Mr. Chair, I appreciate your comments and that we only have 10 minutes. That is not very long, so I will try to cut right to the chase.
I first want to agree with my colleague from Parkdale—High Park that we stand here in solidarity with the people of Ukraine as they struggle to confront the many problems they have and at the same time deal with the fact that the Russians are trying to undermine the stability that we thought they had achieved. What is frightening in a way is how quickly the situation deteriorated from a year and a half ago to what we are dealing with today.
Originally, this debate was going to be about the subject of Canadian support to help train and build the capacity of Ukrainian military personnel, but it has turned to a more broad point about the conflict situation in Ukraine. I guess people can talk about whatever aspect of it is important to them.
I want to talk about the current situation that we have, with the UN human rights office recognizing that since last April, only one year ago, more than 6,000 people, military and civilians, have been killed and some 15,000 wounded, and that conditions in eastern Ukraine, particularly those areas held by anti-government forces are extremely difficult. In northern Donetsk and Luhansk, water and electricity supplies are frequently disrupted by shelling and rocket attacks and the number of people internally displaced has now reached some 1.2 million. That is an astonishing situation in about a year.
We know how this started, with the instability in the government and the actions by Yanukovych. The path that Ukraine was on to make a close economic arrangement with Europe was stopped by the then prime minister. That led to a protest, which eventually led to a civil war after he was deposed. How quickly that turned into the situation we have now is really an indication of how much instability there was in Ukraine that could be fomented into the civil war so quickly.
Who can forget the shock in July 2014 when Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down and the loss of 298 lives? All of us were shocked to know that such a thing could happen. A civilian airliner with innocent rights of passage over Ukraine was shot down in that situation. That was followed by the horrific scenes of preventing rescue personnel and international relief efforts from trying to remove the bodies and bring them back to loved ones. It was a shock to all of us that this could happen so rapidly in a country that we thought was on the road to a relationship with some harmony, with some conflict and dispute, yes, but with an opportunity at least to have a relationship with Europe as well as hopefully continuing a relationship with Russia. That turned out not to be possible, and we are where we are today.
A lot of work has been done. I want to talk about some of the military side of it, because this debate has been prompted by the recent decision by Canada to send 200 troops to Ukraine to help in training and building the capacity of the Ukrainian military, which is very important for the stability of Ukraine and for the ability of the Ukrainian people to maintain their territorial integrity. We know there are serious problems in the Ukrainian military. When we tried to deliver non-lethal weaponry, we actually had to build up our own supply lines to ensure the goods got to where they were supposed to, because of ongoing problems with corruption within the Ukrainian military.
Something has to be done about that, and I think NATO has stepped in to do that. There are five trust funds set up by NATO to make that possible: the logistics and standardization trust fund; command, control, communications trust fund, to which Canada has contributed $1 million; the cyberdefence trust fund; the military career management trust fund; and a medical rehabilitation trust fund. These are funds that were set up by NATO to build on the medium term professionalism and growth, and the ability of the Ukrainian military to do a proper job.
Canada has also contributed to the NATO reassurance mission. We need to put that in the right perspective. What was the purpose of that? The purpose of that was to show, first of all, the Russians and Mr. Putin, in particular, but also to show our allies, particularly in the Baltics and the neighbouring states of Russia that NATO means business, that article 5, the special and most important clause of the NATO treaty where one country is attacked, all other countries would come to its defence.
It was particularly concerning to the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. They felt very vulnerable and as a result NATO stepped up the efforts, called the reassurance package. Canada participated quite dramatically in that with aircraft, with naval vessels and with training missions both in Poland and contributing for the first time to Baltic air policing that had been going on since 2005. That was an important contribution.
As a member of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, I have been to Riga, Latvia and Vilnius. We do learn from these experiences how important NATO is to these countries, which are recently part of NATO and were part of the former Soviet Union. It is extremely important for them to know that NATO is there to help them.
NATO played a very significant role and Canada, being a part of that to provide that assurance, is there. It is indirectly helping Ukraine. The government has overplayed that a little and said this was a direct support to Ukraine. It did support Ukraine because Ukraine was aware that NATO and the allies would ensure Mr. Putin did not go any further than he has and these sanctions are a very important part of that. That was indirect assistance to Ukraine.
The direct assistance we are talking about now with 200 troops to provide some training is important as well. I imagine the Minister of National Defence will speak in a little while and talk about the exact role. These are some of the questions that we wanted answered. We wanted a debate in the House and wanted to have a vote on this. We wanted to know what exactly has happened.
We do know that Ukraine needs a lot of help not just on the military side but as the Minister of Foreign Affairs said, we have to talk about the long-term stability of Ukraine. I will end by reflecting on the statement made by the minister of finance of Ukraine who was quoted by my colleague from Parkdale—High Park because it is a role for the Ukrainian government to play and people to play. There needs to be a lot of institutional changes.
I know from talking to people from Ukraine that the whole issue of corruption is extremely important and has to be fixed. Canada should be able to make a bigger contribution to that specific aspect than it has so far.
Natalie Jaresko, Ukrainian minister of finance, said in March of this year:
International support can only be effective if the Ukrainian government is also effective and diligent in its efforts to reform the country, fight corruption, improve transparency and accountability, improve the rule of law and create the conditions for the return of economic growth and prosperity.
We know that the European Union has put up $11 billion euros to assist in economic development and $5 billion of that has already been advanced in loans and grants. That is a considerable and significant effort. There is a strong international effort to help the Ukrainian people and Canada should be, and is, a part of it.
We do have some issues about that and I think the foreign affairs critic for our party and other colleagues will make some comments on that in the debate as we go forward.