Mr. Speaker, today, it is almost impossible to imagine and believe that, for the past four years, there has been a war in Ukraine that is the result of the brutality of one country, one man: Mr. Putin and his pointless and cruel war.
We are united in this country. We are united in this Parliament. I want to thank every one of my colleagues who spoke, including the hon. Minister of Defence, my friend and colleague from Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman, the member for Lac-Saint-Jean and the member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie.
I completely agree that we stand with Ukraine. We stand with the people of Ukraine. It is unacceptable that our world is being torn apart by a war that was impossible to imagine five years ago.
When we think of the naïveté that we had, the wonderful thought of the political theorist Fukuyama, it seemed so clear that we had The End of History, as he wrote in 1992, that the political and ideological evolution of nations led inevitably to a time of the rule of law, to liberal democracies that lived within a set of rules that were predictable.
A land war in Europe?
It was impossible to imagine. It could not be true.
When Putin invaded Ukraine, we saw the signs. We saw it was coming, but it still seemed far too impossible to believe. I will never forget February 24, 2022. For the first time, I put on yellow and blue ribbons, and I thought that I would put them on every day until this awful war was over.
Now, Putin thought he could end it in three weeks. I thought the world, the community of nations, would stand with Ukraine so clearly that it would not be long before this was over. The sense of the courage of President Zelenskyy, I thought, was the variable that Putin did not count on. He thought that not that many Ukrainians would stand up and defend their country. He thought, as did the United States at that time, that when they said, “Do not worry, Mr. Zelenskyy, we are sending a plane for you,” and he said, “I need ammunition; I don’t need a ride,” that was the surprise: a genuine hero of his country, someone actually elected, someone who had been a comic on television. He was the unexpected variable of courage that was so unusual in our times, when leadership is in name only.
President Zelenskyy addressed us here for the first time almost four years ago, on a TV screen. I so wished for the day that he could come back, when there was peace in Ukraine and we could celebrate him as the leader who survived a dreadful and unjust war. We still pray for that.
We know that Putin miscalculated. He thought he could end a war in three weeks, but he miscalculated the corruption of his own military, the lack of consideration for what it would mean to the world, and the solidarity of Europe. Today, on the fourth anniversary, the President of the European Union is there in Ukraine. Today, in the United Nations, a resolution was carried whereby 107 nations said, “We stand with Ukraine. We stand with peace.”
Today, President Zelenskyy spoke of Putin and of his lifetime political career of destruction, of hatred, of war. He actually said, of Putin, “He is war itself.” He said that to stand with him is to stand with unending war.
I cannot help but feel, as I always have since we first started debating in this place what we would do for Ukraine, that we have not done enough. In some ways we cannot do enough. We have NATO. We have the United Nations. We have massive efforts.
I am grateful, as my colleagues have said, that the Government of Canada has consistently stood with Ukraine. I am grateful we have welcomed Ukrainian refugees to Canada. However, more should be done with sanctions. We need to cripple the Russian economy. We need to do more. We need to seize the assets of oligarchs and see that they are liquidated and that those funds go to the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government.
War cannot be the solution to war. More bombs do not bring peace. As other members of Parliament have said today, peace will come at a negotiating table. It is extremely important and fundamental that Mr. Putin understand that Canada, every single last one of us, stands with Ukraine, which means Russia has made itself a pariah. When the government changes, perhaps we can welcome it again into the community of nations, but there was no Russian flag at the Olympics. There will not be a Russian flag where civilized people gather, because we recognize what President Zelenskyy has said: Putin is “war itself”.
Now, as we stand here on the fourth anniversary of the beginning of that impossible war, we must make peace possible.
We must choose peace. We must work tirelessly and do what we can to ensure that there is peace around the world, particularly for the children of Ukraine and for the people of Ukraine.
For all those who have suffered and died at the hands of Russian forces, and, yes, I grieve with the Russian mothers too as they have an impossible leader who has taken them to heartbreak and disaster, peace cannot just be a dream. We have to make it real. We have to rescue the Ukrainian children who were kidnapped from their families. We have to reunite those families. We have to pour into Ukraine the help it needs so desperately.
With those words, I join all colleagues here in saying, slava Ukraini, peace and victory to Ukraine.