# Canada–Ukraine relations

Diplomatic relations between Canada and Ukraine were formally established in 1991, following Ukraine's independence from the Soviet Union. However, the two countries' relationship dates back further, due to the long history of Ukrainian immigration to Canada.

## Formal relations

Diplomatic relations were established between Canada and Ukraine on December 2, 1991. Canada was the first western nation to recognize Ukraine's independence from the USSR. Canada opened its embassy in Kyiv in April 1992, and the Embassy of Ukraine in Ottawa opened in October of that same year, paid for mostly by donations from the Ukrainian-Canadian community. Ukraine opened a consulate general in Toronto in 1993 and opened another in Edmonton in 2018.
The main bilateral agreement is the joint declaration of the "Special Partnership" between the two countries signed in 1994 and renewed in 2001.
Sales of Canadian military hardware to Ukraine were permitted by the Trudeau government in December 2017 when Global Affairs Canada minister Chrystia Freeland lifted the prior restrictions.

## Free-trade agreement

On September 22, 2009, talks began between Canada and Ukraine on a free trade agreement.
Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper in July 2015 announced the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement, and signed it in July 2016. It took effect on 1 August 2017.

## High level visits

In 1992, the Governor General of Canada, Ramon Hnatyshyn, visited Ukraine—his ancestral homeland with which he closely identified—in his capacity as Vice-regent. In 2005 Governor General Adrienne Clarkson made a formal state visit and in 2009 Governor General Michaëlle Jean made another. Ukraine's President Leonid Kuchma also undertook a visit to Canada in 1994, his first state visit abroad. Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien visited Ukraine in 1999, and in 2008, President Viktor Yushchenko travelled to Canada on a state visit. In Ottawa, he addressed a joint session of the Canadian Parliament's Senate and House of Commons, a rare privilege for foreign dignitaries.
The annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation occurred in March 2014. In September 2014, Ukrainians visited Ottawa to plead for weapons, including anti-tank missiles, surveillance gear and armoured vehicles, to subdue the separatists on their eastern border. Defence Minister Jason Kenney refused.
In July 2016, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau visited Canadian military trainers in western Ukraine. Petro Poroshenko thanked Canada for its contributions. The two signed a free-trade agreement.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, then former prime minister of Ukraine, visited Ottawa in May 2017 seeking weapons and met with Chrystia Freeland and Ralph Goodale.
In July 2019, the Canadian government hosted the third Ukraine Reform Conference in Toronto for three days, where more than 800 people from 36 countries and international finance organizations like the IMF took part. The theme was Euro-Atlantic integration of Ukraine. Newly inaugurated President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced a new agreement for Canadian military hardware to be used as part of the effort to subdue the separatists in the east along the border with Russia. Justin Trudeau refused to sign the agreement. Trudeau and Zelensky "declared a mutual interest in improving student exchanges and youth work permits" but nothing was done, and money was found to "promote gender equality".
In January 2022, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly went to Ukraine and met the prime minister and the president amid tensions between Ukraine and Russia. She also visited to Canadian instructors who were training Ukrainians as part of Operation UNIFIER.
September 22, 2023, Zelenskyy spoke to the Canadian Parliament. Zelenskyy joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the rest of Parliament as they gave a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, introduced by the speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, as a "veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians." It emerged that Hunka did so in a Ukrainian Division of the SS, a Nazi-aligned unit. The incident made international news, and received widespread criticism and condemnation. The speaker resigned, and Trudeau apologized on behalf of Parliament. In the aftermath, an endowment in Hunka's name at the University of Alberta's Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies shut down, and Jewish organizations called for open records on Nazi war criminals.

## Politics

Canada wants to promote democratic reform in Ukraine, encouraging Ukraine to engage and possibly join the EU and NATO, and distance itself from Russia. Reform are a delicate matter in Ukraine, because the East vs. West trajectory (Russia vs. Europe) of the country is a sensitive political issue in Ukraine. Direct involvement in reform efforts by Canadian officials would violate international protocol (seen as interference in Ukraine's internal affairs), and possibly undercut pro-Western efforts in the country. Many Canadians (including members of parliament, and former Prime Minister John Turner) were part of an international observer team that monitored Ukraine's 2004 presidential election. Canadian media were typically sympathetic to the Orange Revolution, with the national magazine Maclean's running a front-page story on the protests. Election irregularities documented by observer teams in 2004 led to a redo of the election, which resulted in the victory of pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko. Canadian Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, Canada's head-of-state, attended Yushchenko's investiture wearing an orange scarf, the colour of the pro-Western movement.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland's maternal grandparents and mother emigrated from Ukraine. She was actively engaged with pro-democracy and pro-Western movements in Ukraine during the late 1980s. In 2017, allegations circulated in the Russian and Canadian press that Freeland's grandfather, whom she had described as a political exile "with a responsibility to keep alive the idea of an independent Ukraine," had been a Nazi propagandist, which her office denied and she implied were Russian disinformation. However, it was later proven that her grandfather had indeed been the editor of a Nazi newspaper in Poland, and that she had known this for at least twenty years.

