Canada’s shipment of lethal weapons to Ukraine came too late, according to former Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr. He was formerly chairman of the Standing Committee on National Defense, which already in 2017 made the recommendation to arm Ukraine.
“How can we go back in time not to say to ourselves today that we should have provided arms earlier than two weeks ago?” ” he asks.
Over the past two weeks, the Canadian government has supplied over $7 million in lethal weapons to Ukraine. The equipment includes pistols, carbines, cartridges, a hundred anti-tank weapon systems as well as rockets. According to Lubomyr Luciuk, a professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, the weapons enter Ukraine through the Polish border.
In 2017, the professor was part of a group of experts who advocated the delivery of lethal weapons to Ukraine – then already at war with Russia in the east of the country – during testimony before the Committee. “The supply of defensive weapons would help the Ukrainians make the Russian incursion a costly and expensive operation, in terms of equipment and manpower,” he said. The Canadian government then replied that it did not plan to “provide assistance in the form of donations of deadly weapons”.
Four years later, Stephen Fuhr, former Liberal MP for Kelowna–Lake Country, British Columbia, agrees that the scenario unfolding in Ukraine might have been different if the Ukrainians had been armed earlier. “I’m glad to see that the weapons are now sent, but it would have been much more effective if it had been done months or years ago,” he says.
“Lethal weapons were not provided, because everyone wanted to make peace and not war, but many of us have been saying for some time that Vladimir Putin is a tyrant and he only gets the message if you deal with him from a position of strength,” said Ukrainian-born Ontarian Ihor Kozak, who also testified in 2017. “Providing weapons isn’t provocation, it’s deterrence” , says the military adviser, who worked in Ukraine.
Middle ground
Despite the usual political differences between the federal parties, Stephen Fuhr affirms that all agreed on the 17 recommendations to be made to the government at the end of the study of the transpartisan committee. A few members of the Committee visited Ukraine between September 23 and 26, 2017 to better understand the situation on the ground and determine the assistance the country could benefit from.
The main support measures at the time consisted of training the Ukrainian armed forces and contributing to the development of the country, a contribution hailed by Stephen Fuhr. Between 2014 and 2019, Canada provided Ukraine with $700 million in the form of financial aid and non-lethal military assistance. In late January 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government would renew its support for Ukraine for three years.
The former British Columbia MP says committee members expected to see such an attack from the Russian president. “All the evidence was there,” said the former Armed Forces pilot. By invading parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, Russia prevented the country from joining NATO, the former MP believes. “Because as soon as it is part of it, Ukraine could invoke Article 5”, which ensures that an attack against a member of the Alliance is considered an attack directed against all allies. Some NATO countries wanted at that time to avoid a conflict with Russia.
One of the arguments against Ukraine’s entry into the Alliance — the presence of corruption in that country — has also been used to limit the supply of lethal weapons, says the former chairman of the Standing Committee on Defense national. The Committee had proposed in 2017 that the weapons would only be sent if Ukraine demonstrated “that it [travaillait] actively to eliminate corruption at all levels of government,” reads the Committee’s report.
“At some point, the country should have met the threshold necessary to receive aid,” said Stephen Fuhr, who says he does not know what has happened since his electoral defeat in 2019. The Ukrainian government “legitimately sought to eradicate corruption,” he said. During a visit to Toronto in the summer of 2019, a few months after his election, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also assured that the elimination of corruption was one of his priorities. Ukraine emerged from the Soviet era with political stakes and corruption, but the country has since transformed “remarkably” year after year, according to Lubomyr Luciuk.
Threat to Canada
On February 28, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that countries that supplied lethal weapons to Ukraine could face consequences if they were used in that country.
Ihor Kozak, a former Canadian soldier, however, believes that Canada is not in “great danger” because the Russian government is in survival mode. However, Canadians should expect cyberattacks and propaganda, he said. “We must also be aware of the fact that we are the neighbors of the Russians in the north of the country and that they claim part of the Canadian Arctic territory,” explains Ihor Kozak. If Russia starts peeling the onion to find the instigators of the sanctions, illustrious Stephen Fuhr, Canada will be on the list.
This story is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.