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Canada has shuttered its embassy in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and relocated its diplomatic staff to a temporary office in the western part of the country amid fears that an invasion by Russia is imminent.
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly announced the embassy closure on Saturday, shortly after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sought to reassure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Canada stands with his country.
“Given the continued deterioration of the security situation caused by the build up of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border, (the government is establishing) a temporary office in Lviv and temporarily suspending operations at our embassy in Kyiv,” Joly said
Lviv is home to a Ukrainian military base that has served as the main hub for Canada’s 200-soldier training mission in the former Soviet country. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the temporary diplomatic office was being located on that base.
The temporary office will continue to provide services to Canadians in Ukraine by appointment only, Joly said, though she warned that Ottawa’s ability to offer consular assistance to those in trouble “could become increasingly limited.”
In a sign that American officials are getting ready for a worst-case scenario, the U.S. also announced plans to evacuate most of its staff from the embassy in the Ukrainian capital, and Britain joined other European nations in urging its citizens to leave Ukraine.
Meanwhile, a summary of Trudeau’s conversation with Zelenskyy provided by the Prime Minister’s Office indicated the Canadian leader had once again committed to imposing economic sanctions on Russia in response to an invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has mobilized 100,000 troops on its border with Ukraine and is demanding a series of concessions from the NATO military alliance, which includes Canada.
While Russia has denied wanting a war, diplomatic talks between Moscow and the West have failed to resolve the standoff and NATO leaders have started warning of a conflict in Ukraine.
The White House said Saturday that U.S. President Joe Biden told Russia’s Vladimir Putin that the West was committed to a diplomatic resolution to the crisis, but was also “equally prepared for other scenarios.”
Biden also said the United States and its allies would respond “decisively and impose swift and severe costs” if the Kremlin attacked its neighbor, according to the White House.
It offered no suggestion that the hourlong call diminished the threat of an imminent war in Europe.
The two presidents spoke a day after Biden's national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, warned that U.S. intelligence shows a Russian invasion could begin within days and before the Winter Olympics in Beijing end on Feb. 20.
The conversation between Biden and Putin came at a critical moment for what has become the biggest security crisis between Russia and the West since the Cold War.
While the U.S. and its allies have no plans to send troops to Ukraine to fight Russia, an invasion and resulting sanctions could reverberate far beyond the former Soviet republic, affecting energy supplies, global markets and the power balance in Europe.
Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s top foreign policy aide, said that while tensions have been escalating for months, in recent days "the situation has simply been brought to the point of absurdity.”
He said Biden mentioned the possible sanctions that could be imposed on Russia, but “this issue was not the focus during a fairly long conversation with the Russian leader.”
Before talking to Biden, Putin had a telephone call with French President Emmanuel Macron, who met him in Moscow earlier in the week to try to resolve the crisis. A Kremlin summary of the call suggested little progress was made toward cooling the tensions.
Putin complained in the call that the United States and NATO have not responded satisfactorily to Russian demands that Ukraine be prohibited from joining the military alliance and that NATO pull back forces from Eastern Europe.
The timing of any possible Russian military action remained a key question.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he told his Russian counterpart Saturday that “further Russian aggression would be met with a resolute, massive and united trans-Atlantic response.”
Meanwhile, Zelenskyy tried to project calm as he observed military exercises Saturday near Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
"We are not afraid, we're without panic, all is under control,” he said.
But Ukrainian armed forces chief commander Lt. Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny and Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov issued a more defiant joint statement.
“We are ready to meet the enemy, and not with flowers, but with Stingers, Javelins and NLAWs” — anti-tank and -aircraft weapons, they said. “Welcome to hell!”
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoigu, also held telephone discussions on Saturday.
In addition to the 100,000 ground troops that U.S. officials say Russia has assembled along Ukraine’s eastern and southern borders, the Russians have deployed missile, air, naval and special operations forces, as well as supplies to sustain a war.
Russia is demanding that the West keep former Soviet countries out of NATO. It also wants NATO to refrain from deploying weapons near its border and to roll back alliance forces from Eastern Europe — demands flatly rejected by the West.
Russia and Ukraine have been locked in a bitter conflict since 2014, when Ukraine’s Kremlin-friendly leader was driven from office by a popular uprising.
Moscow responded by annexing the Crimean Peninsula and then backing a separatist insurgency in eastern Ukraine, where fighting has killed over 14,000 people.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 12, 2022.
— with files from The Associated Press.
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