Certainly if the hostilities get worse in the next day or two, as the news reports today do indicate, that obviously means that Vladimir Putin is not listening to western condemnations, and you at the very least need to throw Russia out of the G-8; at the very least.
But I think the best way to kind of help Ukraine at this moment, if that's the right way of putting it, is to try to ensure that the new government, the new leadership in the country, is a success story, because that sends a signal that there isn't just the Putin model of autocracy with its lack of the rule of law for the state. There is another model for the population.
I think this particular government is in very dire straits. They inherited a country where everything has been totally stolen from the cupboard. I mean, Canada is not a member of the European Union, but certainly it would be tremendously important to get the association agreement signed, and Canada can give moral, diplomatic support on that.
Certainly Canada I think can help on questions that Dominique has talked about, the post-crisis rebuilding of the country. You have tremendous expertise on the nationality question, for example, and on language questions.
The Soviet-inherited culture unfortunately is not very good at compromise. That culture of compromise is one that Canada can help to promote. To give one concrete example, one of the problems of the Ukrainian presidential election was always that in the second round, it was a candidate from the west and a candidate from the east. When one candidate won, it was winner-takes-all, which created resentment in the other parts of the country. Let's have a system where if the president is elected by western central Ukraine, he or she appoints the prime minister from east Ukraine, and vice versa.
The questions of national integration, which are very closely linked to democracy in Ukraine, are crucial questions, as are those of the rule of law. There are so many other areas that need helping out in Ukraine. I think one area where Canada as a NATO member can help out is in the area of security reform. The military on this occasion, as in the Orange Revolution, refused to come out and shoot protesters. The reason that was the case was thanks to NATO's partnership for peace program.
The Ukrainian military has changed. It's no longer a Soviet institution. It refused to shoot people 10 years ago and it refuses to shoot people today. The other institutions—the police, the security service, and the prosecutor's office—are still Soviet, and they need heavy-duty reform.