Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's truly an honour for me to be here.
I will talk about the global setting, the crisis in Ukraine and its origins, about the existential imperative that we in the west keep more peace with Russia, how Canada might help do so, and about what I think you should recommend.
Our world is in turmoil. Global power is shifting. The west is in palpable relative decline. The Americans are stumbling. The Europeans are in crisis. China has risen and is rising further. Russia is back on its feet. The Middle East is in flames. Jihadism is raging. Persian power is spreading. In Asia a fanatic is rattling nuclear weapons. It is a multipolar world now, and some of the poles are sharply at odds.
Crises come at us thick and fast. Everyone's list is different, but they all include Ukraine. The crisis there has lit the fuse of this new cold war we're waging, more dangerous than the last one, and the stakes in the subject you're discussing are sky high. They are existential.
When media remember Ukraine these days, there is constant talk of who's to blame. In our popular narrative, it's clearly Russia's fault. In Russia's, it's clearly ours. I think there is plenty of blame to go around. Russia is blamed for aggression in Georgia, in Ukraine, in the Baltics, and in Syria. Its President is a demon, a killer, a spoiler, a thief, a war criminal, a fixer of U.S. elections. Choose your epithet, they're all in regular use. Putin is out to restore the Soviet Union, to conquer the Balts again, to make life miserable for Ukraine, and generally to thwart the west at every turn.
That narrative is faulty. I don't think Putin is a demon. In fact, these days he strikes me as one of the more rational adults in the room, and though, as has been said, nothing is more offensive than Russia on the defensive, I don't think Moscow is an aggressive marauder. I don't think it wants war and a broken Ukraine on its western flank. I do think it won't abide a security threat there though, and that it will pay and impose very high costs, as it's doing, to avoid one.
More generally, Russia demands more respect than it's been getting, that Putin is prepared to be our partner, in his words, but never our puppet, and that he's damned if the United States is going to go on running as much of the world as it has been doing, and running it badly. Just think of the U.S. foreign policy fiascos Putin has seen in his 17 years in power, above all in the Middle East, and imagine how the charge that he's the one who's aggressive strikes him. All things are relative. There is no meaning without context.
Let me spend more time though on some of the blame for this mess we're in, which we don't hear so much about. We wrote off Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. We decided we could ignore its interests. For a decade Boris Yeltsin played along. Vladimir Putin won't. For one thing, he will contain NATO. He made that clear in Georgia in 2008 and he's making it clear now in Ukraine. NATO, Russians know, is not a knitting club. It is a congenitally Russophobic nuclear armed military alliance, the mightiest in the history of the world, and it's been growing by leaps and bounds. Driving NATO up Russia's nose was a colossal counterproductively provocative mistake. That deed has been done though, and we have to live with it. Expanding NATO further, however, to include Georgia and Ukraine as Canada has advocated, would invite catastrophe.
When historians assess the origins of this new cold war, I expect NATO expansion will be high on the list. Independent Ukraine's political, economic, and foreign policy performance hasn't helped much either.
Politically, Kiev lost a fateful measure of the loyalty of its large ethnic Russian minority. One in five Ukrainians had independence, about the same proportion as francophones in Canada. Kiev also failed to wrest political control from oligarchs who run the country.
Economically, though, it is rich in natural resources and in human capital, with no shortage whatever of brains, and though it has received billions in aid through a quarter century now, Ukraine has fallen behind its neighbours, east and west, condemning millions of its people to poverty.
In foreign policy, with Ukraine the rope in a tug-of-war, Kiev's mistakes have been devastating. It failed to keep the peace with its giant neighbour. Three years ago, with hard-line nationalists in charge who trashed an EU-brokered agreement we'd all welcomed officially, the Maidan picked a fight Kiev can't win with the Kremlin.
Kiev can't make the west care more, and it can't make the Kremlin care less. Like them or not, theory aside, major powers' spheres of influence are real. We Canadians know that. We live in one. In the real world, Kiev has about as much freedom to undermine Moscow's security as Ottawa has to undermine Washington's, and, of course, its effective practical sovereignty is compromised. So is the effective practical sovereignty of most of the nations on earth. Welcome to the club.
