Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Canada’s deputy chief public health officer, Dr. Howard Njoo, said Thursday that mass vaccinations are not yet needed to stop monkeypox in this country, but people should keep their distance from others, Global reports.
Dr. Njoo said the virus “doesn’t discriminate” and can be spread through close contact with an infected person; people can avoid infection by “maintaining physical distance from people outside their homes. As well, wearing masks, covering coughs and sneezes, and practising frequent handwashing continues to be important, especially in public spaces.”
As of Thursday, 25 cases had been detected in Quebec and one in Ontario.
Breaking records: After Wednesday’s night French-language debate, CPC leadership candidates are focused on the last push for membership sales, CP’s Stephanie Taylorreports.
The party’s leadership election organizing committee says it is already breaking records for how many new members candidates have drawn in ahead of the June 3 cutoff date for new members being able to vote. As of last week, officials were bracing for a voting base of more than 400,000 members by the deadline. In comparison, the party had nearly 270,000 members signed up to vote in its 2020 leadership contest.
Paul Wells, who watched the debate, thought Jean Charest had a better night than Pierre Poilievre, but wonders whether Charest is “a candidate for the leadership of any party that might exist in the real world.”
Charest’s bet is that the Conservatives will be more interested in getting back to power than in throwing in their lot with a “pseudo-American,” as he called Poilièvre. Or that people who weren’t Conservative members at the beginning of the year will take out enough memberships to carry their pragmatist champion to the top job. “The Liberals [that is to say, Trudeau’s] didn’t lose the 2021 elections,” he said. “It’s the Conservatives who lost, because they got distracted by all sorts of stupid things.” He waved in Poilièvre’s direction as he said it.
More! Susan Delacourt was also watching. She writes in the Star that we should have more debates and less Twitter mudslinging.
Gatekeeper: In the Globe, Robyn Urback has a column making fun of Poilievre for attacking gatekeepers while showing every sign of being one himself.
Andrew Coyne has a strong column in the Globe, lamenting the spread of the paranoid style in Conservative politics, pointing out instances where Poilievre and Leslyn Lewis have misled Canadians.
This cynical act is sometimes dressed up as “sticking up for the little guy” or “taking on the elites.” It is not. It is exploitation, pure and simple, shaking down the gullible for money and votes. It’s a con as old as politics. Before Mr. Poilievre can promise his audience to “give you back control over your lives,” he has to first persuade them that control has been taken away from them – and that he alone has the power to give it back. Or rather, that they should give him that power.
No dice: The federal government has refused to disclose material to a federal court that explains its decision to use the Emergencies Act to stop the “Freedom Convoy,” the Starreports. Privy Council Clerk Janice Charette filed a statement in court in March 31 refusing to provide information sought by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, which is pushing for a judicial review of the Emergencies Act invocation. Such a review would be separate from scrutiny by a parliamentary committee and a public inquiry that will study the decision.
New controls: Justin Trudeau said Thursday that new gun control measures would be coming to Canada after a Texas school shooting that left 21 dead, CityNews reports. Trudeau did not say what the measures would entail.
No game: Canada Soccer cancelled a planned friendly against Iran under withering pressure on Thursday, CP reports. The June 5 game in Vancouver was supposed to be a showcase event Canada’s men, who qualified for the World Cup this year for the first time since 1986. But Trudeau, Vancouver Mayor Kennedy Stewart, Conservative MPs and B’nai Brith Canada cried foul because Iran killed 55 Canadian citizens and 30 permanent residents when it shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020.
Bad idea: In the Star, Bruce Arthurwrites that Canada Soccer should have done more work before it signed the deal with Iran.
Instead, Canada Soccer charged ahead and pushback piled up, from Conservatives and Liberals alike. The prime minister said it wasn’t a good idea and that Canada Soccer would have to explain itself, which Canada Soccer has pretty steadfastly declined to do. It came out that the families of the victims planned to protest on game day, in the stadium. The players reportedly discussed among themselves whether they wanted to play the match. Sponsors may have gotten a little nervous.
Not engaged: In the Globe, John Ibbitson has a column about Canada being left out of a U.S.-led Indo-Pacific initiative, which he sees as inexcusable.
UCP speculation: Travis Toews isn’t ruling out running for Jason Kenney’s job, CP reports.
Down three: The Ontario Liberals dropped another candidate Thursday, making a total of three ridings with no Liberal in the June 2 provincial election, CP reports. Steven Del Duca said Thursday that Audrey Festeryga had withdrawn her candidacy. It was called into question by the NDP, who alleged that Festeryga was fraudulently registered with signatures gathered in support of another candidate.
Strong words: Former Quebec City Mayor Régis Labeaume has a strongly worded column in La Presse denouncing Poilievre for what he sees as Trump-style politicking. Labeaume takes an even harder run at Quebec Conservative Leader Éric Duhaime, a former Quebec City shock jock (translation).
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Last night’s CPC French debate in Laval was a three-way brawl, with Jean Charest and Patrick Brown tag-teaming Pierre Poilievre, who referred to them as a “little coalition,” the Postreports. The other candidates — Scott Aitchison, Roman Baber and Leslyn Lewis — said little, likely because they were unable to speak in French without reading notes. It was a raucous affair, with personal attacks and lots of noise from the crowd.
Audience members were asked to avoid clapping and cheering, otherwise the moderator would take time off of their candidate’s speaking time. But the crowd, who was favourable to both Charest and Poilievre, ignored the instruction and at times stole the show, chanting, clapping or even booing so loudly that moderator Marc-Olivier Fortin regularly paused the debate to ask them to quiet down.
Worried about Poilievre: In the Star, Susan Delacourtwrites that Poilievre’s approach to the leadership race is taking a Trumpian tone, conspiratorial and disrespectful of democracy and the media.
I am, to be candid, worried that Poilievre won’t be able to stop himself from whipping up suspicion about why Conservatives have been losing elections — it being far easier to blame a rigged system than the party’s own internal problems.
Poilievre ahead: Abacus has a polling report showing Poilievre’s negatives are up, but he still appears to have a commanding lead in the race.
Challenging 21: David Lametti announced on Wednesday that Ottawa plans to participate in a Supreme Court challenge of Quebec’s secularism Bill 21, angering François Legault, La Pressereports. (translation)
“I can tell you today that once the Court of Appeal has ruled, we go to the Supreme Court to give our opinions on it because it becomes by definition a national issue once it comes before the Supreme Court of Canada. So we will be there, before the Supreme Court of Canada,” said Lametti. Legault called this “a flagrant lack of respect from Justin Trudeau towards Quebecers, since we know that a majority of Quebecers agree with Bill 21.”
Lisee vs Coyne: In Le Devoir, former PQ leader Jean-Francois Liseeresponds to Andrew Coyne’scolumn on Bill 96, the new language law, which we linked here yesterday (translation). Lisee accuses Coyne of misrepresenting the law.
Coyne’s article is indeed libel. François Legault and Simon Jolin-Barrette should sue him and his daily newspaper for defamation and calculate a substantial amount of damages. The very announcement of the defamation will force the media (at least some of them), even English-speaking ones, to examine the facts, the articles of law, the distance that separates them from the crude assertion of the Globe. This will attract the attention of diplomats and the foreign press.
Paper tiger: Coyne’s colleague at the Globe, Konrad Yakabuski, writes that Bill 96 is a paper tiger, not a real threat to anglos, but complains that Legault “regards the English-speaking community as an inconvenience, rather than a historical partner with francophones in the province’s development.”
Moscow or Montreal? In Maclean’s, Alena Matushina, a recent immigrant to Quebec from Russia, writes that the law has made her feel more of an outsider, and makes her wonder whether she wants to stay.
I want to feel like I’m integrated, like I’m part of the system. I want to call it my home, and right now I can’t. Sometimes I consider going home to Moscow. Here, I just feel like I’m not good enough because I do not speak French.
Security fears: Justin Trudeau cancelled plans to appear in person at a Liberal fundraiser in Surrey, B.C. on Tuesday after RCMP warned a protest outside the event could escalate if he arrived, an unnamed source tells CP. In Saskatoon on Wednesday, where he was again beset by protesters, Trudeau expressed disgust at the “harassment, racist insults [and] threats of violence” targeting the mostly South Asian attendees as they arrived.
PR versus action: Canadian Forces members have told a former justice that the military sees sexual misconduct as a public relations problem that needs to be managed to avoid negative media coverage rather than a real issue, the Citizenreports. The Citizen learned about some of the evidence as the public waits for the release of Louise Arbour’s review of sexual misconduct in the ranks, which is expected May 30.
Lich free: An Ontario judge declined Wednesday to revoke the bail of Tamara Lich, the Citizenreports: “The courts are not a thought police,” Justice Kevin Phillips said. “We seek only to control conduct to the extent that certain behaviour will violate, or likely lead to violation of the law.” The Crown had argued that Lich breached bail conditions when she accepted the 2022 “George Jonas Freedom Award,” which she is set to receive in a June 16 gala in Toronto.
Bad game: CPC MPs have called for Canada Soccer to cancel a controversial exhibition game against Iran set for next month in Vancouver, CP reports. The families of those who died aboard Flight PS752 — including 85 Canadians and permanent residents — plan to protest outside the stadium if the match goes ahead.
Fording ahead: A Leger poll for the Post shows Doug Ford headed to a second majority mandate at Queen’s Park. The PCs are at 38, the Liberals are down to 26 from 28 last week, while the NDP are up one to 24.
Rural time: In the Calgary Herald, Don Braidwrites that as the UCP heads to a leadership, rural Albertans are fed up with the dominance of Calgary.
This could give an advantage to out-of-town leadership candidates, especially Brian Jean (Fort McMurray) and Finance Minister Travis Toews (Grande Prairie) if he decides to run. Similarly, the disparity might cause trouble for Calgarians who enter the race, perhaps including ministers Rajan Sawhney and Rebecca Schulz.
Won’t quit: The mayor of Surrey is so far refusing to step down in an escalating scandal involving an allegedly false claim that someone ran over his foot, the Surrey Now-Leaderreports.
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Last night’s CPC French debate in Laval was a three-way brawl, with Jean Charest and Patrick Brown tag-teaming Pierre Poilievre, who referred to them as a “little coalition,” the Postreports. The other candidates — Scott Aitchison, Roman Baber and Leslyn Lewis — said little, likely because they were unable to speak in French without reading notes. It was a raucous affair, with personal attacks and lots of noise from the crowd.
Audience members were asked to avoid clapping and cheering, otherwise the moderator would take time off of their candidate’s speaking time. But the crowd, who was favourable to both Charest and Poilievre, ignored the instruction and at times stole the show, chanting, clapping or even booing so loudly that moderator Marc-Olivier Fortin regularly paused the debate to ask them to quiet down.
Worried about Poilievre: In the Star, Susan Delacourtwrites that Poilievre’s approach to the leadership race is taking a Trumpian tone, conspiratorial and disrespectful of democracy and the media.
I am, to be candid, worried that Poilievre won’t be able to stop himself from whipping up suspicion about why Conservatives have been losing elections — it being far easier to blame a rigged system than the party’s own internal problems.
Poilievre ahead: Abacus has a polling report showing Poilievre’s negatives are up, but he still appears to have a commanding lead in the race.
Challenging 21: David Lametti announced on Wednesday that Ottawa plans to participate in a Supreme Court challenge of Quebec’s secularism Bill 21, angering François Legault, La Pressereports. (translation)
“I can tell you today that once the Court of Appeal has ruled, we go to the Supreme Court to give our opinions on it because it becomes by definition a national issue once it comes before the Supreme Court of Canada. So we will be there, before the Supreme Court of Canada,” said Lametti. Legault called this “a flagrant lack of respect from Justin Trudeau towards Quebecers, since we know that a majority of Quebecers agree with Bill 21.”
