“Ukraine – Russia”

Immigration Minister Sean Fraser announced Thursday the federal government has created two new pathways for Ukrainians fleeing their war-torn country to come to Canada — part of a plan to accept an “unlimited number” of people who want to leave.

To start, Fraser said his department has created a new visa category that will allow a limitless number of Ukrainians to come to Canada to live, work or study here for up to two years.

People accepted under the Canada Ukraine Authorization For Emergency Travel program will have an open work or study permit and employers will be free to hire as many Ukrainians as they want.

Day by day, Kyiv grows more tense.

Checkpoints, barricades, and roadblocks radiate from the imposing streets in the city centre to the motorways on the outskirts. Spiky metal tank traps – called hedgehogs – have mushroomed at strategic locations. Troops are more alert, checking every car. Some still smile and say “welcome”, but many look distracted, already focusing on the battle to come.

It feels like Ukrainian forces in the capital are poised and ready to fight. This ancient city – with its elegant facades and onion domed churches – is now on a war footing.

This is terra incognita for economic policy. No country has ever faced this kind of global freeze-out.

The war in Ukraine is being fought on two battlefields. The first battlefield is geographic. It is the land Russia is tearing up with tank treads and pounding with missiles.

The second battlefield is made up not of physical particles, but rather of relationships—contracts and promises between nations, banks, companies, and individuals. This is the economic arena.

OTTAWA — Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland is warning Canadians against fighting for Russia in Ukraine, saying anyone who does so could face severe consequences.

Freeland issued the warning during a news conference in Ottawa today, where she announced further sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

The deputy prime minister said Canada believes Russia’s attack is illegal, implying anyone fighting for the Russian side could be breaking international law.

The country has enlisted thousands of cybersecurity professionals in the war effort against Russia.

VLADIMIR PUTIN’S ATTACK on Ukraine has been met with fierce resistance throughout the country’s towns and cities. As Russian forces have moved closer to Kyiv, lawyers, students, and actors have taken up arms to defend their country from invasion. They are not the only ones: Volunteers have also flocked to join a Ukrainian volunteer “IT Army” that’s fighting back online.

At around 9 pm local time on February 26, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and minister for digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced the creation of the volunteer cyber army. “We have a lot of talented Ukrainians in the digital sphere: developers, cyber specialists, designers, copywriters, marketers,” he said in a post on his official Telegram channel. “We continue to fight on the cyber front.”

Russia and Ukraine have agreed on the need to set up humanitarian corridors and a possible ceasefire around them for fleeing civilians, both sides said after talks on Thursday, in their first sign of progress on any issue since the invasion.

But while Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said the talks had made “substantial progress,” Russian invasion forces surrounded and bombarded Ukrainian cities as the conflict entered its second week.

#Ukraine: The Territorial Defense volunteers captured a modern Russian T-80BVM, along with one supply truck seized and one more destroyed. pic.twitter.com/bN5OVVXzTE

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 3, 2022

Sergei Lavrov has repeated his warning that World War Three would be nuclear while at the same time accusing the West of fixating on his dire threats of destruction.

The foreign minister also compared the US to Nazi Germany in his latest rant after Russian forces seized the Black Sea regional capital of Kherson in Ukraine, its first major city after a week of fighting.

Vladimir Putin’s lackey said today: ‘It is clear that World War Three can only be nuclear.

#Ukraine 🇺🇦: people in #Starobilsk (N #Luhansk) are blocking the road to prevent Russian invasion forces from advancing any further. pic.twitter.com/Q5OpKRmfeC

— Thomas van Linge (@ThomasVLinge) March 2, 2022

Learn the phrase, for historians will be referencing it for generations to come.

Linguists remind us that Paskudnyak is “THE most potent and offensive insult known to man. It has so much connotation that cannot be truly defined that the closest you can come to its meaning is ‘horrible person’…. Use with caution.”

And so with cluster bombs and shattered hospitals, schools, and apartments, Putin has earned the title of Paskudnyak, a description that will accompany him as long as long as there are historians to record the deeds of despots, dictators, and war criminals, who would crush democracy and freedom.

NATO governments have pledged to crack down on the dealings of Russian oligarchs and companies, but some controversial figures with significant investment ties to Western Canada have so far evaded sanctions from the Canadian government.

Every weekend for most of her youth, while other children were out playing, Natalia Toroshenko attended Ukrainian school, studying the country’s geography, language, its history and national heroes.

“Ukraine, and being Ukrainian, is a deep part of me,” she said. “I wasn’t born there, but it’s my ancestral homeland.”

Toroshenko grew up in Montreal, thousands of kilometres away from the country her father had left to flee famine and conflict. But, she like many other Ukrainian Canadians, has maintained strong connections to the country – and watched horrified as family and friends are trapped in war.

It’s not often that tax can lift people’s spirits but Ukrainian authorities may have done just that, assuring citizens that any Russian military equipment they seize won’t need to be declared for tax purposes.

“Have you captured a Russian tank or armoured personnel carrier and are worried about how to declare it? Keep calm and continue to defend the motherland!” Ukraine’s National Agency for the Protection against Corruption (NAPC) said, according to the Ukraine arm of the Interfax news service.

The agency went on to explain there was “no need to declare the captured Russian tanks and other equipment, because the cost of this … does not exceed 100 living wages (UAH248,100) ($8,298).”

#Ukraine: Locals in #Mykolaiv Oblast found 4 abandoned 2K22M/M1 Tunguska AA vehicles. And burned them down. pic.twitter.com/U3hfBEoxTS

— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 3, 2022

Despite Zelenskyy’s urgings, Canada, the U.S. and other members of NATO have repeatedly said they will not enter into a war with Putin and Russia.

That means that at the end of the day, they are prepared to sacrifice Ukraine to Russian aggression.

We all admire Zelenskyy’s bravery. His blunt refusal of an offer by the U.S. to evacuate him to safety declaring: “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride” was Churchillian in its defiance, recalling Winston Churchill’s famous war-time speech: “We shall fight on the beaches.”

Nothing like a nuclear war to stir things up.

Concern is mounting over the movements of a huge column of Russian military vehicles outside Kyiv, amid a lack of fresh information about its position and the threat it poses.

While a US defence official suggested it appeared to have “stalled”, there was also speculation that an estimated 15,000 troops attached to it may be regrouping, and potentially waiting for logistical supplies before an assault on Kyiv.

Efforts to ascertain the status of the convoy and the threat it poses have been set back by recent cloud cover over Ukraine that has prevented Maxar Technologies – which issued the first satellite images of the convoy – from releasing new pictures.

Ukrainian city of Mariupol ‘near to humanitarian catastrophe’ after bombardment

The key Ukrainian port city of Mariupol was “near to a humanitarian catastrophe” on Wednesday after more than 15 hours of continuous bombardment by Russian forces, the city’s deputy mayor told the BBC.

“The Russian army is working through all their weapons here – artillery, multiple rocket launch systems, airplanes, tactical rockets. They are trying to destroy the city,” Serhiy Orlov said.

Mr Orlov said Russian forces were several kilometres from the city on all sides and had launched strikes on key infrastructure, cutting water and power supplies to parts of the city. One densely populated residential district on the city’s left bank had been “nearly totally destroyed”, he said.