OTTAWA – At the conclusion of his first official visit to Ukraine as Canada’s foreign affairs minister, François-Philippe Champagne told reporters back home that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is assisting Ukrainian police in their criminal investigation of the Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) plane that Iran said its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps accidentally shot down on January 8.
“We always said from the beginning that we want to bring closure, accountability, transparency and justice – and this is the justice part,” said Mr. Champagne in a March 6 teleconference from Lviv. “We want to do everything we can to support [Ukraine] because obviously this was a Ukrainian airline flight, so we’re supporting Ukraine in their criminal investigation of those that would be responsible.”
He said that he and Ukraine’s new foreign affairs minister, Dmytro Kuleba (who was appointed on March 4) agreed to “continue to push” UIA to provide compensation to the families of the victims of the ill-fated Flight PS752.
“From day one, I said that I would stand up for [the] families; that I would stand up for accountability and stand up for compensation, and that’s part of this effort to make sure that I’ll always push for things to happen faster,” said the Canadian foreign minister, who had hoped to meet in Ukraine with UIA President Yevhenii Dykhne but said that he expected to soon speak to the airline executive.
Mr. Champagne, who also discussed the Ukraine International Airlines file in his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on March 4, said that it took between one to two years before compensation was paid to families of the victims of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in which 298 passengers and crew perished after a Russian surface-to-air missile shot the plane down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Three Russians, including Igor Girkin, who served as defense minister in the self-declared Donetsk people’s republic in Ukraine, and a Ukrainian, Leonid Kharchenko, who held a senior position in a pro-Russian militia in eastern Ukraine in 2014 – all fugitives – were charged with murder after a Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), involving judicial authorities from four countries that include Ukraine, issued warrants for their arrest last year. Their trial began in the Netherlands on March 9.
Presidential Office of Ukraine
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne.
On compensation for the downing of PS752, the Canadian foreign minister – a lawyer by training – said that UIA’s insurer is responsible for paying the families and that the Canadian government “is not a party to that.”
He explained that his role is “to make sure that everyone is focused on that so that it happens as quickly as possible,” including providing advance payment to Flight PS752 victims’ families.
In January, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government would provide families with $25,000 (about $18,000 U.S.) to cover the cost of funerals and travel.
Of the 176 passengers and crew killed in the crash, 55 were Canadian citizens and 30 were permanent residents of Canada. Their families qualified to receive that financial assistance from the Canadian government, which as Prime Minister Trudeau stressed at a January 17 news conference in Ottawa, is in addition to the expectation that Iran will “compensate these families.”
During his call from Kyiv, Minister Champagne explained that UIA’s compensation is “statutory” under the Montreal and Warsaw conventions that provide compensation for the victims of air disasters.
Andriy Shevchenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada, told The Canadian Press that the “carrier is committed to all the international rules and applications that apply to such situations.” He said that if there is anything the Ukrainian government “can do on this, it will be, of course, done.”
Mr. Shevchenko added that UIA also expects compensation from Iran, since it lost nine crew members on Flight PS752.
In a statement sent to The Ukrainian Weekly, the airline said: “In all of our operations and activities, the airline must comply with international regulations. Therefore, we can’t comment on any issues related to compensation until all legal procedures surrounding the incidents on PS752 is completed. All parties will be indemnified according to applicable legislation. However, as before, we declare no fault in the actions of the airline.”
At a March 4 news conference with Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko (soon afterwards the foreign-affairs portfolio was handed to Mr. Kuleba), Mr. Champagne called on Iran to provide access to the black box “without any further delay” and, as he said, “to allow for transparency so that justice can be carried out.”
While Mr. Champagne was in Ukraine on March 4-6, he also participated in a conference call with foreign ministers from the member states of the International Coordination and Response Group, which includes Canada, Ukraine, Afghanistan, the United Kingdom and Sweden, all of whom lost citizens in the plane crash.
“Should Iran not abide by its commitments under the Convention on International Civil Aviation,” the ministers “discussed in detail the options available to them… to have the flight recorders downloaded and analyzed in a country with the capacity to do so, without delay,” according to a readout following their meeting.
Minister Champagne told reporters in the March 6 teleconference that the black box would be transferred to “a location in Europe” and said that an Iranian delegation was planning to visit Kyiv.
