news should be kept secret.
Congressman Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, said after a National Security Council briefing on Capitol Hill that he wanted to see the US remove Russia from the SWIFT international banking system in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
“Russia has begun an unprovoked, unjustified and brutal campaign against Ukraine,” Schiff said. “We must provide Ukraine with support to defend itself. We are also going to need to dramatically escalate the sanctions we place on Russia for this act of naked aggression.”
The chairman of the House intelligence committee said he believed the US needed to cut off Russia from the international banking system and its ability to access western capital, its ability to gather technology for weapons systems, and sanction the country’s oligarchs.
Schiff said the US needed to take additional steps to end Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and gas to prevent Putin from using energy as a geopolitical weapon. He added that Russia’s attack on Ukraine “ought to spell, at a minimum, the final death of Nord Stream 2.”
The unclassified NSC briefing that took place shortly before midday on Thursday indicated that Russia had the military capability to overwhelm Ukraine’s forces, Schiff told reporters, and that he anticipated Russia would very quickly overrun the country.
Schiff said that NSC officials were concerned about the possibility of a Russian cyber attack against not only Ukraine, but US and NATO allies. He added that he had not seen evidence of a cyber attack directed at the US, but noted it was still early in the conflict.
NBC reports that Joe Biden has been given various options for American cyberattacks to disrupt Russia’s military action in Ukraine. According to the news network:
Two US intelligence officials, one Western intelligence official and another person briefed on the matter say no final decisions have been made, but they say U.S. intelligence and military cyber warriors are proposing the use of American cyber weapons on a scale never before contemplated. Among the options: Disrupting internet connectivity across Russia, shutting off electric power, and tampering with railroad switches to hamper Russia’s ability to re-supply its forces, three of the sources said.
“You could do everything from slow the trains down to have them fall off the tracks,” one person briefed on the matter said.
A cyberattack would be something of a turning point for the US, given its cyber efforts have prioritised counterterrorism – mainly information and intelligence gathering – though it did also attack the Iranian nuclear program a little over a decade ago.
Russia and China have used much more extensive cyberattacks against American infrastructure, however, and experts say the US has been quietly preparing to fight fire with fire.
