National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman and esteemed members of this committee. I will focus my remarks today on primarily the information operations aspect of foreign cyberwarfare and the threat it poses to our information environment and our national security. I will talk about the direct impact Russian information warfare is having on our understanding of Putin's invasion of Ukraine and how the Russian government seeks to intimidate and silence Canadian critics of Russia's war.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you for that very important question. You may not like this answer, but I think we need to send more weapons to the Ukrainians, certainly Harpoon missiles, to deter Russian attacks on vessels leaving Odessa with that grain, the grain that is so desperately needed in so many parts of north Africa and Asia.

Foreign Affairs committee  That information war would have simply continued. Now that we have returned that turbine, we see it continue. The Russian government has continuously made excuses to reduce the flow of gas through Nord Stream 1. Now that it's stopped that flow completely, it has continuously blamed various different types of paperwork and insufficient repairs.

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, yes, I think it demonstrates that Vladimir Putin is very much in a bit of a panic mode about the sanctions. Dr. Schmitt mentioned earlier that Russia is no longer able to repair any of its military equipment. It's using parts from household appliances to patch up various different weapons.

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly. There are several thousand political prisoners in Russia today since the war began. In the first few months of the war, thousands of Russians took to the streets to protest this war. They were all brutally arrested. The entire Russian opposition, the ones who remained in Russia, have been detained.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a very good question. I saw that same report. According to that report, by August 9 the RCMP had initially reported that $289-million worth of Russian assets had been frozen. They then revised that number to $122.3 million. I'm not sure what would account for that sort of drop.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think there's a lot that Canada could be doing to make our own sanctions regime more effective. First and foremost is working with our allies to harmonize our policies and legislation with the United States, the EU and the U.K. We should be stepping up the enforcement of our sanctions policy.

Foreign Affairs committee  I completely agree that we have the worst of both worlds. We've arrived at a lose-lose situation. The fact that we have compromised on these sanctions opens the door to other allies doing the same. They can justify that action by pointing to our decision to provide that exemption to Gazprom.

Foreign Affairs committee  There certainly is demand in the Baltic states, and there has been, for quite some time, for the export of Canadian energy. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, Canada and Estonia have just recently signed an agreement to develop a program to build small-scale nuclear reactors in Estonia to wean that country off Russian electrical supplies.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am simply Mr. Marcus Kolga, not Dr. Marcus Kolga. Thanks to you and the members of the committee for this opportunity to appear before you today. Over the past months, Russia has threatened to starve vulnerable nations around the world by blockading millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain while shelling and bombing critical Ukrainian agricultural infrastructure to induce a global grain shortage.

Public Safety committee  Absolutely.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for that excellent question. I think the federal government needs to take, first and foremost, an inclusive, all-of-society and all-of-democracy approach to this. Of course, government needs to be part of that discussion to develop a strategy to combat this, but it also means reaching out to civil society actors who are often, like me, on the front lines of this battle against foreign information operations.

Public Safety committee  I think we've seen exactly how far they can go. In the case of the United States and the 2016 presidential elections, we saw Russian efforts to destabilize that election that came very close to successfully doing so. We've seen, with regard to the invasion of Ukraine, the effectiveness of disinformation, certainly domestically in Russia, and Vladimir Putin's ability to seal off his entire nation from outside information and to repress and suppress the independent media within Russia.

Public Safety committee  That's a great question. When we saw the emergence of the pandemic in March of 2020, a lot of us who have been keeping an eye on Russian disinformation, those tactical narratives that they use and the types of issues that they target, saw that COVID would provide a fertile ground for those Russian propagandists to sink their teeth into, with issues on the far left and far right, and pull us apart.

Public Safety committee  If I were in Europe, especially in the Baltic states, I'd be far more concerned about a Russian invasion than I would be in North America. I think that Russia's primary objective—Vladimir Putin's primary objective—is to expand the availability of resources. They have already been engaging in research in the Arctic and have been increasing their claims of the resources underneath the Arctic sea for the past decade.