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Ukrainian News | 16/29Mar2017 | Marco Levytsky, [2] Lozynskyj, [3] Simons, [4] Glavin

Mainstream media must wake up to Putin’s threat

The spirit of one of my predecessors at this newspaper -- the late Michael Chomiak, maternal grandfather of our Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland -- has suddenly been resurrected in a story that has dominated the headlines in some of the most highly respected newspapers in both Canada and the United States.

At issue is his service in the wartime Ukrainian-language newspaper, Krakivs’ki Visti, published in Nazi-occupied Poland. This newspaper served the Ukrainian-speaking population both in Poland and later in the Nazi-occupied territories of western Ukraine and strived to maintain some semblance of Ukrainian national consciousness in those turbulent times. According to Chomiak’s daughter, Natalia, employees of the newspaper even worked to some extent with the anti-Nazi resistance; in particular, they issued false papers for members of the underground. But, as can be expected under such circumstances, they had no choice but to publish Nazi propaganda including some anti-Semitic articles. However, under no circumstance does that make them “Nazis”. I worked with the late Michael Chomiak at Ukrainian News in 1982-1983 and knew him to be an honest journalist and a deeply religious and conscientious individual.

Chomiak’s ghost was first resurrected by a well-known KGB agent, John Helmer, who fled his native United States in the 1980’s before he was exposed by former KGB Major Yuri Shvets. Helmer now works as a “journalist” in Putin’s Moscow, churning out propaganda pieces for his Vozhd. His piece “SCOOP: Canada’s new foreign minister lying about family’s Ukrainian Nazi past,” was posted on the Russia Insider website on January 19, 2017 and this was followed up by Arina Tsukanova’s “A Nazi skeleton in the family closet,”, posted on consortiumnews.com on February 27, 2017. Tsukanova is identified as “a Russian Ukrainian journalist from Kiev (sic) currently living in Crimea,” whose most recent work is entitled “How Ukraine annexed Crimea. A frank conversation with Nikki Haley,” and extends the practice of disseminating “alternative facts” to such a degree that it would even make Kellyanne Conway blush.

In both cases, there is a sliver of truth in that Chomiak did work for Krakivs’ki visti. However, upon this sliver, layers and layers of fabrications were mounted in an attempt to portray him as some Nazi collaborator, which is a very common characteristic of Russian propaganda.

Such drivel circulated mainly in pro-Kremlin and far-right websites until The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa Bureau Chief, Robert Fife, decided to make this an issue during the March 6, 2017 press conference announcing the Government of Canada’s decision to renew Operation Unifier. The exchange (as recorded in the official transcript) went as follows:

Question: Ms. Freeland, can I ask you a quick question? It’s no secret the Russians do not like you. They’ve banned you from the country. Recently, there has been a series of articles about you and your maternal grandparents, making accusations that he was a Nazi collaborator in pro-Russian websites. I’d like to get your view on do you see this as a disinformation campaign by the Russians to try to smear you and discredit you, which they have a tendency to have done?

Hon. Chrystia Freeland: Well, let me start, Rob, by saying that I don’t think that all Russians dislike me. I have many close and good Russian friends, and I very much enjoyed living and working in Moscow as a foreign correspondent. I speak Russian, and I’m a big admirer and fan of the Russian language and culture.

I think that it is also public knowledge that there have been efforts, as U.S. intelligence forces have said, by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians, and indeed other western countries, should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us. I am confident in our country’s democracy, and I am confident that we can stand up to and see through those efforts.

Fife decided to follow this up with a story headlined “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi newspaper”, which was published in The Globe and Mail the following day. Two days after that The Washington Post picked up on this story with one headlined “Russia should stop calling my grandfather a Nazi, says Canada’s foreign minister”. A deluge of commentaries followed, some quite insightful, among them the Edmonton Journal’s Paula Simons and the National Post’s Terry Glavin who followed up his initial March 8, 2017 piece with an even better one in MacLean’s on March 14, 2017 (http://www.macleans.ca/politics/how-russias-attack-on-freeland-got-traction-in-canada/ )

Was this sudden media attention on the late Michael Chomiak justified? If one takes the concept of journalistic responsibility to heart -- then it wasn’t.