While in Ukraine, the foreign minister announced more than $2 million (about $1.5 million U.S.) in Canadian funding over three years to help strengthen the capacity of the National Police of Ukraine in planning, implementing, monitoring and reviewing reform processes, according to Global Affairs Canada.
Mr. Champagne also visited the 200 Canadian Armed Forces deployed there with Operation UNIFIER at the International Peacekeeping and Security Center in Yavoriv, Ukraine. That Canadian security-force training initiative, which was launched in September 2015, is scheduled to end in March 2022.
But the Official Opposition Conservatives back home in Canada hoped the foreign minister would have done more to provide Ukraine with military support.
In a statement released on March 4, Deputy Conservative Leader Leona Alleslev, a former Liberal Member of Parliament who also serves as her party’s shadow minister for foreign affairs, and James Bezan, the shadow minister for national defense, repeated their call to Prime Minister Trudeau’s Liberal government to provide lethal defensive weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
They said that despite the fact that about $10 million ($7.4 million U.S.) worth of arms, originally allocated to Kurdish Peshmerga fighters against the Islamic State in northern Iraq, as The Ukrainian Weekly has previously reported, “have been sitting in warehouses unused for the past three years, the Liberals have ignored repeated requests from Ukraine for additional military support.”
The Conservatives said that “Trudeau’s refusal to increase support to Ukraine in their war against Russian aggression is just another example of the prime minister’s weak leadership on the international stage.”
In an interview, Mr. Bezan, a Manitoba MP of Ukrainian descent, said the Canadian government’s refusal to donate military equipment to Ukraine is “unconscionable” and highlighted that the last time Canada gave Ukraine military equipment was under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, when Mr. Bezan served as parliamentary secretary to then-Defense Minister Rob Nicholson in 2015.
However, the equipment was non-lethal and consisted of military gear, including tactical communications systems, explosive ordinance disposal equipment, tactical medical kits and night-vision goggles.
“All the Liberals have done at best is to maintain operations and support for Ukraine at the same tempo and levels that have previously been done by the Harper government,” said Mr. Bezan, who added that the Trudeau government should also reinstate the supply of images from Canada’s Radarsat-2 satellite that the Conservatives began in 2015 but which the Liberals terminated the following year.
“Ukraine still needs the images for those eyes on the ground to seek out what personnel and materiel are coming across the border into the Donbas region,” he explained.
“And it’s more than just giving them equipment. It’s about sending a message to Putin and his proxies that the West stands shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine, and that by making Ukraine stronger, they are going to not only protect Ukraine’s sovereignty against this Russian-influenced invasion, but they are also protecting democracy around the world by standing up to this despotic regime under [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”
Mr. Bezan added that the Ukrainian government also needs support to rebuild the country’s navy.
When asked whether the issue of arms was raised in his meetings during his visit to Ukraine, Mr. Champagne referred during his callback with reporters to Canada that Ukraine was added (in December 2017) to the Automatic Firearms Country Control List that enables Canadian companies and individuals to apply for a permit to export certain restricted firearms, weapons and devices to Ukraine.
The issue of the Canadian government equipping Ukraine with arms directly is “something we’re always prepared to look at as the situation warrants,” the foreign affairs minister told The Ukrainian Weekly.
“But for now, the core of our mission has been training – helping the Ukrainian forces to strengthen their capacity, strengthen the techniques and expertise they have – complement what they have been doing so that they can be more NATO-operable, and also have the level of professionalism that will help them.”
As for the arms, in storage in Montreal and Jordan, according to Mr. Bezan, Minister Champagne declined to comment, but said that after meeting with President Zelenskyy and two Ukrainian foreign affairs ministers over 24 hours, as well as Col.-Gen. Ruslan Khomchak, chief of the general staff of the Armed Forces, and other senior Ukrainian military officials, they “reasserted their appreciation for the Canadian presence here, the Canadian contribution when it comes to military cooperation.”
“But as always, we’re willing to discuss and assess the type of assistance we can provide. Because one thing that is clear to us is that Ukraine is on the frontline of democracy – and I can assure you that everyone I talked to in Ukraine not only remarked, but appreciated, that Canada’s been steadfast in speaking and spending for Ukraine when it comes to territorial integrity and sovereignty, and we will continue to do that,” Mr. Champagne underscored.