Lisee vs Coyne: In Le Devoir, former PQ leader Jean-Francois Liseeresponds to Andrew Coyne’scolumn on Bill 96, the new language law, which we linked here yesterday (translation). Lisee accuses Coyne of misrepresenting the law.
Coyne’s article is indeed libel. François Legault and Simon Jolin-Barrette should sue him and his daily newspaper for defamation and calculate a substantial amount of damages. The very announcement of the defamation will force the media (at least some of them), even English-speaking ones, to examine the facts, the articles of law, the distance that separates them from the crude assertion of the Globe. This will attract the attention of diplomats and the foreign press.
Paper tiger: Coyne’s colleague at the Globe, Konrad Yakabuski, writes that Bill 96 is a paper tiger, not a real threat to anglos, but complains that Legault “regards the English-speaking community as an inconvenience, rather than a historical partner with francophones in the province’s development.”
Moscow or Montreal? In Maclean’s, Alena Matushina, a recent immigrant to Quebec from Russia, writes that the law has made her feel more of an outsider, and makes her wonder whether she wants to stay.
I want to feel like I’m integrated, like I’m part of the system. I want to call it my home, and right now I can’t. Sometimes I consider going home to Moscow. Here, I just feel like I’m not good enough because I do not speak French.
Security fears: Justin Trudeau cancelled plans to appear in person at a Liberal fundraiser in Surrey, B.C. on Tuesday after RCMP warned a protest outside the event could escalate if he arrived, an unnamed source tells CP. In Saskatoon on Wednesday, where he was again beset by protesters, Trudeau expressed disgust at the “harassment, racist insults [and] threats of violence” targeting the mostly South Asian attendees as they arrived.
PR versus action: Canadian Forces members have told a former justice that the military sees sexual misconduct as a public relations problem that needs to be managed to avoid negative media coverage rather than a real issue, the Citizenreports. The Citizen learned about some of the evidence as the public waits for the release of Louise Arbour’s review of sexual misconduct in the ranks, which is expected May 30.
Lich free: An Ontario judge declined Wednesday to revoke the bail of Tamara Lich, the Citizenreports: “The courts are not a thought police,” Justice Kevin Phillips said. “We seek only to control conduct to the extent that certain behaviour will violate, or likely lead to violation of the law.” The Crown had argued that Lich breached bail conditions when she accepted the 2022 “George Jonas Freedom Award,” which she is set to receive in a June 16 gala in Toronto.
Bad game: CPC MPs have called for Canada Soccer to cancel a controversial exhibition game against Iran set for next month in Vancouver, CP reports. The families of those who died aboard Flight PS752 — including 85 Canadians and permanent residents — plan to protest outside the stadium if the match goes ahead.
Fording ahead: A Leger poll for the Post shows Doug Ford headed to a second majority mandate at Queen’s Park. The PCs are at 38, the Liberals are down to 26 from 28 last week, while the NDP are up one to 24.
Rural time: In the Calgary Herald, Don Braidwrites that as the UCP heads to a leadership, rural Albertans are fed up with the dominance of Calgary.
This could give an advantage to out-of-town leadership candidates, especially Brian Jean (Fort McMurray) and Finance Minister Travis Toews (Grande Prairie) if he decides to run. Similarly, the disparity might cause trouble for Calgarians who enter the race, perhaps including ministers Rajan Sawhney and Rebecca Schulz.
Won’t quit: The mayor of Surrey is so far refusing to step down in an escalating scandal involving an allegedly false claim that someone ran over his foot, the Surrey Now-Leaderreports.
Svyatik Artemenko travelled from Guelph, Ontario, to Ukraine at the end of January to play professional soccer. A few weeks later, he found himself at the frontlines of Europe’s most brutal war in decades. His life’s journey—from Odesa on the Black Sea coast, to Winnipeg as an immigrant, then back to Odesa as a soldier—is quintessentially Canadian. Artemenko, who is 22, has come of age with his feet firmly planted in two national identities, standing at the hyphen in the middle of “Ukrainian-Canadian” for all of his young life. When Russia invaded, he transformed himself from a Canadian soccer recruit to a Ukrainian fighting for the future of his homeland.
Now back in Canada, Artemenko is coming to grips with the trauma of war, even as he resumes his soccer career. During his time in Ukraine, he spoke regularly with Maclean’s contributing editor Adnan R. Khan, documenting his experiences in a conflict of global consequence, and the events that led him to come back.
This memoir by Svyatik Artmenko was told to Adnan R. Khan.
***
When I arrived in Odesa at the end of January, more than 100,000 Russian troops had already gathered around Ukraine’s borders. The world was watching for an invasion that could pull Europe into its first war in decades.
In Ukraine, though, there was only distant talk of war. No one I met thought it was a realistic possibility. Vladimir Putin was acting tough, but ever since the Russians had invaded the east of the country in 2014, he had been the butt of jokes—a puny, wannabe dictator who spent more time getting his picture taken trying to look tough than actually being tough.
So even as Russian troops were mobilizing, Ukrainians shrugged and went on living their lives. It was peaceful and carefree, with cafés full of people, couples taking long walks on Odesa’s beaches and bars pumping bass late into the night. War was the furthest thing from my mind, too. The only thing I was thinking about was proving to the soccer club that had invited me to Ukraine that I was good enough to play for them.
Podillya FC is a team based in Khmelnytskyi, around 500 kilometres northwest of Odesa. To be candid, it wasn’t my first choice. I would have loved to play for Chornomorets FC, Odesa’s home team, or Dynamo in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Both are in Ukraine’s Premier League, and I’ve always dreamed of playing at the top level in the country where I was born.
But I wasn’t complaining. Podillya was a first-division club, one level down from the Premier League. More importantly, it was a team on the rise, with hopes of breaking into Ukraine’s elite league within a few years. I had the chance to be a part of that.
So when I took the train from Odesa to Khmelnytskyi, I was barely paying attention to the news. Podillya’s management put me up in a beautiful apartment not far from their stadium, and my days and nights were quickly consumed with one goal: impressing the team’s coaches. It was going better than I could have hoped. On February 23, I was invited to the team’s office, where there was a contract waiting for me. My dream was coming true. Everything was happening as I imagined: putting pen to paper, pulling on the team jersey for photos. I was so proud.
That night, I had a hard time falling asleep. When I finally did, it didn’t last long. At about five in the morning, I woke to the sound of distant thuds. I would find out later that these were missile strikes hitting a military base not far from Khmelnytskyi. At the time, though, I had no idea what was going on. I immediately checked my phone and saw that I had a bunch of missed calls from my parents and friends in Canada. When I called home, my mom picked up the phone. “Have you seen the news?” she said. “Russia just invaded Ukraine.”
It was like someone had popped a balloon. I could feel all of the excitement deflating inside of me. As ridiculous as it sounds, my first thought was that this would postpone the second half of the soccer season, which was scheduled to start in mid-March. If I wanted to play soccer in Europe, I thought, I would have to help find a way to end this war. Just 12 hours earlier I’d been sitting in the bleachers at Podillya’s stadium daydreaming about being in goal against Dynamo Kyiv. I imagined myself making an impossible save to win the match. I could almost hear the fans screaming and clapping.
I tried to push that idea out of my mind. My country was being invaded, and there I was thinking about soccer. It was stupid. As I looked out my window into the darkness, I thought about my friends in Odesa and the summers I’d spent there as a child. All of it was under threat. I was stunned, and angry. I decided at that moment that I would join the fight for Ukraine.
***
To my parents, Odesa is the most beautiful place in the world, a city of more than a million people that feels like a seaside town. Even in the middle of this war, I can see it through their eyes: the restaurants, the Mediterranean architecture, the views of the Black Sea. Ukraine is smaller than Manitoba, and every inch of it is precious to the people who live there. My parents left only because of me. They wanted a better life for their son.
My father, Vladyslav, was a cardiologist; my mother, Lidiya, an English teacher. They were living a relatively comfortable life. But in 1991, after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, the country’s economy collapsed. By the time I was born in February of 1998, conditions had gone from bad to worse. My parents had lost hope of ever building the kind of life they wanted for their children.
They arrived in Winnipeg when I was two, with almost nothing. My dad’s medical qualifications weren’t recognized in Manitoba, so the best he could do was find a job as a janitor at a hospital. My mom was luckier: her English skills helped her land a job at Carpathia Credit Union, a bank set up by Ukrainian-Canadians to provide financial opportunity to the Ukrainian community.
‘I counted more than 100 dead, both foreigners and Ukrainians, while I was collecting bodies from the attack on Yavoriv’
Over the next years they worked hard to build a middle-class life. They had two more kids—my sister, Nika, and brother, Glev—bought a house just north of the city centre and settled into a working-class routine. It wasn’t perfect, of course. My parents missed their homeland, their family and their friends. When I was a kid, we would go back to Odesa every summer. For my parents, it was like refilling their energy tanks before heading back to the freezing Canadian prairie.
For me, those trips were pure magic. I became fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. I would spend long summer days with my uncle, a sea-traffic controller at one of Odesa’s ports, watching the huge freighters coming and going. The seaside was my favourite place, especially the stretches lined with cliffs. I used to love standing there, looking out and dreaming about sea monsters and adventures on sailing ships.
I also loved playing soccer with my friends. For Ukrainians, soccer is a religion. I developed a passion for the game during my visits to Odesa, and I was good at it. Back in Winnipeg, I was recruited at the age of 16 to an advanced soccer program at Glenlawn Collegiate. That was the same year I signed up for the Canadian Forces reserves—a decision I had no idea would serve me well later in my life. I spent a year training, including a summer at CFB Shilo in Brandon, Manitoba, earning my basic military qualification. In the end, I dropped out and focused on soccer.
When I was 19, the Winnipeg Valour recruited me as their backup goalkeeper for the inaugural season of the Canadian Premier League, a pro circuit just below Major League Soccer. From there, I went to the University of Guelph and played for their varsity team and eventually signed with Guelph United FC, a semi-pro club competing in Ontario’s premier league. In 2021, we won the league championship and qualified for the 2022 Canadian Championship. But the big highlight came near the end of the year, when I received a call from Podillya asking if I wanted to try out for them. It was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. I bought a one-way ticket to Odesa, packed my bags and left for Ukraine.
***
On February 24, almost exactly a month after I arrived in Khmelnytskyi, the sun rose over a changed country. Russian forces were advancing quickly from Crimea, which they already occupied, toward Kherson, a city on the Dnieper River not far from Odesa. The shock of the invasion was rippling throughout Ukraine.
I talked to some of my new Ukrainian teammates with Podillya, who told me they were all enlisting in the country’s military. A few hours later I was lining up at the army recruitment office in Khmelnytskyi. The queue was longer than I’d expected, stretching a block down the street before doubling back to the entrance. The Ukrainian military was already drafting men between 18 and 60 years old before the invasion started, but as soon as the war was on, people were rushing to volunteer. One of the men in line—a tall, bulky guy who seemed to have some military experience—was telling his friend that he thought the Russians would move on to Mykolaiv, east of Odesa, because that’s where the main highway crosses the Pivdennyi Buh River. They would need to take the bridge there before they could begin an assault on Odesa.
I waited more than two hours before I learned I couldn’t enlist because the regular army was only accepting Ukrainian citizens. I was surprised. I knew that Ukraine doesn’t recognize dual citizenship—when I’m there, I’m technically considered a Canadian visitor. But all my life I’ve felt as much Ukrainian as I have Canadian. I worried I might not get a chance to defend the country of my birth. The recruiting officials could see how disappointed I was. They assured me there were plans to establish some kind of force for international volunteers.
