Read the full conference report: https://natoassociation.ca/safeguarding-ukraines-future-security-guarantees-demining-for-ukraines-recovery-reconstruction-conference/
Watch the full conference recording: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUJbdmEnmxrIZtwr7X01uvyTeFfcfhzuh
I’m going to talk to you for about 20 minutes and sort of explain a little bit of my interaction with Ukraine and how I came to be a champion of the country, and a little bit about what’s going forward, what’s going to happen.
I’d like to say that we are clearly closer to the end than to the beginning of this war, and
I have every hope that Ukraine will remain intact and take its place as one of the most dynamic economies in Europe.
My first brush with Ukraine was the fault of a Ukrainian friend of mine, Bob Anesak, who many of you might know that he’s a Toronto lawyer and when the Soviet Union fell apart in 1990 dissolved in 1991, Bob said “You’ve got to go to Ukraine.” Because my newspaper sent me with a photographer for 20 weeks to go all over the Soviet Union as it fell apart to explain to Canadian readers what was going to be the result.
And so I went for a week to Ukraine and that was it. I was stuck. I was the first journalist, western journalist, to interview President Kravchuk, who was the first president of an independent Ukraine, a lovely gentleman. After that interview, Bob was the translator. We said to each other: “Oh my god.” I said “Bob, he’s lovely. I think he’s okay but he’s an orphan. He knows nothing about capitalism, he knows nothing about democracy. we’ve got to do something to help”. so Bob and I chartered the Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce that spring in 1991. Bob remained but we remained semi-active. We sponsored trade missions back and forth, and watched it as it struggled with capitalism and with democracy. It’s been a struggle ever since 1991. And so in about 1995, Bob and I were partners in a newspaper in Kyiv, a financial newspaper, which was one day simply stolen by a Ukrainian oligarch thugs with their baseball bats. They took our paper away, scared our editor into leaving and fleeing the country with his family, and I said “That’s it they got to get their act together. I’m not interested, it’s just another rotten corrupt country.
But then the Orange Revolution happened and then I said “Wow this is the biggest protest and the biggest most powerful influential civil society in the whole of the former Soviet Union.” Belarusians couldn’t do this, the Russians themselves couldn’t do this, this was remarkable and we all watched it on TV. It was amazing. So I went there and that was it. I was hooked again. The Ukrainians were able by sheer dent of collaboration and civil pride to overturn a rotten election that was won by Yanukovich.
Unfortunately, we know that he got back in again, thanks to Russian money and the help of a friend of Donald Trump’s, Paul Maniffort, who gave him a doover, and helped him win the presidency again. Once he did that, he was fully a puppet of Putin’s dismantled the the military in Ukraine, which was one of the finest in the world, and sold off weaponry that had been purchased for its military, for personal profit to third world dictators and he actually disarmed the country in preparation for Russia taking it over, again. It was clearly the plan. All of this went on and it was extremely dangerous and then fell into a slump again: the corruption and the problems. We saw it first hand in the chamber because people would go over there, invest in Ukraine and have their heads handed to them on a platter because of crooked judges or whatevers.
So it was a struggle and it was continuing to be a struggle but there was still that civil society that pride that Ukrainians have, which is very unique, and we had the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, which drove the dictator out and led to the first invasion by Putin. But a rise in nationalism, pride, and reform eventually led to anti-corruption efforts and in 2019 Ukraine had its first real free election and Zelenskyy won it by a landslide, thank God.
Whatever you think of him, this man is heroic. So you know during this whole period, there were people in Ukraine who were trying to get people interested in Ukraine joining NATO and the polls were that people didn’t like it, they weren’t interested in it. They thought it would have been, you know, even more of a motivation for Russia to be brutal. But by 2020 the polls in Ukraine firmly supported joining NATO and then in 2022 the second invasion happened not coincidentally.
Now we have this war which is, of course, gone on since the first invasion in 2014. NATO is a hot button to Putin, and yes, Ukraine should be in but I consider it a de-facto member of NATO already and that’s fine. NATO does everything it can. In the limitations it has to help its members individually; some more than others to help Ukraine fend off the Russians to the extent they have, which is quite amazing, and that’s all on the Ukrainians, of course, but NATO has been there.
