OTTAWA – The Canadian government’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats in late March was partly based on a 2017 online smear campaign against Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland in which allegations were made that her late maternal grandfather was a Nazi collaborator, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Following an April 4 meeting in Ottawa with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister Trudeau was asked to elaborate on his government’s decision to expel the Russian diplomats, and recalled “efforts by Russian propagandists to discredit our minister of foreign affairs through social media and by sharing scurrilous stories about her.”
Earlier, he said that Canada had ejected the four diplomats in response to “Russia’s illegitimate attacks in Salisbury in the United Kingdom” against former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. “The actions by Russia in chemical warfare or chemical weapons against civilians of another country are absolutely unacceptable,” Mr. Trudeau explained.
On March 26, following the Skripal incident, Global Affairs Canada – the department Minister Freeland heads – announced that Canada was expelling four members of Russia’s diplomatic staff at the Russian Embassy in Ottawa and the Russian Consulate General in Montreal.
“The four have been identified as intelligence officers or individuals who have used their diplomatic status to undermine Canada’s security or interfere in our democracy,” the statement read.
One of the diplomats sent back to Russia was the Embassy’s 32-year-old spokesman, Kirill Kalinin, who was revealed to have sent photos and links to stories about Ms. Freeland’s Ukrainian-born grandfather, Michael Chomiak, to Canadian news outlets.
“Expelling someone for voicing an alternative-opinion or giving a different analysis of a situation is very un-Canadian,” Mr. Kalinin recently told the Ottawa Citizen in an exclusive interview. He reportedly left Canada on April 5.
The Globe and Mail, a national Canadian daily newspaper, recently reported that three of the four Russian intelligence operatives removed from Canada were “conducting cyberactivities out of the Montreal Consulate aimed at discrediting the World Anti-Doping Agency and spreading disinformation about Canada and its closest allies.”
Mr. Kalinin, reported the Globe, sent Canadian reporters material “circulated by Fancy Bear, a Russian hacking group believed to have links to Russia’s military-intelligence unit, GRU,” and which, citing past reporting by the Associated Press, “had used phishing e-mails – designed to trick targets into allowing access to their computers – to attack Russian opposition leaders, Ukrainian politicians, U.S. intelligence figures, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, John Podesta, and more than 130 other Democrats.”
In March 2017, The Ukrainian Weekly reported that a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery was contacted by a Russian diplomat in Ottawa who was “pushing the narrative” that Mr. Chomiak, who came to Canada in 1948, was not just the chief editor of the Krakow-based, Ukrainian-language, Krakivski Visti (Krakow News), but that he was also “working with the Nazis,” who controlled the newspaper.
Justin Ling, who was VICE News Canada’s parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa at the time and who has since acknowledged to The Ukrainian Weekly that Mr. Kalinin was the source of the information, chose not to publish the story last year since he viewed it as “neither publicly relevant nor publicly important,” and because “it was a story being shopped by the Russians.”
When contacted by this newspaper at the time, Mr. Kalinin said in an email that “we do not comment on our private contacts with representatives of the media.”
Following his April 4 meeting with NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg, Prime Minister Trudeau told reporters that “there are multiple ways in which Russia uses cyber, social media [and] propaganda to sway public opinion, to try and push a pro-Russia narrative.”
The prime minister noted that the 450 Canadian troops, playing a lead in NATO’s multinational battlegroup in Latvia, “are currently experiencing a wave of interference and propaganda by Russia.”
The Canadian military personnel, who arrived in the tiny Baltic country in June 2017, were targeted by an online Russian-language disinformation campaign that, in part, falsely portrayed the soldiers as living in luxury apartments paid for by the Latvian government.
Secretary-General Stoltenberg praised Canada for its support for Ukraine, which he said “helps boost its resilience.” He also told reporters at the April 4 news conference that “Russia has underestimated NATO’s resolve.”
“As a direct response to [its] illegal annexation of Crimea, and destabilizing efforts against Ukraine, we have implemented the biggest reinforcement of a collective defense since the end of the Cold War, including deploying combat-ready battlegroups in the Baltic countries, one of them led by Canada [in Latvia],” Mr. Stoltenberg said.
“We have more ready forces and we also have increased defense spending across Europe and Canada for the first time in many, many years. On top of that, we have suspended practical cooperation [with Russia after its 2014 annexation of Crimea] and we saw after the Salisbury incident or attack, that NATO allies and partners, in a coordinated way, decided to expel many diplomats from several NATO-allied countries,” he said.
Last month, the alliance expelled seven diplomats from the Russian mission to NATO and reduced the delegation’s size from 30 to 20 following the Salisbury attack, which prompted the expulsion of over 100 Russian diplomats from Western countries.
“We are continuing to work with our partners and look at ways where we can continue to make sure that Russia understands that this is not in their interest, not in their citizens’ interests and not in the global interest to continue with these types of behaviors,” Prime Minister Trudeau said.
“We’ve recently passed Magnitsky legislation that will allow us to further target particular actors with sanctions. We will continue to reflect on the impact, on the efficiency of sanctions and are always open to more discussions on what next we can do or what we need to do, he added.”
The prime minister explained that Canada “has always stood with the international community on imposing sanctions on various actors, in this case Russia, for a series of illegitimate and illegal actions, whether it was the annexation of Crimea, its interference in the Donbas, the actions they’ve had more recently in Salisbury in the U.K.”
“There need to be clear consequences from the international community on Russia’s continual desire to upset or cause trouble in the international order and international peace, stability and governance,” Mr. Trudeau stated.
A G-7 foreign ministers meeting will be held in Toronto on April 22 and the focus will be on Russia’s ongoing annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, the recent chemical attack against the Skripals, and “the Putin regime and the actions they are taking” that challenge “rules-based international order” Minister Freeland told an audience in Winnipeg on April 4.