Kiev was mistaken too in taking European promises of integration, of EU membership even, far too seriously. The prospect of EU membership was always a dream. Now with the EU beset, it's pure fantasy.
Kiev erred as well in letting westerners mind so much of its own business. We've seen the Americans choose a prime minister. We've seen an American proxy finance minister. We've seen foreigners as ministers of reform and anti-corruption, and we've seen, and we're now seeing, the spectacle of Mikheil Saakashvili, fresh from picking his own fight with Russia and losing a good chunk of his country, show up in Ukraine as a regional governor, then as an exile, and now on the streets as a would-be president.
It's an old story. For a thousand years someone else has always been in charge. The buck has seldom stopped in Kiev. It should stop there now. It is clear foreigners don't know how to solve Ukraine's problems. In their independent country, Ukrainians are going to have to solve more of them, or not, themselves.
They would be having an easier time of it had they inherited a smaller, more ethnically homogeneous state, but they didn't, and they've not done well keeping the place together. There is admirable popular democratic will, but the country's political institutions confound it time and again. There have been mass movements and uprisings. There are angry protesters encamped again on the Maidan as we speak. There have been democratic elections, massively monitored, declared free and fair, but they have yet to produce any semblance of peace, order, and good government. As its evangelists should humbly take note, democracy is not an import.
Through the quarter century of Ukraine's independence, Canada has been determined to play a prominent role, driven above all by passionate diaspora sentiment. Quite out of character and far from keeping with our modest military means, we became the west's leading hawk. This aggressive posture with its highly vocal hostility to Russia is sustained to this day.
What I find striking in this record is that we've stood our values on their heads in Ukraine. We go out of our way, for example, to get along with our giant neighbour. For Ukrainians though, who also live beside a giant, we counsel confrontation. The Russian bear should be poked in the nose at every opportunity.
Consider as well that while at home we practise pluralism, inclusive accommodation, federalism, bilingualism, and significant regional autonomy, we pander in Ukraine to lethally exclusive nationalism. Yulia Tymoshenko, recall, was recorded advocating that the solution to Russian ethnicity in Ukraine was a nuclear bomb.
The latest example that is bound to exacerbate inter-ethnic animosity is the new education policy banning Russian language instruction after grade 4. Ethnic Russian Ukrainians, however patriotic, and Russians cannot help but take offence. Wouldn't you?
No country in the world has a more profound interest in good bilateral and western relations with Russia than does Ukraine, yet no country in the world has done less than its best, loudest friend Canada to encourage essential reconciliation.
Consider our Magnitsky sanctions. All of you voted for them. Can any of you tell me, please, what shred of due process they entail? How are those lists of the condemned determined? Who decides how long the list is? Who's guilty? Who's not? Is this done by foreign policy advisers? Is it done by journalists? Is it done by well-paid lobbyists? Who knows?
At a time of new, tense, cold war and global upheaval, and particularly in the glaring ahistorical absence of any Canadian effort whatsoever to ease tension and reduce risk, Canada's grandstanding contribution of a late, ill-timed, imitative, redundantly duplicative, and entirely due process-free set of new Russia sanctions makes no sense whatsoever. Is this all we have to offer? Is this our best shot? To everything there is a season, including moral outrage.
However we got here, though, and whoever is to blame, we are where we are, on the verge of greater disaster, and given the stakes, we really do have to keep more peace with Russia.
To respond to this imperative, my view is that we need to four-square further NATO growth and make room and arrangements for Ukraine to trade well with both Europe and Russia, while posing a security threat to neither. Also, we need to allow for Ukraine to have the space, peace and quiet it so desperately needs to reunite, to recover, to reform, and to succeed.
Far from sacrificing Ukraine as critics will claim, neutrality and détente would provide for its salvation.
Chair, I have another two pages. It will take me another two or three minutes. I'll stop now if you want or I'll continue.