I left Khmelnytskyi that day and headed back to Odesa, disappointed but still holding out hope that I would be able to contribute to the fight. The next day, I received a call from a Ukrainian military official who told me there would be an International Legion, and I should prepare to leave for training at any moment. In the meantime, I signed up to local neighbourhood patrols, which had been quickly assembled to watch for saboteurs and spies.
These kinds of covert operations were a real fear in Odesa, where many residents are native Russian speakers: in early January, Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, arrested a Russian agent who was recruiting people to carry out attacks in Odesa. As the war started, the government was concerned that sleeper cells were preparing to sabotage Ukrainian defensive positions, or were sending information back to Russia about the city’s defences.
Artemenko in Odesa in mid-March, when he was assigned to a unit operating behind Russian lines. (Photograph by Valeria Ferraro)
The patrols were tasked with looking for suspicious activities and reporting them to the authorities. When I signed up, they asked if I had any military training and if I could handle a gun. I showed them a photograph of my basic military qualification certificate from Canada. That was enough for them to assign me to the patrols and issue me a nine-millimetre pistol, which I kept tucked into my pants, under my jacket. Working in groups of three or four, dressed in civilian clothes so we could blend in with the local population, we walked the streets in downtown Odesa, sometimes during the day and other times at night, when the city was under a curfew.
Once, during a daytime patrol, we saw a guy walking around taking pictures. It was weird because he wasn’t taking pictures of anything that would make a nice photo—just random street shots. We went up to him and told him this wasn’t the time to be taking pictures. He tried to walk away, but we followed him and called in the police. They stopped him, and when they checked his documents, they found a Russian passport and a notebook listing locations around Odesa. He was arrested.
I never found out whether he was a spy. If not, it was stupid of him to be acting suspiciously when things were so tense. Odesa wasn’t being bombed in the same way as other cities, but everyone was preparing for the worst. Occasionally one of the Russian warships lined up on the Black Sea would launch a missile. One hit the airport. The Russians had even tried to deploy a landing party in Koblevo, just east of Odesa, but were repelled by Ukrainian forces.
The Russians were finding it hard to get to the city. The Ukrainian military and volunteers were fighting heroically to hold off any advancements from the east, and Odesa’s cliffs provided natural protection against an amphibious assault. For extra protection, the Ukrainian navy had set naval mines in the sea.
Sometimes I would take a walk down to the beach, or along the clifftops I had loved so much as a kid. I could see the Russian warships lining the horizon, these ominous black shadows. It felt like something could happen at any moment.
One cold morning at the beginning of March, the beach was empty and the water was dark grey, under a cloudy sky. I was frustrated: it had been nearly a week since the Russians had invaded and I felt like I was wasting my time with these city patrols. Nothing had happened since we’d stopped that guy taking photos a few days earlier.
I spoke to my parents every day and told them how discouraged I was watching the war without being able to contribute. They worried about me, of course, but they were also proud of my decision to stay and fight. The Ukrainian military had surprised everyone with its resistance against the much bigger Russian army. My parents understood why I wanted to be a part of that.
Two days later, I received an order from Ukrainian military officials to report to the Yavoriv training centre, near Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, where the International Legion was based. I was finally going to get my chance.
***
When I arrived at Odesa’s central station to catch the train, officials were only allowing women and children to board. Most Ukrainians fleeing the country were heading to Lviv, and then on from there to Poland. Men of fighting age were prohibited from leaving, but I had papers from the Ukrainian military that identified me as a recruit.
At first, the women on the train car I boarded didn’t realize I had volunteered to fight. I was the only man and I didn’t have any military equipment. I looked like a civilian and, in their eyes, like a coward on the run.
There’s this trick Ukrainian grandmothers have to make a person feel guilty without saying a word. It’s this look of pure disgust, and if you ever experience it, you don’t easily forget it. On the train, I got so many of those grandmother looks that I almost started to believe I’d done something wrong. A few women came up and asked why I wasn’t fighting to defend Ukraine. When I explained I was on my way to Yavoriv for training, their attitudes completely changed. Word got around the car that I was a volunteer, and everyone started offering me food, water and anything else they thought I needed.
One elderly lady came up and gave me some prosphora, the holy bread handed out at orthodox services. She told me she’d been at church in Odesa not too long before evacuating to the train station. She wanted me to have it as a blessing. I was deeply moved. I’ve always had a strong faith in God. Standing in that crowded railway car for the nearly eight-hour journey to Lviv, surrounded by terrified women and children fleeing their homes, I knew the best I could do to ensure they returned was train hard, do my duty and pray to God for a quick end to the war.
Yavoriv certainly had the facilities to provide excellent training. It was a massive base, spread over thousands of acres with lots of forest. There were tactical training areas; artillery, tank and shooting ranges; and long, two-storey barracks. The commanders could have really put these guys through their paces, weeding out those who didn’t have what it takes.
I hadn’t been at the Yavoriv base long, though, when I realized the International Legion wasn’t all it was hyped up to be. A lot of people had taken up President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for help, but that didn’t translate into a capable fighting force. Some of the guys lacked the mental discipline to be soldiers. There would be a drill, for instance, and they would take their time putting on their shoes and getting dressed. At a boot camp for Canadian reserves, they would have been punished for that.
They weren’t receiving the kind of training—the yelling and breaking people down—that scares away people who lack the mental toughness to operate in a war zone. This training seemed designed to give them just enough basic skill that commanders could throw them into the fight. We did some physical training and some offensive and defensive tactical manoeuvres, and that was about it. Most of the volunteers seemed to think they were there on some kind of adventure vacation. I was skeptical they would ever be ready.
Because of my previous training, my commanding officer put me in charge of teaching people how to load their magazines. One guy was trying to load the bullets backwards. When I pointed out the mistake, he shrugged and said he’d never held a weapon before. I asked what he had been assigned to do, and he said he was going to be a sniper. It was unbelievable.
That’s not to say everyone was incompetent. There were some experienced foreign volunteers, including my commanding officer, a 20-year veteran of war zones. I stuck close to him because I knew he would be able to improve my skill set. I don’t know what it was—maybe the discipline I’d learned from playing soccer—but this officer seemed to trust me.
Still, I wondered why they weren’t kicking some of these people out and telling them to go home. There were plenty of volunteers; they had set up a tent camp to house the overflow. Did the commanders believe they could just throw bodies at the Russians and win the war that way? I was uneasy. I knew that most of these guys would be ill-equipped to handle a life-threatening situation. They might very well get me killed.
***
On my ninth day at Yavoriv, we were awoken by an air-raid siren and left the barracks to take cover. No bombs had fallen, and we went back to bed a little pissed off, only vaguely aware that what had probably been a Russian reconnaissance plane flying overhead could mean trouble later.
By 5:30 in the morning, I was in a deep sleep, so I didn’t hear the first missile. But it must have been close to my barrack, because the explosion nearly threw me out of bed. There was no warning—no siren, no announcement over the loudspeakers. Immediately after the blast, there were a few seconds of eerie silence, as if everyone was too shocked to react. Then chaos: people shouting, boots stomping on the concrete floor. I don’t remember getting dressed, but I must have done, because I had my uniform and boots on when a second rocket tore overhead. It’s a sound I will never forget, like a giant sheet of paper being ripped in two, accompanied by that high-pitched whistling noise you hear bombs making in war films. Then the explosion, the ground shaking, the windows shattering.
I stood dazed in the dark for a few seconds as my fellow soldiers ran for the exits, some with cuts on their faces from shards of broken glass. I saw one of my friends sitting on his bed. He had been next to a window and looked like he was in shock. I threw him over my shoulder and ran.
Outside it was freezing cold, but with so much adrenalin pumping through me, I barely felt it. Another rocket shredded the air and slammed down somewhere in the direction of the shooting range. Someone was barking orders to take cover in the forest, so I ran in that direction, my friend dangling from my shoulder.
I stumbled over frozen ground for what felt like an hour but was probably no more than a few minutes, getting clear of the buildings. Rockets were raining down almost non-stop. I would later learn the enemy had launched more than two dozen cruise missiles toward the base from bombers flying in Russian airspace.
This was my first taste of the Russian way of war. I’d decided to join this fight almost without thinking. Watching the Russians lay waste to the place where I’d been living for the past nine days was the first time I’d felt fear since signing up. I was facing an enemy that had no problem killing indiscriminately from a distance. What would it be like on the frontline? If I was killed, would I be looking into the eyes of a human being who fired a gun? Or would my killer be some far-off grunt in Russia pressing a button? Or someone well behind the frontline loading artillery shells?
As the sun rose and the missiles stopped, some of my fear melted away. But for many of the foreign volunteers, this first taste of war was a reality check. It woke them up to the fact that this wasn’t some kind of Hollywood movie where they were the heroes dodging every bullet. Many, including the guy who’d been loading ammunition backward into his magazine, decided to go home.
I didn’t blame them. These guys demonstrated pure heart for coming in the first place. Their departure was probably for the best, though. It’s better they were put through the experience of war on the training base than on the frontline, where their inexperience would have put other lives at risk.
The attack on Yavoriv strengthened my resolve. The base was badly damaged, and from the looks of it, the Russians knew exactly where to hit it to cause the most carnage. Anyone who had been on the second floor of a barrack was either dead or badly injured. Anyone in the tent camp had been blown to pieces.
We dug in for a few days in the forest, with little more than our clothes and blankets to keep us warm, eating military rations that we retrieved from the base. We built fires during the day, but at night we weren’t allowed to because they would make us an easy target for Russian attacks.
A few of us dug a ditch where we slept in case the Russians did bomb us, huddling together for warmth. I used some of the skills I’d acquired in a Grade 10 outdoor education class back in Manitoba, where we learned wilderness survival. I knew how to build a lean-to over the ditch, so we had some cover from the elements. Funny, because I’m not much of a camper. I’m not even sure why I took that class. I guess growing up in Canada, where the wilderness is such a big part of our lives, it was just a normal thing to do.
We spent most of our days digging through the rubble and recovering the remains of the dead. There were no survivors; gathering up the dead mostly meant collecting body parts and reassembling them into whole human beings so they could be identified.
‘You don’t see the things I’ve seen and not change in some basic ways’
It was gruesome work. I try not to think about it, but sometimes those images pop into my head. I guess they’ll haunt me for the rest of my life. While I was doing it, I kept thinking about all those terrified people in Ukraine’s cities hiding in bomb shelters. After the missiles hit, would there be anyone to dig them out of the rubble?
***
Over the three days I spent at Yavoriv after the attack, I counted more than 100 dead, both foreigners and Ukrainians. There must have been more buried under all that rubble. When I left for Odesa, the recovery teams were still digging.
The devastation created some uncertainty about the future of the International Legion. The more experienced volunteers were becoming frustrated even before the bombing. Some, including my commanding officer, felt like the Legion had been a publicity stunt to show that most of the world was on Ukraine’s side. After the attack, he gathered some of the guys he thought were ready to fight and told us if we wanted to leave, we were free to do so. There were other volunteer brigades operating in Ukraine that would give us the chance to contribute. He could put us in touch with them.
I was willing to be deployed anywhere in Ukraine, of course. But after the missile attack, returning to the familiar surroundings of Odesa felt right. My commanding officer linked me up with a volunteer battalion attached to the SBU. He told me they could use my language skills, and my steadiness in times of crisis.
At the SBU base, I was assigned to a group of volunteers who were tasked with supporting Ukrainian special forces operations. It wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing. All of my training in Canada, and the little I’d received in Ukraine, was geared toward the infantry. I was expecting to go to the frontlines and shoot at Russians.
Maybe that kind of thinking was simplistic. By mid-March, the frontline around Mykolaiv was shifting. Ukrainian counterattacks and Moscow’s changing strategy had allowed us to push Russian forces back toward Kherson. Ukrainian forces had prevented enemy troops from crossing the Pivdennyi Buh River, sparing Odesa. After that, the frontline was less about infantry engagements than artillery and air strikes, with special forces conducting covert, pinpoint hits as the Russians retreated.