This was disinformation that permeated the lowest depths of pro-Kremlin, neo-fascist, and alt-right websites and should have stayed there. There was absolutely no evidence to suggest the late Michael Chomiak was a “Nazi” and had absolutely no relevance to Chrystia Freeland’s policy stands as Canada’s foreign minister. It served instead as a distraction that added fuel to the disinformation campaign waged by the Kremlin in order to undermine the democratic countries of the world.

But if this particular case was merely irresponsible, one specific article published in a mainstream Canadian newspaper was totally despicable (and potentially subject to a legal interpretation of what constitutes hate propaganda, but that is a question for a legal expert, which I do not purport to be). I am referring to “Canada should not renew mission to Ukraine” by David Rennie, published on February 18, 2017 in the Hamilton Spectator, a newspaper which belongs to the TorStar chain. Here are some excerpts:

“First, the present Ukrainian government, installed in a coup orchestrated by Washington, isn’t worthy of our support. According to the BBC, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland admitted that the U.S. spent $5 billion over a number of years to instigate regime change in Ukraine.

“(1) She overthrew the democratically-elected Yanukovich (sic) government in 2014 which had less than one year remaining in its term of office…”

“Second, the agents of regime change recruited by Nuland were none other than gangs of thugs from several fascist parties, remnants of the very same Ukrainian fascists allied to Hitler in the Second World War. They fought soldiers and police in the main squares of Kyiv and other cities. Poroshenko’s coup government has the dubious distinction of being the only government in Europe with fascists in cabinet, several holding key security posts. Canadian veterans might be surprised to learn that the Trudeau government is considering renewing Canada’s military mission to a country with the same fascists in government that they fought in the Second World War.”

Now would any mainstream Canadian newspaper that purports to be respectable run a piece that, in all seriousness, argued that the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on New York’s twin towers was a Jewish conspiracy, as has been claimed by some extremists? Off course not. But Ukrainians, it seems, are fair game.

The tentacles of Putin’s disinformation campaign extend far and wide around the world and represent an extremely dangerous threat to the stability of the world’s democracies. It’s about time the mainstream media in these democracies woke up to face this fact and this very real threat to democracy.

[2]
Unknown | 16Mar2017 | Askold S. Lozynskyj

A Peculiar Smear

Canada's foreign minister has been the subject of a peculiar smear. No one questions her competence or qualifications. In fact she is perceived almost as a hero by many having been blacklisted by the Russians for her efforts and outspokenness on such noble issues as human rights and the sovereignty of countries. For some reason, that I personally cannot understand, recently she has been disparaged in the Western press because she is the granddaughter of one, Michael Chomiak, her maternal grandfather. The alleged sins of her forefather have been ascribed to her genetically by no less noble an accuser than Russia.

This is somewhat troubling not from the Russian end but from the Western side. Svetlana Alliluyeva aka Lana Peters, the daughter of one of history's worst mass murderer Josef Stalin had never been disparaged for her father's egregious crimes. In fact she was perceived as being heroic for having overcome her demonic paternal influence. But she led a troubled life. Chrystia Freeland is an accomplished writer, journalist and politician.

Frankly, I should apologize to Minister Freeland and her late grandfather for the comparison. Sometimes its takes hyperbole to manifest how ludicrous some accusations can be. Svetlana Alliluyeva was no Chrystia Freeland and Michael Chomiak was no Josef Stalin.

For some reason no one bothers to address the veracity of the accusations leveled against Michael Chomiak despite the fact that Russia is the source. When Russia accuses, the presumption always should be that it's disinformation subject to the presentation of legitimate (non-Russian) evidence. In this case, the revelation of the source should have ended the debate which, in fact, should have never been initiated in the West.