## Sub-national ties

Much of the relationship is based on the legacy of migration. Ukrainians did not migrate to Canada equally from all parts of Ukraine, or settle equally everywhere in Canada. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Ukrainian immigrants settled in the Canadian prairies and account for the region's strong ties to Ukraine, especially Western Ukraine, from which most majority of them had come. Ontario also drew Ukrainian immigrants, especially in the immediate post-war period. Prevented during the Soviet period, migration to Canada from Ukraine resumed after its 1991 independence under provincial immigration programs. Migrants came to Saskatchewan and Manitoba after they set up these programs, having identified Ukraine as a potentially significant source of skilled workers.
Most Ukrainians who migrated to Alberta between 1893 and 1929 came from a few small districts in western Ukraine, many of them in the current Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. Alberta premier Ralph Klein visited Ivano-Frankivsk in 2002, and governor of Ivano-Frankivsk Mykhailo Vyshyvaniuk reciprocated with a visit to Edmonton in which the two governments signed a trade and cooperation agreement. Alberta was expected to sign a similar agreement with neighbouring Lviv Oblast.
Premier Roy Romanow's also visited Ukraine in 1995 and invited Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma to Saskatchewan in 2000. Delegations at the ministerial level to Ukraine from Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan led to agreements and memoranda of understanding on culture, education and economic matters. The prairie provinces also established formal advisory committees:
* Saskatchewan-Ukraine Advisory Committee
* Manitoba-Ukraine Secretariat
* Advisory Council on Alberta-Ukraine Relations).
Beyond a number of regional twinning agreements, e.g. Saskatchewan-Chernivtsi oblast, a number of Canadian cities are also twinned with Ukrainian municipal counterparts at the local level, including Toronto/Kyiv, Winnipeg/Lviv, Vancouver/Odesa, and Saskatoon/Chernivtsi.
* Kyiv and Toronto (Ontario)
* Chernivtsi and Saskatoon (Saskatchewan)
* Lviv and Winnipeg (Manitoba)
* Odesa and Vancouver (British Columbia)
* Uzhhorod and Hamilton (Ontario)
* Dnipro and Durham Region (Ontario)
* Kamianets-Podilskyi and Brantford (Ontario)
* Sokal and North Grenville (Ontario)
* Vashkivtsi and Sioux Lookout (Ontario)
* Stryi and Vegreville (Alberta)

## Humanitarian and development aid to Ukraine

Canadian organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, are active in providing different kinds of aid to Ukraine. Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) funded the establishment of Centre for Small Business and Economic Development (SBEDIF) in Ivano-Frankivsk. An additional CA$3.8 million was committed for a regional network project to support small business growth and economic development in five additional communities in the same oblast of Western Ukraine.
The Canada-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce (CUCC) plays an important role in promoting trade and business ties between the two countries.
In 2016, Global Affairs Canada established the Canada-Ukraine Trade and Investment Support (CUTIS) Project, which is budgeted for five years and was designed "to lower poverty in Ukraine through increasing exports from Ukraine to Canada and investment from Canada to Ukraine".
As recently as July 2016 Canadian non-governmental organizations also have substantially provided aid to the Ukrainian army and set up rehabilitation clinics for Ukrainian soldiers during the War in Donbas.
On 22 March, 2022, Reuters News, which employed Freeland for a decade, had an article titled "On the Ukraine refugee crisis, watch Canada", and then in early April 2022 the Trudeau government cleared the immigration barriers for Ukrainian refugees.

## Educational contacts

The longest standing educational partnership at the post-secondary level is that of between the University of Saskatchewan and Chernivtsi National University, in existence since 1977. The relationship, however, currently operates through the Ramon Hnatyshyn Canadian Studies Centre, a research and teaching unit created in 2003 and devoted to Canadian studies at Chernivtsi National University. The National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy also established a Canadian Studies Center in 2009 to foster greater contact and scholarly exchange.
Bilateral exchanges between Canadian and Ukrainian universities exist in the sciences, social sciences and humanities. Canadian universities and colleges with active exchange programs include: University of Alberta, University of Manitoba, University of Saskatchewan, University of Toronto, Queen's University, St. Thomas More College and MacEwan University.
In 1991, with the support of the Ukrainian Studies Foundation of Toronto, the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Program (CUPP) was created. CUPP has provided Ukrainian university students with an opportunity to learn how democracy functions in Canada by working closely with Canadian Members of Parliament of all parties. Ukrainian students are competitively selected from among 48 participating institutions of higher-learning in Ukraine.