My unit’s job was to infiltrate the frontline, come in behind the Russians and set traps—IEDs and land mines—to make their withdrawal more painful. On one mission, we might be sent to get close to the enemy, disguised as civilians, and radio back their positions. On another, we might be told to disrupt a retreating column by neutralizing a key armoured vehicle so Ukrainian special forces could then go in and take out the whole group.
It was nerve-racking work. The thinking was that if we looked like civilians, the Russians wouldn’t target us. But as we knew from the scenes in Bucha and Irpin, where hundreds of bodies and mass graves have been found, many Russian soldiers have no qualms about killing civilians. During our first mission behind enemy lines—it would end up being our only one—we were shot at and nearly hit by artillery as we drove around Russian positions in a civilian car. One of the men in my unit took a piece of shrapnel in the arm from an artillery round that landed some 10 feet from our vehicle.
That was the worst period of my life. Being killed worried me less than being captured. The Russians had made it clear they didn’t consider foreign volunteers to be covered under the laws of war. I knew how they would treat me—like a mercenary, or a terrorist. I would likely disappear into their prisons forever. When I went out on that mission, I told myself: Putting a bullet in my own head is better than being caught. I know it sounds gruesome, and it wasn’t something I dwelled on. It was just a reminder of how high the stakes were before we headed out.
The scenes of devastation I witnessed were another stark reminder. I saw the bodies of civilians, left in ditches on the side of the road, some scorched black as if someone had tried to burn them.
There were forced relocations, too. On my one mission behind Russian lines near the end of March, I witnessed Russian-speaking Ukrainians in a village near Mykolaiv being forced to board military trucks heading east, either into Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine or on to Russia itself. When we told our commanders what we’d seen, they said there was little that could be done. I can’t imagine what those people must have gone through, or what they might still be enduring.
By early April, Putin’s new plan for Ukraine was obvious. He had failed to take over the entire country, so his forces were limping out of Kyiv and Kharkiv and redeploying to the east, with the goal of taking the entire Donbas region. In the south, they had retreated to the outskirts of Kherson, the first city in Ukraine they’d taken control of, and dug into defensive positions, setting up tanks and artillery in populated areas so we couldn’t shell them. Playing defence in a war takes fewer resources than going on the offensive, especially if you’re using human shields.
(Photograph by Valeria Ferraro)
Once the Russians had dug into populated areas, my commanders decided it wasn’t worth the risk for my unit to repeat our trip behind enemy lines. The new worry was that Russia would restock its forces and make a new push on Odesa, potentially using Transnistria, a Russian-controlled territory in Moldova, to launch a two-pronged ground assault on the city.
My unit was retasked with capturing Russian agents, identified by the SBU, who were operating all around the Odesa region, sending information back to Russia about Ukrainian troop deployments or weak points in our defences, anything the Russians could use to plan a new offensive. We would be given targets who we would then track down and arrest.
The work was less stressful than missions behind enemy lines: with no Russian troops in the area at the time, there was no risk of capture. But it came with its own risks. Sometimes, our targets were armed, or they would run away, forcing us to open fire on them. Once, we were assigned to pick up a suspected saboteur who was sheltering with a family. When we broke through the door to raid the apartment, everyone inside panicked, and we couldn’t be sure which of the adults was our target. We just started screaming, fingers on our triggers, for everyone to get on the ground. Fortunately, no one got shot.
My time fighting in the war had, in a way, come full circle. My first contribution was helping arrest a suspicious person taking pictures and notes on Odesa’s streets; my last missions involved chasing down and capturing spies and saboteurs.
I was a different person, though, than I had been during those early days in Odesa. You don’t see the things I’ve seen and not change in some basic ways. It was hard, much harder than I’d expected. I’d never been in a war zone, but other people who have told me this was the worst they had ever seen. The level of devastation is terrifying.
***
After a month and a half, a part of me just wanted to go home. When I had some time off and spoke to my friends back in Canada, they asked me about my experiences. I described the things I’d seen matter-of-factly, and they responded with shock. “That’s so messed up,” they said. But for me, it just felt kind of normal. I really didn’t feel any emotions about it anymore.
I realized this shouldn’t be normal—that it wasn’t good to be so numb to these experiences. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was having doubts. But I was also torn. I had become extremely close to the people I met during my time as a soldier, the men and women who sacrificed everything to defend their country. I didn’t want to abandon them.
My time off—a couple of days every week or so—was difficult. I was allowed to leave the SBU base, but after the intensity of my missions, going back to regular life in Odesa was unsettling. The rhythm of the city was returning to some kind of normal. It was early April and spring had arrived. Cafés and restaurants were open. People were still tense, but they were going about their daily routines. And yet for me, the war was never far away.
The Russian warships on the Black Sea had disappeared beyond the horizon, but we knew they were still there. Warning sirens would ring out regularly because of the threat of missile attacks. From time to time, one would land, almost randomly, hitting a street here or a building there. It was as if the Russians were reminding us that they were still out there, that we weren’t safe, that the war was not over.
By the middle of April, I desperately needed a break. I’d come to realize over my six weeks or so in the war that I didn’t want to be a soldier, though I was definitely good at it. I had volunteered so I could help my people live free from Putin’s tyranny. But I’d come to Ukraine to play soccer.
It looked almost certain that the whole season would be cancelled. Podillya’s officials had told all of its foreign players they were free to sign with other teams temporarily if they wanted to keep playing. I was the only one who had volunteered to fight, but I was considering my options. My coach at Guelph United had offered me a contract for the upcoming season. The Canadian Championship was scheduled to start in early May, with Guelph United playing the Halifax Wanderers, a Canadian Premier League team, in its first match. My coach said if I was back in Canada, I could be in the lineup.
If we won, we would be up against Toronto FC, a Major League Soccer club that includes players who will be representing Canada next fall at the World Cup in Qatar. Just to be on the pitch playing against them would be a highlight of my career.
I felt guilty for wanting this opportunity as much as I did. The war was still raging in Ukraine’s east. By the third week of April, the Russians had launched a fresh offensive to take the entire Donbas region. But I decided to complete one last set of missions and then return to Canada. My commanders told me the Russians were also preparing for another assault on Mykolaiv from Kherson, while building up troops in Transnistria. Then, on April 22, a Russian general admitted on state television what most people suspected: Russia intended to take all of southern Ukraine, including Odesa, cutting off Ukrainians from the Black Sea.
When I got that news, I was in a car on my way to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, where I was booked to fly to Toronto. I had long feared that Russia planned to invade my hometown, but the confirmation felt like a punch in the gut. I pictured all those old ladies when I’d boarded the train to Yavoriv back in early March, fixing me with their looks of disgust as I left the country.
I knew, though, that I was not running away. In the weeks that had passed since then, I’d survived missiles and mortars; I’d gone undercover and infiltrated the frontlines of one of the world’s most powerful armies. I’d witnessed death on a scale no one should ever have to see. I’d fought for my people.
It was time to go back to my other home, where there was no war, and where I could be the person I dream of being. It was the right choice, if a painful one. As I approached the border with Moldova, I thought of my beautiful Odesa—miraculously intact despite the war—and wondered if I had set eyes on it for the last time. The Russian war machine was coming. Wherever it went, death and destruction would follow.
This article appears in print in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “A soldier’s story.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here.
Svyatik Artemenko travelled from Guelph, Ontario, to Ukraine at the end of January to play professional soccer. A few weeks later, he found himself at the frontlines of Europe’s most brutal war in decades. His life’s journey—from Odesa on the Black Sea coast, to Winnipeg as an immigrant, then back to Odesa as a soldier—is quintessentially Canadian. Artemenko, who is 22, has come of age with his feet firmly planted in two national identities, standing at the hyphen in the middle of “Ukrainian-Canadian” for all of his young life. When Russia invaded, he transformed himself from a Canadian soccer recruit to a Ukrainian fighting for the future of his homeland.
Now back in Canada, Artemenko is coming to grips with the trauma of war, even as he resumes his soccer career. During his time in Ukraine, he spoke regularly with Maclean’s contributing editor Adnan R. Khan, documenting his experiences in a conflict of global consequence, and the events that led him to come back.
This memoir by Svyatik Artmenko was told to Adnan R. Khan.
***
When I arrived in Odesa at the end of January, more than 100,000 Russian troops had already gathered around Ukraine’s borders. The world was watching for an invasion that could pull Europe into its first war in decades.
In Ukraine, though, there was only distant talk of war. No one I met thought it was a realistic possibility. Vladimir Putin was acting tough, but ever since the Russians had invaded the east of the country in 2014, he had been the butt of jokes—a puny, wannabe dictator who spent more time getting his picture taken trying to look tough than actually being tough.
So even as Russian troops were mobilizing, Ukrainians shrugged and went on living their lives. It was peaceful and carefree, with cafés full of people, couples taking long walks on Odesa’s beaches and bars pumping bass late into the night. War was the furthest thing from my mind, too. The only thing I was thinking about was proving to the soccer club that had invited me to Ukraine that I was good enough to play for them.
Podillya FC is a team based in Khmelnytskyi, around 500 kilometres northwest of Odesa. To be candid, it wasn’t my first choice. I would have loved to play for Chornomorets FC, Odesa’s home team, or Dynamo in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Both are in Ukraine’s Premier League, and I’ve always dreamed of playing at the top level in the country where I was born.
But I wasn’t complaining. Podillya was a first-division club, one level down from the Premier League. More importantly, it was a team on the rise, with hopes of breaking into Ukraine’s elite league within a few years. I had the chance to be a part of that.
So when I took the train from Odesa to Khmelnytskyi, I was barely paying attention to the news. Podillya’s management put me up in a beautiful apartment not far from their stadium, and my days and nights were quickly consumed with one goal: impressing the team’s coaches. It was going better than I could have hoped. On February 23, I was invited to the team’s office, where there was a contract waiting for me. My dream was coming true. Everything was happening as I imagined: putting pen to paper, pulling on the team jersey for photos. I was so proud.
That night, I had a hard time falling asleep. When I finally did, it didn’t last long. At about five in the morning, I woke to the sound of distant thuds. I would find out later that these were missile strikes hitting a military base not far from Khmelnytskyi. At the time, though, I had no idea what was going on. I immediately checked my phone and saw that I had a bunch of missed calls from my parents and friends in Canada. When I called home, my mom picked up the phone. “Have you seen the news?” she said. “Russia just invaded Ukraine.”
It was like someone had popped a balloon. I could feel all of the excitement deflating inside of me. As ridiculous as it sounds, my first thought was that this would postpone the second half of the soccer season, which was scheduled to start in mid-March. If I wanted to play soccer in Europe, I thought, I would have to help find a way to end this war. Just 12 hours earlier I’d been sitting in the bleachers at Podillya’s stadium daydreaming about being in goal against Dynamo Kyiv. I imagined myself making an impossible save to win the match. I could almost hear the fans screaming and clapping.
I tried to push that idea out of my mind. My country was being invaded, and there I was thinking about soccer. It was stupid. As I looked out my window into the darkness, I thought about my friends in Odesa and the summers I’d spent there as a child. All of it was under threat. I was stunned, and angry. I decided at that moment that I would join the fight for Ukraine.
***
To my parents, Odesa is the most beautiful place in the world, a city of more than a million people that feels like a seaside town. Even in the middle of this war, I can see it through their eyes: the restaurants, the Mediterranean architecture, the views of the Black Sea. Ukraine is smaller than Manitoba, and every inch of it is precious to the people who live there. My parents left only because of me. They wanted a better life for their son.