Nonetheless, as long as there is a smear campaign resulting from innuendo, let's ask who was this Michael Chomiak? The consensus is that he was the editor in chief of a Ukrainian language newspaper “Krakivski Visti” published in Nazi occupied Poland and then briefly in Vienna. The unsubstantiated accusations are that he was somehow responsible for articles in that newspaper glorifying the Nazis and attacking the Jews.

Ivan Kedryn-Rudnytsky was a colleague of Michael Chomiak, having worked with him in several periodicals, “Dilo” in the Polish-occupied Ukrainian city of Lviv, then in the “Krakivski Visti”. Kedryn-Rudnytsky wrote about both Michael Chomiak and “Krakivski Visti” in his memoirs of more than 700 pages published in 1976 in the United States. Here are several passages. About “Krakivski Visti” he wrote:

“My side earnings came from writing for “Krakivski Visti”, whose editor in chief was Michael Chomiak, my younger colleague from `Dilo`. Writing articles on Ukrainian or international topics was impossible totally under German occupation if the writer did not wish to write in the official tone of of German press political propaganda. It was also forbidden to write anything about or against the USSR, because from September 1939 until June 21, 1941, the Soviets were allies and our German communicators became angry when they heard from Ukrainians doubts about the longevity of German-Soviet friendship. The only theme was Poland...”

About Michael Chomiak, he wrote from an earlier time when both worked at “Dilo”:

“Michael Chomiak -- later the editor in chief of the daily “Krakivski Visti”, now in Edmonton, (a nice person, a first rate journalist, who earlier would send us under a pseudonym given the then circumstances in Lemkischyna -- wonderful reports from Lemkivschyna working as a candidate to become an attorney from the office of his uncle Blavatsky in Sianosc.)”

And then about the later period Kedryn-Rudnytsky wrote about his colleague:

“Living in Warsaw over five years 1925-1930, and later traveling there almost monthly and staying for several weeks at a time during important meetings of the Sejm, I became like a specialist in Polish relations. This came in handy when after fleeing on foot from Lviv on September 18, 1939 to Krakiv, at the request of Michael Chomiak, a former younger member of the editorial board of “Dilo” where I had been the editor in chief, a person with a law degree, but a professional journalist and the editor in chief of the founded in Krakiv “Krakivski Visti”. I wrote for “Krakivski Visti” a whole series of articles which appeared as a book in 1940 entitled `The Reasons why Poland fell`”.

Ivan Kedryn-Rudnytsky was born of a Ukrainian father, also Ivan and a Jewish mother, Ida. Inasmuch as his father died when Ivan was ten years old, he was raised by his mother. Michael Chomiak did not have any problem working with this Ukrainian-Jewish journalist on more than one occasion. In fact as editor-in-chief of “Krakivski Visti” he employed him seemingly at his own peril since the Nazis most assuredly would not have approved of such a hiring. They remained friends long after the war.

If there were articles in “Krakivski Visti” glorifying the Nazis and disparaging the Jews, I doubt very much that Michael Chomiak penned them. Ivan Kedryn-Rudnytsky, a Ukrainian-Jewish journalist certainly would have mentioned that in his memoirs.

Nonetheless, all of this has absolutely nothing to do with Chrystia Freeland's qualifications as Canada's Foreign Minister or her ability to do her job for the people of Canada.

Askold S. Lozynskyj; March 16, 2017

[3]
Edmonton Journal | 08Mar2016 | Paula Simons
http://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/paula-simons-school-of-hate-was-foreign-affairs-minister-chrystia-freelands-grandfather-a-nazi-collaborator

'School of hate': Was Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland's grandfather a Nazi collaborator?

Was Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland's grandfather a Nazi collaborator?

