Indeed, Russia started its invasion only when our country decided on its integration path towards the European Union and the united European family. Russia didn't like all that, and they started their attack.
However, I believe that today the question is much broader than Ukraine alone. I will provide you with just one example. The Ukrainian Crimea, before annexation, was a resort that could be used by residents of countries all over the world. It temporarily hosted a Russian naval base that was to be withdrawn in 2017. Today it is turned into an extremely powerful Russian army base. It is too powerful to threaten Ukraine alone. Accordingly, it threatens NATO countries as well.
As regards our future actions, we will, of course, fight, and we will do everything possible to make sure that the enemy withdraws from our territory. The numbers are tremendous. If we speak about the military component, that's more than 60,000 personnel and more than 700 tanks. There are several thousand armoured personnel vehicles that are deployed at Ukraine's borders, and also inside Ukraine in the occupied regions. All of this is a threat to us. We support a political and diplomatic resolution, but we also know for sure that our military capacity will represent a very important argument for withdrawing Russian troops from Ukraine.
Indeed, we need to improve our military capacity. We speak about defensive weapons. The greater and the better our defence, the better an argument there will be against any aggression by the Russian Federation. We highly appreciate the Canadian contribution to the training of our military, and we believe it will be absolutely the right step to providing us with high-tech defensive weapons which will be a symbol and a system of containment of the aggression by the Russian Federation.
Thank you.