My father, Vladyslav, was a cardiologist; my mother, Lidiya, an English teacher. They were living a relatively comfortable life. But in 1991, after Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union, the country’s economy collapsed. By the time I was born in February of 1998, conditions had gone from bad to worse. My parents had lost hope of ever building the kind of life they wanted for their children.
They arrived in Winnipeg when I was two, with almost nothing. My dad’s medical qualifications weren’t recognized in Manitoba, so the best he could do was find a job as a janitor at a hospital. My mom was luckier: her English skills helped her land a job at Carpathia Credit Union, a bank set up by Ukrainian-Canadians to provide financial opportunity to the Ukrainian community.
‘I counted more than 100 dead, both foreigners and Ukrainians, while I was collecting bodies from the attack on Yavoriv’
Over the next years they worked hard to build a middle-class life. They had two more kids—my sister, Nika, and brother, Glev—bought a house just north of the city centre and settled into a working-class routine. It wasn’t perfect, of course. My parents missed their homeland, their family and their friends. When I was a kid, we would go back to Odesa every summer. For my parents, it was like refilling their energy tanks before heading back to the freezing Canadian prairie.
For me, those trips were pure magic. I became fluent in both Ukrainian and Russian. I would spend long summer days with my uncle, a sea-traffic controller at one of Odesa’s ports, watching the huge freighters coming and going. The seaside was my favourite place, especially the stretches lined with cliffs. I used to love standing there, looking out and dreaming about sea monsters and adventures on sailing ships.
I also loved playing soccer with my friends. For Ukrainians, soccer is a religion. I developed a passion for the game during my visits to Odesa, and I was good at it. Back in Winnipeg, I was recruited at the age of 16 to an advanced soccer program at Glenlawn Collegiate. That was the same year I signed up for the Canadian Forces reserves—a decision I had no idea would serve me well later in my life. I spent a year training, including a summer at CFB Shilo in Brandon, Manitoba, earning my basic military qualification. In the end, I dropped out and focused on soccer.
When I was 19, the Winnipeg Valour recruited me as their backup goalkeeper for the inaugural season of the Canadian Premier League, a pro circuit just below Major League Soccer. From there, I went to the University of Guelph and played for their varsity team and eventually signed with Guelph United FC, a semi-pro club competing in Ontario’s premier league. In 2021, we won the league championship and qualified for the 2022 Canadian Championship. But the big highlight came near the end of the year, when I received a call from Podillya asking if I wanted to try out for them. It was the opportunity I’d been waiting for. I bought a one-way ticket to Odesa, packed my bags and left for Ukraine.
***
On February 24, almost exactly a month after I arrived in Khmelnytskyi, the sun rose over a changed country. Russian forces were advancing quickly from Crimea, which they already occupied, toward Kherson, a city on the Dnieper River not far from Odesa. The shock of the invasion was rippling throughout Ukraine.
I talked to some of my new Ukrainian teammates with Podillya, who told me they were all enlisting in the country’s military. A few hours later I was lining up at the army recruitment office in Khmelnytskyi. The queue was longer than I’d expected, stretching a block down the street before doubling back to the entrance. The Ukrainian military was already drafting men between 18 and 60 years old before the invasion started, but as soon as the war was on, people were rushing to volunteer. One of the men in line—a tall, bulky guy who seemed to have some military experience—was telling his friend that he thought the Russians would move on to Mykolaiv, east of Odesa, because that’s where the main highway crosses the Pivdennyi Buh River. They would need to take the bridge there before they could begin an assault on Odesa.
I waited more than two hours before I learned I couldn’t enlist because the regular army was only accepting Ukrainian citizens. I was surprised. I knew that Ukraine doesn’t recognize dual citizenship—when I’m there, I’m technically considered a Canadian visitor. But all my life I’ve felt as much Ukrainian as I have Canadian. I worried I might not get a chance to defend the country of my birth. The recruiting officials could see how disappointed I was. They assured me there were plans to establish some kind of force for international volunteers.
I left Khmelnytskyi that day and headed back to Odesa, disappointed but still holding out hope that I would be able to contribute to the fight. The next day, I received a call from a Ukrainian military official who told me there would be an International Legion, and I should prepare to leave for training at any moment. In the meantime, I signed up to local neighbourhood patrols, which had been quickly assembled to watch for saboteurs and spies.
These kinds of covert operations were a real fear in Odesa, where many residents are native Russian speakers: in early January, Ukraine’s intelligence service, the SBU, arrested a Russian agent who was recruiting people to carry out attacks in Odesa. As the war started, the government was concerned that sleeper cells were preparing to sabotage Ukrainian defensive positions, or were sending information back to Russia about the city’s defences.
Artemenko in Odesa in mid-March, when he was assigned to a unit operating behind Russian lines. (Photograph by Valeria Ferraro)
The patrols were tasked with looking for suspicious activities and reporting them to the authorities. When I signed up, they asked if I had any military training and if I could handle a gun. I showed them a photograph of my basic military qualification certificate from Canada. That was enough for them to assign me to the patrols and issue me a nine-millimetre pistol, which I kept tucked into my pants, under my jacket. Working in groups of three or four, dressed in civilian clothes so we could blend in with the local population, we walked the streets in downtown Odesa, sometimes during the day and other times at night, when the city was under a curfew.
Once, during a daytime patrol, we saw a guy walking around taking pictures. It was weird because he wasn’t taking pictures of anything that would make a nice photo—just random street shots. We went up to him and told him this wasn’t the time to be taking pictures. He tried to walk away, but we followed him and called in the police. They stopped him, and when they checked his documents, they found a Russian passport and a notebook listing locations around Odesa. He was arrested.
I never found out whether he was a spy. If not, it was stupid of him to be acting suspiciously when things were so tense. Odesa wasn’t being bombed in the same way as other cities, but everyone was preparing for the worst. Occasionally one of the Russian warships lined up on the Black Sea would launch a missile. One hit the airport. The Russians had even tried to deploy a landing party in Koblevo, just east of Odesa, but were repelled by Ukrainian forces.
The Russians were finding it hard to get to the city. The Ukrainian military and volunteers were fighting heroically to hold off any advancements from the east, and Odesa’s cliffs provided natural protection against an amphibious assault. For extra protection, the Ukrainian navy had set naval mines in the sea.
Sometimes I would take a walk down to the beach, or along the clifftops I had loved so much as a kid. I could see the Russian warships lining the horizon, these ominous black shadows. It felt like something could happen at any moment.
One cold morning at the beginning of March, the beach was empty and the water was dark grey, under a cloudy sky. I was frustrated: it had been nearly a week since the Russians had invaded and I felt like I was wasting my time with these city patrols. Nothing had happened since we’d stopped that guy taking photos a few days earlier.
I spoke to my parents every day and told them how discouraged I was watching the war without being able to contribute. They worried about me, of course, but they were also proud of my decision to stay and fight. The Ukrainian military had surprised everyone with its resistance against the much bigger Russian army. My parents understood why I wanted to be a part of that.
Two days later, I received an order from Ukrainian military officials to report to the Yavoriv training centre, near Lviv, the main city in western Ukraine, where the International Legion was based. I was finally going to get my chance.
***
When I arrived at Odesa’s central station to catch the train, officials were only allowing women and children to board. Most Ukrainians fleeing the country were heading to Lviv, and then on from there to Poland. Men of fighting age were prohibited from leaving, but I had papers from the Ukrainian military that identified me as a recruit.
At first, the women on the train car I boarded didn’t realize I had volunteered to fight. I was the only man and I didn’t have any military equipment. I looked like a civilian and, in their eyes, like a coward on the run.
There’s this trick Ukrainian grandmothers have to make a person feel guilty without saying a word. It’s this look of pure disgust, and if you ever experience it, you don’t easily forget it. On the train, I got so many of those grandmother looks that I almost started to believe I’d done something wrong. A few women came up and asked why I wasn’t fighting to defend Ukraine. When I explained I was on my way to Yavoriv for training, their attitudes completely changed. Word got around the car that I was a volunteer, and everyone started offering me food, water and anything else they thought I needed.
One elderly lady came up and gave me some prosphora, the holy bread handed out at orthodox services. She told me she’d been at church in Odesa not too long before evacuating to the train station. She wanted me to have it as a blessing. I was deeply moved. I’ve always had a strong faith in God. Standing in that crowded railway car for the nearly eight-hour journey to Lviv, surrounded by terrified women and children fleeing their homes, I knew the best I could do to ensure they returned was train hard, do my duty and pray to God for a quick end to the war.
Yavoriv certainly had the facilities to provide excellent training. It was a massive base, spread over thousands of acres with lots of forest. There were tactical training areas; artillery, tank and shooting ranges; and long, two-storey barracks. The commanders could have really put these guys through their paces, weeding out those who didn’t have what it takes.
I hadn’t been at the Yavoriv base long, though, when I realized the International Legion wasn’t all it was hyped up to be. A lot of people had taken up President Volodymyr Zelensky’s call for help, but that didn’t translate into a capable fighting force. Some of the guys lacked the mental discipline to be soldiers. There would be a drill, for instance, and they would take their time putting on their shoes and getting dressed. At a boot camp for Canadian reserves, they would have been punished for that.
They weren’t receiving the kind of training—the yelling and breaking people down—that scares away people who lack the mental toughness to operate in a war zone. This training seemed designed to give them just enough basic skill that commanders could throw them into the fight. We did some physical training and some offensive and defensive tactical manoeuvres, and that was about it. Most of the volunteers seemed to think they were there on some kind of adventure vacation. I was skeptical they would ever be ready.
Because of my previous training, my commanding officer put me in charge of teaching people how to load their magazines. One guy was trying to load the bullets backwards. When I pointed out the mistake, he shrugged and said he’d never held a weapon before. I asked what he had been assigned to do, and he said he was going to be a sniper. It was unbelievable.
That’s not to say everyone was incompetent. There were some experienced foreign volunteers, including my commanding officer, a 20-year veteran of war zones. I stuck close to him because I knew he would be able to improve my skill set. I don’t know what it was—maybe the discipline I’d learned from playing soccer—but this officer seemed to trust me.
Still, I wondered why they weren’t kicking some of these people out and telling them to go home. There were plenty of volunteers; they had set up a tent camp to house the overflow. Did the commanders believe they could just throw bodies at the Russians and win the war that way? I was uneasy. I knew that most of these guys would be ill-equipped to handle a life-threatening situation. They might very well get me killed.
***
On my ninth day at Yavoriv, we were awoken by an air-raid siren and left the barracks to take cover. No bombs had fallen, and we went back to bed a little pissed off, only vaguely aware that what had probably been a Russian reconnaissance plane flying overhead could mean trouble later.
By 5:30 in the morning, I was in a deep sleep, so I didn’t hear the first missile. But it must have been close to my barrack, because the explosion nearly threw me out of bed. There was no warning—no siren, no announcement over the loudspeakers. Immediately after the blast, there were a few seconds of eerie silence, as if everyone was too shocked to react. Then chaos: people shouting, boots stomping on the concrete floor. I don’t remember getting dressed, but I must have done, because I had my uniform and boots on when a second rocket tore overhead. It’s a sound I will never forget, like a giant sheet of paper being ripped in two, accompanied by that high-pitched whistling noise you hear bombs making in war films. Then the explosion, the ground shaking, the windows shattering.
I stood dazed in the dark for a few seconds as my fellow soldiers ran for the exits, some with cuts on their faces from shards of broken glass. I saw one of my friends sitting on his bed. He had been next to a window and looked like he was in shock. I threw him over my shoulder and ran.
Outside it was freezing cold, but with so much adrenalin pumping through me, I barely felt it. Another rocket shredded the air and slammed down somewhere in the direction of the shooting range. Someone was barking orders to take cover in the forest, so I ran in that direction, my friend dangling from my shoulder.
