Murray Wood: We should defend Ukraine because it is the right thing to do.
Four years of Russian barbarism after the invasion of Ukraine seem to have left some Canadians less concerned about that...
OTTAWA — Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said she told her Ukrainian counterpart Monday that decisions about Ukraine’s sovereignty must be made by Kyiv itself.
Anand’s conversation with Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, followed Canada’s recent commitment of an additional $2.5 billion in economic assistance to the country as it fights Russia’s invasion.
Anand said in a social media post that, as always, “Minister Sybiha and I will continue to be in touch.”
Ukraine has been trying to fend off Russia since 2014, when Moscow illegally annexed Crimea and Russian-backed separatists took up arms in the Donbas, a vital industrial region in eastern Ukraine. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
In his own social media post Monday, Sybiha said he briefed Anand on efforts to secure a peace agreement with Moscow — which included a high-level weekend meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump in Florida.
“We focused on future security guarantees for Ukraine and ways to strengthen our co-operation within the peace efforts,” Sybiha wrote.
“I expressed my appreciation for keeping Ukraine high on the G7 agenda during Canada’s presidency in 2025.”
Zelenskyy met with Prime Minister Mark Carney on Saturday in Nova Scotia before heading to Florida.
Trump hosted Zelenskyy at his Mar-a-Lago resort Sunday and insisted that Ukraine and Russia are “closer than ever before” to a peace settlement.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said publicly he wants all four key regions that have been captured by his forces, as well as the Crimean Peninsula, to be recognized as Russian territory. He also has insisted that Ukraine withdraw from some areas in eastern Ukraine that Moscow’s forces haven’t captured.
Kyiv has rejected all those demands.
After meeting with Zelenskyy, Trump declared that “Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed.”
Zelenskyy said Monday that Washington is offering Ukraine security guarantees for a period of 15 years as part of a proposed peace plan.
The Ukrainian leader said he would prefer an American security commitment of up to 50 years to deter Russia from further attempts to seize its neighbour’s land by force.
Negotiators are still searching for breakthroughs on key issues — including the question of which country’s forces must withdraw from where in Ukraine and the fate of Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
“Without security guarantees, realistically, this war will not end,” Zelenskyy told reporters in voice messages responding to questions sent via a WhatsApp chat.
Details of the proposed security guarantees have not been made public — Zelenskyy said Monday they would address how a peace deal would be monitored and the “presence” of partners. He didn’t elaborate, but Russia has said it won’t accept the deployment of troops from NATO countries in Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Kyiv’s allies will meet in Paris in early January to “finalize each country’s concrete contributions” to the security guarantees.
Wesley Wark, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, said there is little to indicate what a U.S. security guarantee would actually look like.
“The complication is, really, I think framed in terms of Donald Trump’s own thinking about Russia,” Wark said in an interview.
“I don’t think he has ever accused the Russians of doing anything wrong in terms of actually invading Ukraine, and he continues to entertain what I call magical thinking about Vladimir Putin’s own outlook.”
Trump’s claim that Putin wants Ukraine to succeed is “the most ridiculous, absurd thing I’ve ever, ever heard,” Wark said.
“And unless Trump can be moved from his view of Putin and of what Russia is up to in Ukraine, I think the prospects for any genuine peace deal in Ukraine are very, very dim, no matter what people say about how close they are and so on.”
Wark said it’s going to be up to Ukraine’s partners, including Canada, to figure out whether there are points of leverage with the Trump administration that could move the president’s thinking.
“And by points of leverage, I mean, are there voices that Trump would listen to that might be persuaded to take a different kind of view of what Vladimir Putin is really up to?” he said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 29, 2025.
— With files from The Associated Press
Jim Bronskill, The Canadian Press