[W.Z. Perhaps it would be most accurate to describe the refugees (including those of Jewish origin), who escaped to the West from the German and Soviet killing machines during and after World War II, as Hitler and Stalin survivors, rather than collaborators. The term collaborator usually carries a positive connotation, not a negative one. Virtually all civilians (as well as military personnel) who were occupied by the German and Soviet (Russian) regimes and survived the war were forced to "collaborate" with the authorities in one form or another.]

If so, does that undercut her moral authority as one of Canada’s most senior politicians?

Or are we all being played and manipulated by Russia’s propaganda machine? 

Those seem like crazy questions. But Freeland is under a microscope in the wake of efforts by Russian-linked bloggers to tie her to her deceased grandfather’s past as the editor of a Ukrainian nationalist newspaper, published in German-occupied Poland during the Second World War.

Freeland initially dismissed the reports as Russian propaganda. But this week, the Alberta-born minister was under new scrutiny with Canadian papers picking up the story and commentators complaining she’d been less than forthcoming about her family’s troubled past.

Mykhailo Khomiak, or Michael Chomiak, to use his Anglicized name, was Freeland’s grandfather and spent his post-war years in Alberta. Before the war, he was a young journalist in Lviv. Today, it’s a city in western Ukraine. But in the 1920s, it was a part of Poland. Chomiak was a reporter for a Ukrainian-language Lviv newspaper called Dilo, or Deed.

“It was one of the most famous Ukrainian newspapers,” says Ernest Gyidel, a graduate student at the University of Alberta, who is studying this period. “It was quite a high intellectual product. But Chomiak was not an intellectual. He never wrote anything that was like political analysis. He was a journalist who just reported the facts.” 

In 1939, the Nazi Germans and the Soviet Russians marched on Poland and split the country between themselves. Lviv fell to the Soviets. Much of the staff of Dilo fled Lviv for Krakow, in the German zone of occupation. There, they were encouraged by the nationalist Ukrainian Central Committee to start a Ukrainian-language paper, the News of Krakow, or Krakivski Visti. The Germans gave them printing presses, confiscated from a Jewish-owned paper. And soon Chomiak found himself named chief editor — even though, says Gyidel, Chomiak protested he didn’t want the job. 

“Calling him chief editor is a bit of a misnomer. He managed the technical aspects of the paper — the printing, the type set, the distribution, the logistics. Throughout the whole of the war, he never wrote a single article,” said Gyidel.

As part of his dissertation research, Gyidel is analyzing the paper’s articles. About 25 per cent, he says, were Nazi propaganda — anti-Semitic, but also anti-Polish and anti-Russian. 

“The Germans wanted to put the occupied population through a school of hate, so that the Poles and Ukrainians would never unite against them. And of course, they published anti-Semitic articles, as all the press did under German occupation. That was just German policy.” 

Yet the paper, he argues, also published important articles about culture and language and philosophy.

Nothing he’s found in Chomiak’s letters or articles expressed pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic views. But, he says, Chomiak made the choice to continuing working at the paper, rather than take his chances elsewhere.

“He was in no way an intellectual collaborator. But you could definitely see him as a situational collaborator.”

The Nazis were happy to manipulate Ukrainian nationalists as allies against the Soviets. And plenty of Ukrainian nationalists, who loathed Stalin, were happy to collaborate on the false assumption that co-operating with Hitler would somehow win them their own country.

From the vantage point of Canada in 2017, it’s easy to condemn Chomiak’s choices. In a war zone, squeezed between Hitler and Stalin, things weren’t so simple.

Newspaper editors working under oppressive regimes always navigate moral murk, trying to publish newspapers that serve their audiences without ending up in jail, or worse.

Chomiak may have been naive. Or a coward. Or an amoral pragmatist, more interested in protecting himself and his family than in heroism. He may even have been, as some in his family have suggested (albeit without much evidence), a secret part of the anti-Nazi resistance, printing false papers for the Polish underground. Just labelling him a collaborator oversimplifies a horrifically complicated time. But it certainly suits Vladimir Putin and his allies now to insinuate that Freeland’s credibility is tainted by her grandfather’s past. 