I stumbled over frozen ground for what felt like an hour but was probably no more than a few minutes, getting clear of the buildings. Rockets were raining down almost non-stop. I would later learn the enemy had launched more than two dozen cruise missiles toward the base from bombers flying in Russian airspace.
This was my first taste of the Russian way of war. I’d decided to join this fight almost without thinking. Watching the Russians lay waste to the place where I’d been living for the past nine days was the first time I’d felt fear since signing up. I was facing an enemy that had no problem killing indiscriminately from a distance. What would it be like on the frontline? If I was killed, would I be looking into the eyes of a human being who fired a gun? Or would my killer be some far-off grunt in Russia pressing a button? Or someone well behind the frontline loading artillery shells?
As the sun rose and the missiles stopped, some of my fear melted away. But for many of the foreign volunteers, this first taste of war was a reality check. It woke them up to the fact that this wasn’t some kind of Hollywood movie where they were the heroes dodging every bullet. Many, including the guy who’d been loading ammunition backward into his magazine, decided to go home.
I didn’t blame them. These guys demonstrated pure heart for coming in the first place. Their departure was probably for the best, though. It’s better they were put through the experience of war on the training base than on the frontline, where their inexperience would have put other lives at risk.
The attack on Yavoriv strengthened my resolve. The base was badly damaged, and from the looks of it, the Russians knew exactly where to hit it to cause the most carnage. Anyone who had been on the second floor of a barrack was either dead or badly injured. Anyone in the tent camp had been blown to pieces.
We dug in for a few days in the forest, with little more than our clothes and blankets to keep us warm, eating military rations that we retrieved from the base. We built fires during the day, but at night we weren’t allowed to because they would make us an easy target for Russian attacks.
A few of us dug a ditch where we slept in case the Russians did bomb us, huddling together for warmth. I used some of the skills I’d acquired in a Grade 10 outdoor education class back in Manitoba, where we learned wilderness survival. I knew how to build a lean-to over the ditch, so we had some cover from the elements. Funny, because I’m not much of a camper. I’m not even sure why I took that class. I guess growing up in Canada, where the wilderness is such a big part of our lives, it was just a normal thing to do.
We spent most of our days digging through the rubble and recovering the remains of the dead. There were no survivors; gathering up the dead mostly meant collecting body parts and reassembling them into whole human beings so they could be identified.
‘You don’t see the things I’ve seen and not change in some basic ways’
It was gruesome work. I try not to think about it, but sometimes those images pop into my head. I guess they’ll haunt me for the rest of my life. While I was doing it, I kept thinking about all those terrified people in Ukraine’s cities hiding in bomb shelters. After the missiles hit, would there be anyone to dig them out of the rubble?
***
Over the three days I spent at Yavoriv after the attack, I counted more than 100 dead, both foreigners and Ukrainians. There must have been more buried under all that rubble. When I left for Odesa, the recovery teams were still digging.
The devastation created some uncertainty about the future of the International Legion. The more experienced volunteers were becoming frustrated even before the bombing. Some, including my commanding officer, felt like the Legion had been a publicity stunt to show that most of the world was on Ukraine’s side. After the attack, he gathered some of the guys he thought were ready to fight and told us if we wanted to leave, we were free to do so. There were other volunteer brigades operating in Ukraine that would give us the chance to contribute. He could put us in touch with them.
I was willing to be deployed anywhere in Ukraine, of course. But after the missile attack, returning to the familiar surroundings of Odesa felt right. My commanding officer linked me up with a volunteer battalion attached to the SBU. He told me they could use my language skills, and my steadiness in times of crisis.
At the SBU base, I was assigned to a group of volunteers who were tasked with supporting Ukrainian special forces operations. It wasn’t what I’d expected to be doing. All of my training in Canada, and the little I’d received in Ukraine, was geared toward the infantry. I was expecting to go to the frontlines and shoot at Russians.
Maybe that kind of thinking was simplistic. By mid-March, the frontline around Mykolaiv was shifting. Ukrainian counterattacks and Moscow’s changing strategy had allowed us to push Russian forces back toward Kherson. Ukrainian forces had prevented enemy troops from crossing the Pivdennyi Buh River, sparing Odesa. After that, the frontline was less about infantry engagements than artillery and air strikes, with special forces conducting covert, pinpoint hits as the Russians retreated.
My unit’s job was to infiltrate the frontline, come in behind the Russians and set traps—IEDs and land mines—to make their withdrawal more painful. On one mission, we might be sent to get close to the enemy, disguised as civilians, and radio back their positions. On another, we might be told to disrupt a retreating column by neutralizing a key armoured vehicle so Ukrainian special forces could then go in and take out the whole group.
It was nerve-racking work. The thinking was that if we looked like civilians, the Russians wouldn’t target us. But as we knew from the scenes in Bucha and Irpin, where hundreds of bodies and mass graves have been found, many Russian soldiers have no qualms about killing civilians. During our first mission behind enemy lines—it would end up being our only one—we were shot at and nearly hit by artillery as we drove around Russian positions in a civilian car. One of the men in my unit took a piece of shrapnel in the arm from an artillery round that landed some 10 feet from our vehicle.
That was the worst period of my life. Being killed worried me less than being captured. The Russians had made it clear they didn’t consider foreign volunteers to be covered under the laws of war. I knew how they would treat me—like a mercenary, or a terrorist. I would likely disappear into their prisons forever. When I went out on that mission, I told myself: Putting a bullet in my own head is better than being caught. I know it sounds gruesome, and it wasn’t something I dwelled on. It was just a reminder of how high the stakes were before we headed out.
The scenes of devastation I witnessed were another stark reminder. I saw the bodies of civilians, left in ditches on the side of the road, some scorched black as if someone had tried to burn them.
There were forced relocations, too. On my one mission behind Russian lines near the end of March, I witnessed Russian-speaking Ukrainians in a village near Mykolaiv being forced to board military trucks heading east, either into Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine or on to Russia itself. When we told our commanders what we’d seen, they said there was little that could be done. I can’t imagine what those people must have gone through, or what they might still be enduring.
By early April, Putin’s new plan for Ukraine was obvious. He had failed to take over the entire country, so his forces were limping out of Kyiv and Kharkiv and redeploying to the east, with the goal of taking the entire Donbas region. In the south, they had retreated to the outskirts of Kherson, the first city in Ukraine they’d taken control of, and dug into defensive positions, setting up tanks and artillery in populated areas so we couldn’t shell them. Playing defence in a war takes fewer resources than going on the offensive, especially if you’re using human shields.
(Photograph by Valeria Ferraro)
Once the Russians had dug into populated areas, my commanders decided it wasn’t worth the risk for my unit to repeat our trip behind enemy lines. The new worry was that Russia would restock its forces and make a new push on Odesa, potentially using Transnistria, a Russian-controlled territory in Moldova, to launch a two-pronged ground assault on the city.
My unit was retasked with capturing Russian agents, identified by the SBU, who were operating all around the Odesa region, sending information back to Russia about Ukrainian troop deployments or weak points in our defences, anything the Russians could use to plan a new offensive. We would be given targets who we would then track down and arrest.
The work was less stressful than missions behind enemy lines: with no Russian troops in the area at the time, there was no risk of capture. But it came with its own risks. Sometimes, our targets were armed, or they would run away, forcing us to open fire on them. Once, we were assigned to pick up a suspected saboteur who was sheltering with a family. When we broke through the door to raid the apartment, everyone inside panicked, and we couldn’t be sure which of the adults was our target. We just started screaming, fingers on our triggers, for everyone to get on the ground. Fortunately, no one got shot.
My time fighting in the war had, in a way, come full circle. My first contribution was helping arrest a suspicious person taking pictures and notes on Odesa’s streets; my last missions involved chasing down and capturing spies and saboteurs.
I was a different person, though, than I had been during those early days in Odesa. You don’t see the things I’ve seen and not change in some basic ways. It was hard, much harder than I’d expected. I’d never been in a war zone, but other people who have told me this was the worst they had ever seen. The level of devastation is terrifying.
***
After a month and a half, a part of me just wanted to go home. When I had some time off and spoke to my friends back in Canada, they asked me about my experiences. I described the things I’d seen matter-of-factly, and they responded with shock. “That’s so messed up,” they said. But for me, it just felt kind of normal. I really didn’t feel any emotions about it anymore.
I realized this shouldn’t be normal—that it wasn’t good to be so numb to these experiences. I wasn’t sleeping well. I was having doubts. But I was also torn. I had become extremely close to the people I met during my time as a soldier, the men and women who sacrificed everything to defend their country. I didn’t want to abandon them.
My time off—a couple of days every week or so—was difficult. I was allowed to leave the SBU base, but after the intensity of my missions, going back to regular life in Odesa was unsettling. The rhythm of the city was returning to some kind of normal. It was early April and spring had arrived. Cafés and restaurants were open. People were still tense, but they were going about their daily routines. And yet for me, the war was never far away.
The Russian warships on the Black Sea had disappeared beyond the horizon, but we knew they were still there. Warning sirens would ring out regularly because of the threat of missile attacks. From time to time, one would land, almost randomly, hitting a street here or a building there. It was as if the Russians were reminding us that they were still out there, that we weren’t safe, that the war was not over.
By the middle of April, I desperately needed a break. I’d come to realize over my six weeks or so in the war that I didn’t want to be a soldier, though I was definitely good at it. I had volunteered so I could help my people live free from Putin’s tyranny. But I’d come to Ukraine to play soccer.
It looked almost certain that the whole season would be cancelled. Podillya’s officials had told all of its foreign players they were free to sign with other teams temporarily if they wanted to keep playing. I was the only one who had volunteered to fight, but I was considering my options. My coach at Guelph United had offered me a contract for the upcoming season. The Canadian Championship was scheduled to start in early May, with Guelph United playing the Halifax Wanderers, a Canadian Premier League team, in its first match. My coach said if I was back in Canada, I could be in the lineup.
If we won, we would be up against Toronto FC, a Major League Soccer club that includes players who will be representing Canada next fall at the World Cup in Qatar. Just to be on the pitch playing against them would be a highlight of my career.
I felt guilty for wanting this opportunity as much as I did. The war was still raging in Ukraine’s east. By the third week of April, the Russians had launched a fresh offensive to take the entire Donbas region. But I decided to complete one last set of missions and then return to Canada. My commanders told me the Russians were also preparing for another assault on Mykolaiv from Kherson, while building up troops in Transnistria. Then, on April 22, a Russian general admitted on state television what most people suspected: Russia intended to take all of southern Ukraine, including Odesa, cutting off Ukrainians from the Black Sea.
When I got that news, I was in a car on my way to the Moldovan capital, Chisinau, where I was booked to fly to Toronto. I had long feared that Russia planned to invade my hometown, but the confirmation felt like a punch in the gut. I pictured all those old ladies when I’d boarded the train to Yavoriv back in early March, fixing me with their looks of disgust as I left the country.
I knew, though, that I was not running away. In the weeks that had passed since then, I’d survived missiles and mortars; I’d gone undercover and infiltrated the frontlines of one of the world’s most powerful armies. I’d witnessed death on a scale no one should ever have to see. I’d fought for my people.
It was time to go back to my other home, where there was no war, and where I could be the person I dream of being. It was the right choice, if a painful one. As I approached the border with Moldova, I thought of my beautiful Odesa—miraculously intact despite the war—and wondered if I had set eyes on it for the last time. The Russian war machine was coming. Wherever it went, death and destruction would follow.
This article appears in print in the June 2022 issue of Maclean’s magazine with the headline, “A soldier’s story.” Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here, or buy the issue online here.
