Thank you very much for the question, Mr. Garneau.
This is a really difficult question to answer, as I said. Let me say again we have no evidence. Evidence matters, and we have no evidence.
Let me just say there is a dark and then there is a darker interpretation. The interpretation you just put forward is dark in the sense that it's that President Putin has never accepted the loss of Ukraine and Belarus from the greater Russian sphere of influence, and that this is an opportunistic moment to reassert Russian influence, to construct a greater economic zone, particularly to keep Ukraine from joining or affiliating with the European Union, and that he seized the opportunity when it became apparent.
A darker version even than the one you just put forward is about the so-called Eurasianists, who are increasingly prominent in the Russian media, and if you're prominent in the Russian media today that's because you are allowed to be prominent by the government. There is in fact a group who articulate a position that Russia needs to reassert and re-establish its borders. It needs to turn its back on the west, the western model of democratic government, human rights, that these are all strategies used as spheres to undermine the Russian government and to inflict further damage on Russia. These are voices actually that we're hearing. There's no question we're hearing these voices inside Russia.
The big question is how influential are they, how much access do they have to the president, and is this in fact the strategy that he's following?
For us as Canadians I think we have to stay focused on what Russia is doing rather than on the why of what they're doing. We have to be unambiguous in demonstrating our own resolve and in underlying that this unilateral change of Ukraine's borders is unacceptable, that any further dismemberment of Ukraine, south and eastern Ukraine, would in fact provoke a new round of much broader and much deeper sanctions, and that this crosses all party lines within this country.