“There’s always an element of truth in Russian propaganda,” says David Marples, a professor of Russian and Ukrainian history at the University of Alberta. “It’s never an outright lie. But this is a sign that Russia has now interfered in our affairs. And it’s an ominous sign that they’ve delved so deeply into the background of a senior Canadian leader.”

And that’s particularly worrying in light of the way Putin’s propagandists were able to manipulate the news cycle of the last American election. 

Naturally, Freeland’s proud of the grandfather she loved, who became a leader in Edmonton’s post-war Ukrainian community. Still, she might have been clearer about his complicated legacy -- if only to deny the Russians the ammunition of such Kompromat.

But Chomiak isn’t our foreign minister. Freeland is. And she’s smart, articulate and a potent critic of Putin, so potent she’s banned from Russia. Let’s judge her on her merit -- not what her grandfather did, or didn’t, do.

[4]
Macleans | 14Mar2017 | Terry Glavin
http://www.macleans.ca/politics/how-russias-attack-on-freeland-got-traction-in-canada/

How Russia’s attack on Freeland got traction in Canada

Terry Glavin traces Moscow’s “Nazi-grandfather” calumny through a maze of cranks, propagandists and Putin fanciers -- to Canada’s mainstream media

Now that we’re well into the second week of an imbroglio that should be remembered as one of the most disgraceful, embarrassing, or at least hilarious events in the recent history of Canadian journalism, the “Chrystia Freeland Lied About Her Family’s Nazi Past” hoax is accruing to itself ever thicker layers of absurdity and silliness.

It was a hoax, we would all admit, if we were capable of resisting the inclination to double-down on the preposterous claims and dirty insinuations that have been allowed to muddy the significance of what has really happened here. It was a hoax, perpetrated on the Canadian public, in service of Vladimir Putin’s gangland regime in Moscow.

Chrystia Freeland, the journalist-turned-politician who was appointed Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs only two months ago, has not been shown to have lied about anything. And as the plot thickened, Freeland found herself being accused of engaging in her own hoax by blaming the Russians for her misfortunes.

Quite apart from the adorable Canadian naiveté involved in passive-aggressively permitting the Kremlin to headline-hack itself out of a national spotlight that should have been shining last week on Putin’s belligerence in Ukraine and the Baltics, there are a couple of things that distinguish this particular Kremlin caper from the run-of-the-mill jobs.

The first is that it’s a textbook case of Russian disinformation by conspiracy theory. The second is that this time around, the Russians were caught red-handed.

Unfortunately, we’ve all spent a great deal of effort being clever in our elucidations upon how to properly distinguish between a Ukrainian patriot and a Nazi collaborator in the terror time of the 1940s, and about where one might situate the boundaries of Soviet-occupied Eastern Galicia on contemporary maps of the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, and other such boring ephemera.

This is what Moscow wanted, and it also wanted the not-especially-bright among us to be wondering out loud and often about whether it might be true that Freeland is a Russophobic Nazi sympathizer who can’t be trusted with the Foreign Affairs portfolio.

To that purpose, the Globe and Mail’s Tuesday, March 7, 2017 article, headlined “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor on Nazi newspaper,” was intepreted by the glamorous American celebrity paranoiac Glenn Greenwald -- the most assertive champion of Edward Snowden, the famous U.S. National Security Agency hacker who has been enjoying the perks of Russian asylum ever since he absconded to Moscow in June 2013 -- in this way: “The exposé on how Canada’s Foreign Minister knowingly lied for 20 years about grandfather’s past, now blames Russia.”