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
CAQ and Québec Solidaire MNAs voted Tuesday to pass Bill 96, language legislation that “delves into almost all aspects of the daily lives of Quebecers: from who has access to English CEGEPs, the language of the workplace and even the name of an electoral riding,” the Gazettereports. The bill was opposed by the Liberals and by the Parti Quebecois, who held back on announcing how they would vote until the last minute. The vote was 78 for, 29 opposed.
Concerned: Justin Trudeau has concerns about the bill but doesn’t say what he will do about it, the Globereports.
Andrew Coyne had a good column about the bill in Friday’s Globe, pointing out questionable measures.
A doctor, for example, would not be permitted, even in the privacy of her own office, to speak with her patient in English – or Mandarin, or any other language – even if that were the preferred language of both parties. The only exceptions: members of the province’s “historic” English-speaking minority, as defined under existing law – that is, those who attended English school in Canada; and immigrants of less than six months’ residency.
Recalling centaur: In la Presse on Tuesday, Yves Boisvertwrites aboutLucien Bouchard’s 1996 “centaur speech,” in which he sketched out a view of Quebec society that reassured its anglo minority, and wonders when François Legault will deliver a similar message. (translation)
On the other hand: In le Journal de Montréal, Mathieu Bock-Côtélaments that Legault didn’t have the courage to go farther, and expresses withering disdain for those with misgivings about the law (translation).
The insane reaction of the Anglophone community to Bill 96 shows us how many of them in its ranks no longer even want to pretend to respect the principle of French Quebec. They equate this with ethnolinguistic supremacy. It’s odious. The reaction of part of the French-speaking elite to the 96 project also shows us that it has the intellectual consistency of dead wood.
Airport delays: A group representing global airlines called Tuesday for the Canadian government to drop the remaining COVID-19 travel rules to reduce the delays people face at airports, the Globereports. A shortage of the staff has led to delays that leave passengers fuming.
Passengers to blame? In the Post, Kelly McParlandconsiders the situation and concludes that Omar Alghabra was wrong to blame passengers.
The backlog at Pearson International Airport grew so pronounced that some weary passengers were forced to bed down for the night wherever they could find space. Others spent hours in search of bags that somehow wandered to spots all over the conveyor system. The Greater Toronto Airport Authority, which runs the airport, put much of the responsibility on the airlines and the federal government. The airlines claimed it was Ottawa’s fault, while Ottawa — well, we already know what Ottawa thinks, thanks to Minister Alghabra.
Fox threat: A task force of intelligence experts says Canada will have to grapple with the growing influence of anti-democratic forces in the United States — including the threat posed by Fox News, CBC reports: “The United States is and will remain our closest ally, but it could also become a source of threat and instability.”
Bad finances: Canadian households are reporting a deterioration of their finances, polling by Nanos Research for Bloomberg News shows. The number of Canadians who say their finances are worse today than a year earlier has reached 41 per cent, the second-highest reading for this question in surveys going back to 2008.
Tax cut sought: Pierre Poilievre, who may be aware that people are fretting about their household budgets, is calling on the Liberals to scrap taxes on gasoline for the summer, CBC reports.
Retailers are routinely charging more than $2 a litre in markets like Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Atlantic Canada. In an effort to capitalize on discontent over these higher prices, Poilievre sent a letter to Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland Tuesday demanding that Ottawa “give people a break” by eliminating the gas tax, carbon tax and GST on gasoline sales this summer.
Looking good: In the Globe, John Ibbitsonwrites that if “suburban Ontario votes in this election based on concerns over inflation in general and gas prices in particular, the vote on June 2 could deliver a second majority government for Mr. Ford.”
Changed man: Ford should benefit from an admiring profile on the front page of the Tuesday Star, which contrasts with a recent Global report that pressed the premier on his failure to let the media know his whereabouts as the campaign nears the finish line.
Friendly contract? CPC ethics critic James Bezan is asking the federal ethics commissioner to probe what he calls a $17,000 “sweetheart” media-training contract International Trade Minister Mary Ng gave to her friend Amanda Alvaro, Global reports.
High hopes: Expectations are high for Jean Charest going into tonight’s French-language CPC leadership debate, CP reports. Of the candidates, only Charest and Pierre Poilievre are considered to be fluently bilingual.
Ammo for Ukraine: Canada is sending 20,000 rounds of artillery ammunition to Ukraine at a cost of $98 million, the Globereports. Canada is spending nearly $100 milllion to purchase the 155 mm NATO-standard ammunition from the United States. Vladimir Zelensky thanked Justin Trudeauon Twitter.
Cash to Iran: The head of Iran’s national soccer team says Canada Soccer is paying Iran’s soccer federation $400,000 to play a friendly game next month in Vancouver, CBC reports. Victims who lost loved ones on Flight PS752 have called the game a slap in the face. Eighty-five Canadians and permanent residents were killed when Iran shot down the flight.
Religious exemptions: More federal public servants got out of the government’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate for religious reasons than for medical concerns, the Starreports.
Of more than 319,000 employees, more than 3,000 applied for exemptions. That included 2,040 workers who sought religious exemptions, and 1,184 who applied to opt-out for medical reasons. Religious exemptions were granted to 540 people, while 357 workers got medical exceptions.
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Jason Kenney won the battle of Alberta on Wednesday night, but not by enough. He took 51.4 per cent of 34,298 votes in a UCP leadership review and promptly announced he would step down, the Calgary Heraldreports.
“While 51 per cent of the vote passes the constitutional threshold of majority, it clearly is not adequate support to continue on as leader,” Kenney said to a crowd gathered at Spruce Meadows in Calgary. “That is why tonight I will inform the president of the party of my intention to step down as the leader of the United Conservative Party.”
Early reviews: In the Post, Carson Jaremapaid tribute to a leader he sees as a consistent conservative. In the Calgary Sun, Rick Bell wrote that Kenney never learned to listen.
In the Herald, Don Braid predicts a lively race will soon be under way.
On your mark: There will be a struggle over whether the UCP edges more to the centre, or veers sharply to the right. Many of the MLAs who opposed Kenney prefer the latter. New MLA Brian Jean will run. Danielle Smith will likely join in, too. They’re well-known voices from the party’s past, but many members will want to move beyond the old merger struggles. Jobs Minister Doug Schweitzer’s name often comes up. So does Finance Minister Travis Toews. Other campaigns will take shape very quickly.
Fast attack: Also out Wednesday was Ed Fast, who started the day as CPC finance critic, CP reports. He said Wednesday that Pierre Poilievre’s pitch to fire the Bank of Canada governor hurts the party’s credibility on economic issues. Fast is co-chairing the leadership campaign of Poilievre rival Jean Charest. “I’m deeply troubled by suggestions by one of our leadership candidates, that that candidate would be prepared to interfere already at this stage in the independence of our central bank,” Fast said. Later, Candice Bergenannounced Fast will not be critic any longer.
United Grits: In the Globe, Lawrence Martinpoints out that while the Conservatives are divided, the Liberals are unusually united, at least for now.
Racism probe: The CPC is investigating a complaint from the Patrick Brown campaign about a racist email which expressed support for Nazism, CBC reports. Michelle Rempel Garner, co-chair of Brown’s leadership campaign, posted the text of the email Wednesday. She said the message was sent after the campaign sent en email denouncing the “white replacement” conspiracy theory. Poilievre denounced the email: “I reject all racism. If you are a racist, I don’t want your vote.” Rempel had a column in the Post on Wednesday urging Canadians to reject the racist conspiracy theory.
Deplores racism: Marco Mendocino says the racism and white supremacy behind the mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., are alive and well in Canada, As It Happensreports: ” It is a harsh reality that exists not only in the United States, but, indeed, in Canada and around the world.”
Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday that Conservative “tough on crime” policies were “really just tough on Black Canadians and Indigenous Canadians,” Global reports. The Conservatives accused the Liberals of planning to “make it allowable for criminals to get house arrest” by repealing mandatory minimum sentences.
“He’s going after law-abiding Canadians but going soft on gangsters,” said Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs before asking: “Will he scrap Bill C-5?” Trudeau said the government is repealing “failed” Conservative policies. “They claim to be tough on crime but really they’re just tough on Black Canadians and Indigenous people,” Trudeau said before being drowned out by shouts.
Watching 96: Trudeau said Wednesday his government is watching “carefully” how Quebec’s Bill 96 is playing out and defended the right of MPs to protest, CTV reports. He commented after members of the Bloc Quebecois argued it was “unacceptable” that a “large contingent” of Liberal MPs went to Montreal over the weekend to demonstrate against Bill 96, a language law that Quebec anglos say would restrict their access to services.
Gala or jail? Crown prosecutors want “Freedom convoy” organizer Tamara Lich sent back to jail, claiming she breached bail conditions by agreeing to participate in an event next month, CTV reports. At a gala on June 16, Lich is to receive the “George Jonas Freedom Award” from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. The Toronto gala will feature a keynote speech by Post columnist Rex Murphy. VIP tickets cost $500.
Ford charged: Ottawa law prof Amir Attaran has filed a private criminal prosecution against Doug Ford for breaking federal quarantine law during a March newser in which he took off his mask, the Citizenreports.
Buddies now: Susan Delacourtnotes in the Star that Ford, who once inveighed against Trudeau, is now, in campaign mode, talking about how well they work together.
Ford doesn’t talk about Trudeau all of the time while he’s on the road campaigning to keep his job as premier after June 2. But after that election-eve announcement for the auto industry in Windsor, the Progressive Conservative leader has dropped occasional references to how well he works with the Trudeau government. During the debate in North Bay a week or so ago, Ford even talked about those long nightly phone calls he had during the early days of the pandemic with Chrystia Freeland, the now-deputy prime minister he called his “therapist.”
Pox in Canada? Health officials said Wednesday that the first confirmed case of monkeypox in the United States this year recently travelled to Canada, Global reports. PHAC said no cases of monkeypox have been reported to the agency as of Wednesday evening.
Ejected: Two members of the Saskatchewan legislature were ejected for unparliamentary language on Wednesday, CP reports.
Prince mobbed: Prince Charles was mobbed by well-wishers during a visit to Ottawa. Maclean’s royal watcher Patricia Treble was there, noting that the prince and the Duchess of Cornwall aim to avoid mistakes Charles’s eldest son encountered during an ill-fated tour of the Caribbean in March.
Unlike the Cambridges’s trip, which back-loaded important events, this one begins with perhaps the most sensitive issue for the host nation: the damage inflicted on Indigenous peoples by the government policies, especially the horrors of the residential school system. In his speech at the official greeting on Tuesday, Charles said: “I have greatly appreciated the opportunity to discuss with the Governor General the vital process of reconciliation in this country—not a one-off act, of course, but an ongoing commitment to healing, respect and understanding.
Apology sought: AFN national chief RoseAnne Archibald met with Charles and later told reporters the Queen must apologize for the Crown’s “ongoing failure to fulfil its treaty agreements” with Indigenous peoples, CBC reports.
Byelection coming: Liberal Sven Spengemann is leaving his Toronto-area seat to take a UN job, which will force a by-election later this year, CP reports.
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Jason Kenney won the battle of Alberta on Wednesday night, but not by enough. He took 51.4 per cent of 34,298 votes in a UCP leadership review and promptly announced he would step down, the Calgary Heraldreports.
“While 51 per cent of the vote passes the constitutional threshold of majority, it clearly is not adequate support to continue on as leader,” Kenney said to a crowd gathered at Spruce Meadows in Calgary. “That is why tonight I will inform the president of the party of my intention to step down as the leader of the United Conservative Party.”
Early reviews: In the Post, Carson Jaremapaid tribute to a leader he sees as a consistent conservative. In the Calgary Sun, Rick Bell wrote that Kenney never learned to listen.
In the Herald, Don Braid predicts a lively race will soon be under way.
