A hero will likely die, a country will likely fall, all while the West fiddles

Official portrait of President Volodymyr Zelensky, 2019.

February 2022

By the time this is published, Ukraine may have fallen to the Russians and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will likely be dead, having armed himself and vowing to stay in the capital city of Kyiv. Russia has already made it clear they will kill him, but Zelensky is prepared to fight to the death alongside his fellow Parliamentarians and Ukrainians to save his country.

Former President Petro Poroshenko returned to Ukraine from Poland on 17 January, making a similar vow to fight, despite facing charges of state treason; charges that Poroshenko says are politically motivated.

Western nations have once again, underestimated the determination of Vladimir Putin and the horrors he is prepared to commit in his quest to re-create the Soviet Union. We ignored what he was capable of doing when he invaded Crimea in 2014, and Georgia in 2008.

We ignored the warnings of Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border, convinced in own arrogance that we could convince Putin to play nice and go home. We made promises to Ukraine in 2014, when they agreed to relinquish their nuclear arms.

For years, the West has encouraged Ukraine to take a hard line on Russia, with false promises that the U.S. and NATO would stand up to Moscow and defend Ukraine if it came to it, or that Ukraine would become a NATO member and thus secure its untenable borders.

Now it’s too late.

We could have made a real effort to stop Putin by isolating Russia financially, cutting off his access to foreign funding, cease all trading, especially all the Russian oil that we buy, and bolstering the Ukrainian military as much as possible.

It’s debatable as to whether western nations, particularly NATO countries, should put soldiers on the ground in Ukraine, as it could be argued this isn’t our conflict to fight. However, many countries took the same view during the 1930s, as Hitler was rising in power, and we all know how that turned out.

I place part of the blame for this crisis on the “Climate-Crisis, Kool-Aid Drinkers” who are so obsessed with everything green, that they can’t see the reality that we will still need oil for decades to come. They have attacked and scared off billions of dollars in investments in oil sands energy projects and pipelines that could transport our oil and natural gas resources to world markets.

Canada has enough oil and natural gas to be energy self-sufficient, along with supplying environmentally responsible and ethically-produced energy to much of the world. There is no reason that Canada and other western nations like America, the United Kingdom and Germany, should be buying natural gas and oil from Russia and OPEC nations. Canada alone is the fourth-largest oil and natural gas producer in the world.

Canada could use the revenues generated from our energy industry to fund investments in green and cleaner fossil-fuel technologies, in addition to our much beloved social programs.

President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who only became president in 2019, is a true hero, as are the people of Ukraine, who are valiantly fighting against the Russians. We can only hope that Ukraine can be free again someday.

Maybe we should all plant sunflowers, the national flower of Ukraine, in memory of the Ukrainian dead.