RELATED: Russia’s coming attack on Canada

The Bolivarian catastrophe of Venezuela’s own Telesur television channel handled the story exactly the same way, as did all the usual Canadian “alternative” media undertakings, even though there was nothing in Robert Fife’s Globe and Mail story, or anyone else’s reporting, that showed Freeland had lied about anything, knowingly or otherwise, much less for 20 years. And it was not Freeland who first implicated Moscow in the hubbub. She merely raised the subject of Russia’s well-documented European monkey-wrenching, which she was warned to be personally on guard against at the Munich Security Conference on February 17, 2017.

As for who first noticed that Moscow was gunning for Freeland, that’s something that has yet to show up in any banner Canadian headlines. It was the European Union’s East StratCom Task Force, a unit of the External Action Service (the EU’s foreign ministry and diplomatic branch). The Task Force was set up in March 2015 as a kind of early warning system to detect incoming Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

In its January 26, 2017 Disinformation Digest, the Task Force specifically identified the “Freeland Lied About Her Family’s Nazi Past” hoax, which by then was already circulating within the nether regions of the pro-Kremlin web, under the category of “pro-Kremlin disinformation” and “fake media stories that support Russia’s policies.” The Task Force flagged the Freeland smear project under the campy headline “And you are a Nazi, too!” along with several ongoing efforts to affix the Nazi tag to “anyone opposing the Kremlin’s interests,” especially in Ukraine and the Baltic states. Canadian Forces personnel are active in both arenas.

Usually, Moscow enjoys a degree of marginally plausible deniability by circulating its nastiest propaganda via merely Kremlin-admiring webzines and usefully idiotic “anti-imperialist” pseudo-news operations. But the effort to attack Freeland’s character and undermine her credibility first came straight out of Russia’s embassy in Ottawa, on January 11, 2017 the day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed Freeland to the foreign-affairs post.

That was the day an embassy official shopped the purported bombshell about the Freeland family’s past to Justin Ling, the Canadian features editor for Vice News. The official provided Ling with two academic papers written by Freeland’s uncle, John Paul Himka, about Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather, Michael Chomiak. A Ukrainian nationalist, lawyer and journalist, Chomiak had ended up serving as the titular editor of Krakivs’ki Visti, a newspaper Himka describes as “the organ of established Ukrainian nationalists operating within the limits imposed by Nazi rule.”

The newspaper obligingly printed obscenely anti-Semitic material, as Himka’s research shows (Freeland also assisted Himka in a 1996 study of Krakivs’ki Visti during Chomiak’s tenure). A “Nazi collaborator,” then, a term Freeland has never been known to use to describe her grandfather, who died when she was 15, and who Freeland had never mentioned except fleetingly as a grandparent who had fled the Soviet depredations in Ukraine during the Second World War. Which was true.

RELATED: Will Freeland’s fractious relationship with Putin affect her job?

Ling decided to take a pass on the “story” because there really was no “story” to be told, but the smear erupted in headlines last week after Freeland and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that the Canadian Forces training mission in Ukraine, which has been besieged by Russia for the past three years, would continue until at least March, 2019. Moscow was quite unhappy about the decision.

When questioned about the lurid Secret Nazi Past smear, Freeland pointed out that it isn’t exactly a secret, as several U.S. intelligence agencies have pointed out, and as German chancellor Angela Merkel has similarly noticed, that Moscow is devoting itself to the destabilization of western democracies. “I think it shouldn’t come as a surprise if these same efforts were used against Canada,” Freeland said, and thus, hey presto, the Kremlin-friendly spin became: Freeland Dodges Question, Blames Russia.

From its first public eruption in the Moscow blogosphere to the semi-respectability of Polish tabloids and then to its extraordinary mainstream legitimation by the Globe and Mail, the trajectory of the Nazi-tagging disinformation project aimed at Freeland follows an arc through a digital maze of far-right cranks, far-left tirade launchers and hopelessly disreputable Putin fanciers.