On your mark: There will be a struggle over whether the UCP edges more to the centre, or veers sharply to the right. Many of the MLAs who opposed Kenney prefer the latter. New MLA Brian Jean will run. Danielle Smith will likely join in, too. They’re well-known voices from the party’s past, but many members will want to move beyond the old merger struggles. Jobs Minister Doug Schweitzer’s name often comes up. So does Finance Minister Travis Toews. Other campaigns will take shape very quickly.
Fast attack: Also out Wednesday was Ed Fast, who started the day as CPC finance critic, CP reports. He said Wednesday that Pierre Poilievre’s pitch to fire the Bank of Canada governor hurts the party’s credibility on economic issues. Fast is co-chairing the leadership campaign of Poilievre rival Jean Charest. “I’m deeply troubled by suggestions by one of our leadership candidates, that that candidate would be prepared to interfere already at this stage in the independence of our central bank,” Fast said. Later, Candice Bergenannounced Fast will not be critic any longer.
United Grits: In the Globe, Lawrence Martinpoints out that while the Conservatives are divided, the Liberals are unusually united, at least for now.
Racism probe: The CPC is investigating a complaint from the Patrick Brown campaign about a racist email which expressed support for Nazism, CBC reports. Michelle Rempel Garner, co-chair of Brown’s leadership campaign, posted the text of the email Wednesday. She said the message was sent after the campaign sent en email denouncing the “white replacement” conspiracy theory. Poilievre denounced the email: “I reject all racism. If you are a racist, I don’t want your vote.” Rempel had a column in the Post on Wednesday urging Canadians to reject the racist conspiracy theory.
Deplores racism: Marco Mendocino says the racism and white supremacy behind the mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., are alive and well in Canada, As It Happensreports: ” It is a harsh reality that exists not only in the United States, but, indeed, in Canada and around the world.”
Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday that Conservative “tough on crime” policies were “really just tough on Black Canadians and Indigenous Canadians,” Global reports. The Conservatives accused the Liberals of planning to “make it allowable for criminals to get house arrest” by repealing mandatory minimum sentences.
“He’s going after law-abiding Canadians but going soft on gangsters,” said Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs before asking: “Will he scrap Bill C-5?” Trudeau said the government is repealing “failed” Conservative policies. “They claim to be tough on crime but really they’re just tough on Black Canadians and Indigenous people,” Trudeau said before being drowned out by shouts.
Watching 96: Trudeau said Wednesday his government is watching “carefully” how Quebec’s Bill 96 is playing out and defended the right of MPs to protest, CTV reports. He commented after members of the Bloc Quebecois argued it was “unacceptable” that a “large contingent” of Liberal MPs went to Montreal over the weekend to demonstrate against Bill 96, a language law that Quebec anglos say would restrict their access to services.
Gala or jail? Crown prosecutors want “Freedom convoy” organizer Tamara Lich sent back to jail, claiming she breached bail conditions by agreeing to participate in an event next month, CTV reports. At a gala on June 16, Lich is to receive the “George Jonas Freedom Award” from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. The Toronto gala will feature a keynote speech by Post columnist Rex Murphy. VIP tickets cost $500.
Ford charged: Ottawa law prof Amir Attaran has filed a private criminal prosecution against Doug Ford for breaking federal quarantine law during a March newser in which he took off his mask, the Citizenreports.
Buddies now: Susan Delacourtnotes in the Star that Ford, who once inveighed against Trudeau, is now, in campaign mode, talking about how well they work together.
Ford doesn’t talk about Trudeau all of the time while he’s on the road campaigning to keep his job as premier after June 2. But after that election-eve announcement for the auto industry in Windsor, the Progressive Conservative leader has dropped occasional references to how well he works with the Trudeau government. During the debate in North Bay a week or so ago, Ford even talked about those long nightly phone calls he had during the early days of the pandemic with Chrystia Freeland, the now-deputy prime minister he called his “therapist.”
Pox in Canada? Health officials said Wednesday that the first confirmed case of monkeypox in the United States this year recently travelled to Canada, Global reports. PHAC said no cases of monkeypox have been reported to the agency as of Wednesday evening.
Ejected: Two members of the Saskatchewan legislature were ejected for unparliamentary language on Wednesday, CP reports.
Prince mobbed: Prince Charles was mobbed by well-wishers during a visit to Ottawa. Maclean’s royal watcher Patricia Treble was there, noting that the prince and the Duchess of Cornwall aim to avoid mistakes Charles’s eldest son encountered during an ill-fated tour of the Caribbean in March.
Unlike the Cambridges’s trip, which back-loaded important events, this one begins with perhaps the most sensitive issue for the host nation: the damage inflicted on Indigenous peoples by the government policies, especially the horrors of the residential school system. In his speech at the official greeting on Tuesday, Charles said: “I have greatly appreciated the opportunity to discuss with the Governor General the vital process of reconciliation in this country—not a one-off act, of course, but an ongoing commitment to healing, respect and understanding.
Apology sought: AFN national chief RoseAnne Archibald met with Charles and later told reporters the Queen must apologize for the Crown’s “ongoing failure to fulfil its treaty agreements” with Indigenous peoples, CBC reports.
Byelection coming: Liberal Sven Spengemann is leaving his Toronto-area seat to take a UN job, which will force a by-election later this year, CP reports.
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Pierre Poilievre denounced the “white replacement theory” behind the Buffalo mass shooting as “ugly and disgusting hate-mongering” on Monday, CBC reports, after being challenged by leadership rival Patrick Brown: “I condemn the attack in Buffalo and the ugly racist hatred that motivated it. Any and all racism is evil and must be stopped. I also denounce the so-called ‘white replacement theory’ as ugly and disgusting hate-mongering. I also condemn Pat King and his ugly remarks.” He also denounced Brown as “sleazy” for using the attack against him.
Didn’t denounce mob: In the Globe, Gary Mason writes that it’s shameful that Poilievre and other Conservatives remained silent about the nasty recent mobbing of Jagmeet Singh in Peterborough, Ont.
Talking to Peterson: Also on Monday, Poilievre told Jordan Peterson he is consulting legal scholars to find a way to keep the Emergencies Act from being abused for political purposes, the Postreports. In a 1.5-hour conversation with the world-famous former professor, Poilievre called Justin Trudeau an egomaniac, and compared him to French king Louis XIV.
Unimpressed: Former prime minister Kim Campbell thinks the CPC leadership contenders are not showing leadership on difficult issues, she told CTV: “I’m sorry, if you’re not worried about climate change, and you’re not worried about resurgent authoritarianism, and you’re not a champion of the rights of women to make the contributions they need to make in society, I’m not interested.”
Bad TV?Globe TV critic John Doylethinks the would-be leaders all gave lousy answers about TV in the leaders’ debate.
Debate held: Three Ontario opposition leaders took turns attacking Doug Ford and each other during a debate Monday night, CBC reports.
Rapid response: The Citizen has a digital round table featuring rapid reaction from savvy observers.
PCs ahead: In a poll from Abacus conducted before the debate, Doug Ford’s Tories appeared to have a comfortable lead.
Tough spot: Steven Del Duca is in a battle just to win a seat in the legislature, the Starreports.
Justice sought: Three senators released a report Monday calling for exoneration for 12 Indigenous women, who they say have endured a pattern of discrimination, inequality and violence within the criminal justice system, the Globereports.
Google gripes: Google warned Monday that proposed federal legislation would break its search engine, the Globereports.
China committee back: Opposition parties voted Monday voted to revive the high-profile special committee studying Canada’s ties with China, Global reports, over the objections of the Liberals. The committee will be tasked with studying “all aspects of the Canada-People’s Republic of China relationship including but not limited to diplomatic, consular, legal, security and economic relations.”
Statue to go: The Terry Fox statue on Parliament Hill is to be moved to make room for a new building, CP reports.
Correction: Economists are predicting that Canadian home prices will fall as much as 20 per cent this year as higher interest rates hit the real estate market, the Globe reports.
Kenney in DC: Jason Kenney says he doesn’t need overwhelming support in a leadership review because the pool of voters has been diluted by thousands of angry members bent on destruction, CP reports. Kenney spoke from Washington, where he is to testify before a Senate committee to discuss the North American energy situation.
Murdered: The Taliban shot and killed an Afghan man over the weekend who was urgently seeking refugee protection from Canada, the Globereports. Canada committed to resettling 40,000 Afghan refugees but thousands are still stuck overseas because of bureaucratic red tape, advocates say.
— Stephen Maher
Editor’s note: The newsletter will take a one-day break tomorrow.
Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign up to get it delivered straight to your inbox in the morning.
Pierre Poilievre denounced the “white replacement theory” behind the Buffalo mass shooting as “ugly and disgusting hate-mongering” on Monday, CBC reports, after being challenged by leadership rival Patrick Brown: “I condemn the attack in Buffalo and the ugly racist hatred that motivated it. Any and all racism is evil and must be stopped. I also denounce the so-called ‘white replacement theory’ as ugly and disgusting hate-mongering. I also condemn Pat King and his ugly remarks.” He also denounced Brown as “sleazy” for using the attack against him.
Didn’t denounce mob: In the Globe, Gary Mason writes that it’s shameful that Poilievre and other Conservatives remained silent about the nasty recent mobbing of Jagmeet Singh in Peterborough, Ont.
Talking to Peterson: Also on Monday, Poilievre told Jordan Peterson he is consulting legal scholars to find a way to keep the Emergencies Act from being abused for political purposes, the Postreports. In a 1.5-hour conversation with the world-famous former professor, Poilievre called Justin Trudeau an egomaniac, and compared him to French king Louis XIV.
Unimpressed: Former prime minister Kim Campbell thinks the CPC leadership contenders are not showing leadership on difficult issues, she told CTV: “I’m sorry, if you’re not worried about climate change, and you’re not worried about resurgent authoritarianism, and you’re not a champion of the rights of women to make the contributions they need to make in society, I’m not interested.”
Bad TV?Globe TV critic John Doylethinks the would-be leaders all gave lousy answers about TV in the leaders’ debate.
Debate held: Three Ontario opposition leaders took turns attacking Doug Ford and each other during a debate Monday night, CBC reports.
Rapid response: The Citizen has a digital round table featuring rapid reaction from savvy observers.
PCs ahead: In a poll from Abacus conducted before the debate, Doug Ford’s Tories appeared to have a comfortable lead.
Tough spot: Steven Del Duca is in a battle just to win a seat in the legislature, the Starreports.
Justice sought: Three senators released a report Monday calling for exoneration for 12 Indigenous women, who they say have endured a pattern of discrimination, inequality and violence within the criminal justice system, the Globereports.
Google gripes: Google warned Monday that proposed federal legislation would break its search engine, the Globereports.
China committee back: Opposition parties voted Monday voted to revive the high-profile special committee studying Canada’s ties with China, Global reports, over the objections of the Liberals. The committee will be tasked with studying “all aspects of the Canada-People’s Republic of China relationship including but not limited to diplomatic, consular, legal, security and economic relations.”
Statue to go: The Terry Fox statue on Parliament Hill is to be moved to make room for a new building, CP reports.
Correction: Economists are predicting that Canadian home prices will fall as much as 20 per cent this year as higher interest rates hit the real estate market, the Globe reports.
Kenney in DC: Jason Kenney says he doesn’t need overwhelming support in a leadership review because the pool of voters has been diluted by thousands of angry members bent on destruction, CP reports. Kenney spoke from Washington, where he is to testify before a Senate committee to discuss the North American energy situation.
Murdered: The Taliban shot and killed an Afghan man over the weekend who was urgently seeking refugee protection from Canada, the Globereports. Canada committed to resettling 40,000 Afghan refugees but thousands are still stuck overseas because of bureaucratic red tape, advocates say.
— Stephen Maher
Editor’s note: The newsletter will take a one-day break tomorrow.