## Response to the Russo-Ukrainian War

Since the February 2014 annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, diplomatic relations between Russia and Ukraine have had a military dimension. Annexation occurred during the 41st Canadian Parliament, during which the country was governed by the Harper Ministry, with Rob Nicholson as Minister of Defence.
On 17 April 2014 the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) offered assets and members to NATO and called this engagement Operation REASSURANCE. In September 2014 the Ukrainians visited Ottawa to plead for weapons, like anti-tank missiles, surveillance gear and armoured vehicles, with which to subdue the eastern separatists along the border with Russia. Their quest did not bear fruit.
At the Brussels NATO Ministerial conference in February 2015, Nicholson offered no weapons to Ukraine, agreeing with Ursula von der Leyen then the German Minister of Defense. "We've been very clear in our support for Ukraine. We've signed a defense cooperation agreement, and we have been sending considerable non-lethal aid to Ukraine over the last number of months, as well as assistance in other forms, and that's what we're going to continue." On 14 April 2015 the new Minister of National Defence, Jason Kenney, announced Canadian military personnel would instruct Ukrainian forces as part of a $700 million gift he called Operation UNIFIER.
It came to light in July 2015 while Stephen Harper was still in power, that more than 5,400 Eryx anti-tank missiles, 10 Husky VMMD and Buffalo (mine protected vehicle), four specialized landmine detection systems and 194 LAV-II Light Armoured Vehicles had been declared surplus by the Canadian military instead of being sent to aid the Ukrainians.
On 4 November 2015 Justin Trudeau inaugurated his 29th Canadian Ministry, having won a majority in elections for the 42nd Canadian Parliament. He appointed Harjit Sajjan as his first Minister of Defence. Sales of Canadian military hardware to Ukraine were permitted by the government of Trudeau in December 2017, as Global Affairs Canada minister Chrystia Freeland lifted restrictions.
Soon after the 2019 Canadian federal election was won by Trudeau, who had faced down Andrew Scheer, a supporter of sending Canadian peacekeepers to Ukraine, Ukrainian deputy foreign minister Vasyl Bodnar in the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy revived the idea of sending Canadian peacekeepers to the war-torn Donbas territory of Ukraine.
Freeland was named Minister of Finance in August 2020 after the previous minister, Bill Morneau, refused to accede to Trudeau's request for more helicopter money and because he was lukewarm on the goals of the WEF. The position gave her command of such tools as FINTRAC. Freeland was accused by the KGB of promoting anti-Soviet sentiment in Kyiv in the late 1980s.
On 1 February 2022 rumours of open conflict were thick and a helpful list of Canadian sanctions tools was provided by consultant attorneys. There were then three pieces of secondary legislation that collectively formed the "Sanctions Regime":
* Special Economic Measures (Russia) Regulations (SEMRR)
* Special Economic Measures (Ukraine) Regulations (SEMUR)
* Freezing Assets of Corrupt Foreign Officials (Ukraine) Regulations (FACFOUR)
On 23 February Canada announced first round of new economic sanctions on Russia over its build-up to its invasion of Ukraine. The United States, the European Union, Germany and Britain also announced financial punishments of Russia. Trudeau said his government "will ban Canadians from all financial dealings with the so-called" DPR and LPR. He was also to "ban Canadians from engaging in purchases of Russian sovereign debt." Trudeau promised to "sanction members of the Russian parliament who voted for the decision to recognize Donetsk and Luhansk as independent."
On 24 February Russia invaded Ukraine.
On 27 February Omar Alghabra ordered Transport Canada to close Canadian airspace to Russian owned aircraft. The next day there was some confusion over "humanitarian" flights by Russian aircraft. On 3 March Freeland sanctioned Russian companies Rosneft and Gazprom. Canada had already banned Russian vessels from its waters. On 5 March Freeland removed Russia and Belarus from "most-favored nation status", which automatically places a mandatory 35% tariff on all imports from the two countries.
On 6 March Transport Canada fined the owners of a plane that was chartered by Russians. Russians can still travel as passengers. On 7 March Canada imposed sanctions on 10 Russian individuals in connection with the invasion of Ukraine. On 12 March Transport Canada grounded a Volga Dnepr An-124 Russian airliner it had contracted, as it intended to enforce a Notice to Airmen drafted for the occasion. The regulator said it "will not hesitate to take further enforcement action should additional incidents of non-compliance with the regulations and restrictions be found." On 15 March 15 more Russian officials were sanctioned. More than 900 "individuals and entities" had been targeted by then. The Russians responded on 15 March and targeted 313 Canadian individuals. On 18 March a report documented the Russian seizure of Canadian (and other) flagged aircraft.
The L3 Harris Wescam gyro-compensated cameras were revealed to be the choice of the manufacturer of the Bayraktar UAV for their drones were pledged by the Trudeau government in late March.
On 24 March it was revealed to a Parliamentary committee that the CAF had barred its active-duty service members from entering the Ukraine Foreign Legion.
Before 21 April Canada had sent 4,500 M-72 rocket launchers and 100 Carl Gustaf anti-tank systems to Ukraine. On 22 April Canada sent from its warehouse of 37 units an unknown number of 155mm M777 Howitzers. On 26 April Canada pledged to send eight Rohsel light armoured vehicles to Ukraine.
On 8 May, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a surprise visit to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
On 8 June Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly announced a ban under the SEMRR on the export of 28 services vital for the operation of the oil, gas and chemical industries, including technical, management, accounting and advertising services.