For all its shock-headline sensation, there is no real “news” involved. The content is relentlessly repetitive and usually just cut-and-pasted from one website to another, torqued up with wild headlines and sordid spins. The first Moscow blogger with the “story,” for instance, claims that Freeland “stands for the same race hatred as her grandfather” and is determined to “cleanse” Ukraine of its Jews, Russians and Poles.

Ironically, the replicated content, on perhaps hundreds of websites, derives almost entirely from research undertaken by Freeland’s uncle, and from archives made public years ago by Freeland’s family. If Chrystia Freeland had wanted to hide some dark family secret, she and her relatives have been going about it exactly the wrong way.

One of most comical deployments of the Kremlin’s “And you are a Nazi, too!” device occurred last October, when no less a Kremlin figure than Dmitry Kiselyov, deputy director of Russian state television, took to the airwaves to personally deliver a 10-minute “documentary” about the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Contrary to the historical record, Kiselyov’s documentary purported to show that the anti-Soviet, pro-democracy uprising was really a bloody rampage engineered by Nazis trained and organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Last December, the English-language channel of RT News -- a Kremlin propaganda arm that masquerades as a news organization with a $300 million annual budget from the Russian government -- reported “news” from Riga, Latvia, under this headline: “Swastika-looking snowflakes pop up at Latvian Christmas market.” The “swastikas” were in fact traditional Latvian folk runes. From RT News last summer: “Gardener let off hook for mowing swastika into Latvian president’s lawn.” Except it wasn’t a “swastika.”

Moscow has waged its most vicious, sustained and transparently absurd “Nazi” smear campaigns against the Ukraine government, and it has been doing so ever since Putin lost his grip on Kyiv when Ukraine’s kleptocrat-president Viktor Yanukovych fled to Moscow following the November 2013 Euromaidan uprising.

Putin has been waging a hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine pitting proxy “separatists” against Ukrainian security forces in a bloody conflict in the Donbas region that has left 10,000 people dead. Moscow’s military annexation of the Crimean peninsula, in violation of several international treaties, has earned Putin a suspension from the Group of Eight (G8) countries, the opprobrium of his fellow United Nations Security Council members, and a suite of international sanctions.

Moscow has responded with a cyber-warfare campaign of hacking and disinformation, and a persistent, ugly propaganda line: the Kyiv government is run by Nazis, and its international backers are Nazi sympathisers.

While it’s true that the chaos in Donbas has attracted combatants from neo-Nazi Ukrainian groupuscules, the “Right Sector” coalition in Ukraine was a total bust in the May 2014 elections that cemented Yanukovich’s ouster. The rightists scored less than two per cent of the national vote. That hasn’t stopped Moscow’s smears, however. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov insists that the Right Sector secretly controls the Ukraine government. But then, Lavrov also claims the Canadian government is controlled by a “rabid” Ukrainian diaspora.

Marko Suprun, a Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker and presenter with the StopFakeNews channel in Kyiv, says it’s significant that so much of the Nazi-tagging aimed at Freeland has percolated in the alternative media in Poland. “This is a new level of targeted fake news,” Suprun told me. “There was and remains a concerted effort to drive a 70 year old wedge between Warsaw and Kyiv.”

Anyone who claims that Freeland isn’t being subjected to a targeted disinformation campaign doesn’t understand how disinformation works, Suprun said. “Notice the attack on Freeland started just around the time when Canada was deciding to extend its military training mission in Ukraine,” he said. “The Kremlin has long been trying to turn a fake stereotype into a reality, that Ukrainians are Nazis and that Kyiv was the target of a junta.”

With the largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, Canada is especially vulnerable to Russian destabilization efforts. The Communications Security Establishment is in the early stages of a threat assessment to determine whether Canada’s electoral system is vulnerable to foreign disruption, and the events of the past couple of weeks will likely draw in greater resources from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP.

As for how Freeland is holding up, she seems to be taking it all in stride. “Canadians expect their government to be focused on their priorities,” Freeland told me. “That’s exactly what I am doing.”