One thing I know from reading a few history books is that every delay in responding to a dictator—an aggressive dictator—pushes the price up.
When Boris Nemtsov was here—I don't know if he was in this room or somewhere else—arguing for the Magnitsky case, we lived in a different world. It was before the invasion of Ukraine, before the annexation of Crimea, and obviously before Boris Nemtsov was shot dead in front of the Kremlin. It tells you that Putin's regime is developing—I'm not sure this is the right word—is moving in one direction.
You talked about violation of laws, but we have to find a way to penalize Putin's regime for violating the fundamental international law that secured peace in Europe and in the rest of the world after 1945, which was that borders cannot be changed by force. There was only one case, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and the international community had a forceful response.
If you pretend that annexation of Crimea is just a local affair between Russia and Ukraine or it's something that has no fundamental consequences for global security, then you're sending the message to Putin that all bets are off.
For those who are arguing that Ukraine is not NATO, yes, Ukraine is not NATO. I understand there are no obligations to defend Ukraine militarily. There are, of course, the Budapest memorandums, which had the signatures of the U.S. president and the British prime minister, alongside Boris Yeltsin's signature. This agreement was for an exchange of Ukrainian nukes, the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world, for a Russian guarantee of territorial integrity.
When you basically invite Putin to test the resolve of the free world elsewhere, have no doubts that he will. The question is not if Putin will strike tomorrow or next month or next year; it's when and where he will strike, because he has made foreign policy aggression a staple of his domestic propaganda. He will need to feed the Russian public with this red beat of his global successes.
While I understand your concerns about intricate details of Canadian law, and obviously you don't want to make a mistake by hurting potentially innocent people, it's up to you to come up with a plan to protect the integrity and security of the world we live in. Unless you do something, Putin's war against the free world, Putin's policy of spreading chaos worldwide, will continue. He has proven to be a very good enabler of creating chaos, and unlike many other politicians, his counterparts in the free world, he does not play the game of small corners, but the geopolitical game. He understands that the Syrian refugees could help his buddies in Europe, all the fascist parties, to gain more popularity, because it shatters European political systems. It helps him to have more friends in power, and eventually will help him to lift sanctions, or to weaken them.
That's why I think it's up to you to decide how you want to oppose this aggression. However, you shouldn't argue whether you will inevitably face the ultimate challenge; the ultimate challenge could be when Putin will test your resolve in the Baltic states.