So I think the focus in the talks has to be on a ceasefire and then on a major security force which is in a sense a de-facto NATO without NATO, which is the big red flag to Putin. It will not be in the deal and to push for that means an extenuation of a war of attrition, that is burning up the youth and the resources and the goodwill that Ukraine has worldwide and internally. So I think that it’s important that a security, Coalition of the Willing, if you want to call it. The Europeans consider that pejorative because that was George Bush’s term in terms of invading Kuwait but whatever you want to call it, you can’t call it NATO and it can’t really be part of NATO. It can be helped by all the NATO allies individually and now, of course, that the talks and Trump is losing patience and he should, the talks are faltering on-off and not going to lead to everything we all hope for.
Europe is stepping up, they’re next, they know it, and I think that a major Rubicon River has been crossed because Germany gets it. Germany thinks it has troops in the Baltics as of this week. Germany’s leader has pledged defense spending equivalent to half a trillion dollars and they can afford more if they want to. So we have the fourth richest economy on the planet technologically capable but now politically aligned with what we were all hoping would happen earlier. So to me Germany, Germany’s new leader and the fact that the houses the parliament in Germany fully back this! That turnaround is enormous. Germany’s talking about an atom bomb. They’re not fooling around, they get it. They were the problem, but that is an important security step in favor of Ukraine’s existence.
Now and I think that also means endorsement by the European Union and it membership of Ukraine, and the French and the British are putting together a Coalition of the Willing and all of that has to happen, because there will be no rebuilding of Ukraine if it still has a target on its back, and you have to have boots on the ground, and all kinds of other things there. The other thing that’s interesting is that as Europe realizes it’s next and Germany steps up.
Ukraine will be the military industrial complex of Europe. So will the United States indirectly, Europe will buy stuff from the US which will keep Mr. Trump at bay and happy.
They have already made an incredibly technologically advanced Ukrainian military defense construct. The Germans will plug into that, the French and the British and all of Europe, and so the strengthening of Europe with Ukraine at the point of the spear is going to stop Putin, in my opinion, thank God, maybe even God willing, crush his economy and push him back someday. So the other thing that’s needed of course too because of my interaction with Ukraine in the past is that the war has not eliminated all the bad elements in the Ukrainian world, and this is why the next thing that has to happen which is going to happen is the European Union membership which will allow the rebuilding of all of the institutional architecture of Ukraine. The minerals deal with the United States, while painful, has kept Trump engaged, had to happen, has to happen, and if executed properly, will of course provide jobs and economic development inside Ukraine and export-income and so on. But you can’t have these things happen unless you have the Europeans come in as they did in Hungary and Poland and get rid of the rotten judiciary, the incompetence of the civil service, and corruption.
And replace the oligarchs as the structure of the economy they have to be replaced. I would actually nationalize all of their assets because they collaborated with the Russians in my opinion, that includes the ones that are running around saying “they love Ukraine and are trying to help” it who shall remain nameless… So the economic building will take place because Ukrainians are smart, they have great work ethic, they have resources and they have drive and resilience. The European Union will provide, as they did with Hungary and Poland, decent institutional structures so that people feel good about investing there, building business there, and employing people there.
Get rid of the oligarchs so there’s not this terrible concentration of power that the Russians were captive to the Russians again, privatize the state-owned enterprises which are incompetent but are sitting on incredible wealth creation potential. privatize them fairly, publicly, openly and put in place antitrust laws so that you don’t have just one or two players gobbling up everything, and keep the oligarchs out, and then you’re going to have economic rebuilding. It’ll explode. you’ve got the piggy bank in Germany and in the United States and the rest of Europe. Asia’s salivating to get back in there but if there’s decent rules so what let them come in is my attitude, and the country will be rebuilt, demined.
The assets and that’s another thing I like about the new chancellor of Germany. He wants to take those frozen assets the heck with the arguments this is not a good idea and give them to Ukraine. So where are we now in Ukraine, this is why I’m optimistic: Ukraine has the biggest and best military in Europe, it is bigger than the French and British armed forces combined, it is a technological center of excellence not just for military stuff for everything. It was before the war long before the war the European country with the highest literacy rates. These are smart people and the other thing that a lot of people never realized is that the Silicon Valley of the Soviet Union was in Ukraine, it was not in Russia. All the brains that put Gagarin into space to develop weaponry and develop technological advances for the Russian Empire were made and done and invented by Ukrainians. So this is going to be an incredible country once it’s out from under the boot of Russia and collaborating with Europe. So the best military technological center of excellence, it has incredible natural resources, it now has allies, lots of very important prominent allies well-healed and its people and its diaspora are second to none.
So Ukraine’s going to make it. Thank you.
This speech was transcribed by Şerif Sav.