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Our unofficial war: Canada’s Ukrainian diaspora is fighting Russia any way they …

The fight for Ukraine is associated, naturally enough, with the
blue-and-yellow hues of the country’s flag. But in the struggle to
hold back Russian-backed rebels in the east, a second pair of
colours is increasingly seen: the red and white of the Canadian
flag.

In the Kyiv headquarters of Army SOS, a volunteer
organization that aids Ukraine’s warriors in the field, the Maple
Leaf hangs in both the warehouse on the first floor and the drone
factory upstairs. Until recently, Canadian flags were often
included with supplies delivered by Army SOS to the front – which
likely explains why Canada’s colours have been seen flying on the
front lines outside of the rebel capital of Donetsk.

And the flag is echoed in the red Roots sweatshirt worn by Lenna
Koszarny, head of the Kyiv arm of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress,
as she presents official Canadian aid to troops. The gesture is one
illustration of how Canada’s powerful Ukrainian diaspora is not
content to leave the defence of the homeland up to Ottawa.

“Is the diaspora at war with Russia? Absolutely,” says Ms.
Koszarny, 45. “The diaspora is helping Ukraine defend itself. How
do we do that? In any which way we can.”

Welcome to Canada’s unofficial war. It’s being fought on several
fronts. In Canada, the Ukrainian lobby, led by the Ukrainian
Canadian Congress, pressures Ottawa to aid the government of
President Petro Poroshenko. But the community also raises funds for
its own improvised stream of aid, via organizations such as
Army SOS. At the individual
level, people have taken up tasks ranging from providing front-line
technical help to playing key roles in Ukraine’s propaganda
campaign.

And some – a handful – have taken up arms. While Canadians who
have gone to join the fight in Syria have had their passports
revoked, at least one Ukrainian-Canadian who joined a
pro-government militia and fought in the Lugansk region has
returned to Canada to help raise money for Army SOS. He hopes to
recruit other Canadians to the front line.

This uncharted territory is not without risks. Most obviously,
the fundraising campaign is going where no country, including
Canada, is willing to go – supplying sometimes-lethal equipment to
Ukrainian fighters, including irregulars. By circumventing official
channels in both Canada and Ukraine, activists risk playing into
the agendas of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian
militias whose patriotism is tainted by extremism.

Warehouse full of war supplies

The shelves in SOS’s Kyiv warehouse are piled high with supplies
for war: dark green uniforms, sturdy black boots, white winter
camouflage nets.

Upstairs is a workshop where a team of volunteers gathers
nightly to tinker with handmade surveillance drones that they will
take to the front and fly over territory controlled by a
Russian-backed militia.

Other volunteers gleefully show off new artillery-targeting
software that they’ve installed on tablet computers. The software
is designed by a team led by Bohdan Kupych, a Ukrainian-Canadian
resident of Kyiv.

Ukraine’s myriad volunteer battalions are famed for their
bravery, as well as for their sometimes-extreme nationalism. Along
the front line, they are often the ones engaged in the toughest
fighting against the rebel army that Kyiv and NATO say is armed by
Moscow.

Army SOS says it has raised and spent just more than $1-million
since it was founded last summer. (Ms. Koszarny estimates the
amount of overall aid raised for Ukraine by the Canadian diaspora
million over the past year at between $10-million and $15-million.)
Some of Army SOS money was used to buy parts for the homemade
drones, but more went toward 30 vehicles, mostly Humvees and pickup
trucks, that it has shipped to the front. The group says this
unusual aid is needed because of endemic corruption inside the
army.

“We don’t specifically help the army or any battalion … we
deliver to those at the front and put it directly into the hands of
the soldiers,” says Yaroslav Tropinov, a Kyiv investment banker who
co-founded Army SOS after he saw the Ukrainian army humiliated by
Russia’s annexation of Crimea last March. “We don’t consult with
army headquarters – we go around the corruption and the
stealing.”

While cash donations are pooled and used where Army SOS deems
the need to be greatest, many in the diaspora have bought goods
themselves and shipped them to the Kyiv warehouse. Mr. Tropinov
says that while the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States has
been the biggest source of clothes and toys for the families of
soldiers, its Canadian counterpart has been a bigger contributor in
terms of military supplies. Hence the flags in the warehouse.

Richard Hareychuk, a 59-year-old Toronto optometrist, says he
raises funds for Army SOS because it gets help to those actually
doing the fighting, regardless of whether it’s the regular army or
the volunteer battalions.

He says he worried that official Canadian aid wasn’t
getting to those doing the bulk of the fighting. “We heard a lot of
stories that aid would arrive, they would show it for the cameras …
and then in terms of distribution, I heard a lot of different
stories. I didn’t hear very much about stuff being driven to the
front.”

Last year, Mr. Hareychuk and other members of the
Ukrainian-Canadian community bought a $12,000 drone, which they
christened Prometheus before shipping it to Army SOS. Prometheus
flew 10 intelligence-gathering missions over the rebel-held regions
of Donetsk and Lugansk before it was shot down by the separatist
forces last month. Army SOS has also purchased parts for sniper
rifles and tripwire detonators.

Mr. Hareychuk says the effort to buy lethal weapons is just
getting started. “The initial call … was ‘we don’t have boots.’
There were guys [at the front line] in running shoes. Now that the
guys have the boots, we’ve decided to take to it to the next
level.”

Mr. Kupych, an executive at a Kyiv-based software firm who has
helped oversee the development of the targeting software
distributed by Army SOS, says the feeling in the diaspora – and
among Ukrainians in general – is that everyone should do whatever
they can. “Most of what we do is defensive,” the Toronto native
says, speaking of the volunteer movement in general. “But, as
[President] Poroshenko said, you’re not going to win a war with
winter outfits and sleeping bags.”

Beyond groups such as Army SOS are even more informal – and
direct – contacts between the Ukrainian troops at the front and the
diaspora in Canada.

Mychailo Wynnyckyj, a well-known Ukrainian-Canadian political
analyst who teaches at the Kyiv Mohyla Business School, says a
shopkeeper neighbour has joined a mechanized brigade of the regular
army. The neighbour mentioned that his unit lacked encrypted
communication equipment; Prof. Wynnyckyj notified a friend in
Montreal, who donated $5,000 to buy the gear.

“It sounds very chaotic, but when you put these initiatives
together, this is how the Ukrainian army gets 60 per cent of its
aid,” Prof. Wynnyckyj says. He adds that there were examples of
“NATO-standard” weaponry that had reached the front, though he
wasn’t sure of how they were supplied. “Bottom-up, grassroots
networks can be more powerful than the state machine, because the
state machine can be corrupted.”

The front lines

The two trucks bouncing along the potholed and frost-framed
roads of the eastern Ukraine war zone betray little hint of their
cargo. The tarp covering the back of one advertises “Everything for
Home and Garden.” The other looks even plainer – save for a bumper
sticker bearing a crude reference to Mr. Putin.

This is how Canada sends its official military aid to Ukraine.
Inside the trucks are several thousand boxes dispatched from the
Department of National Defence. They contain flame-resistant green
winter uniforms and water-resistant boots.

Sitting in front of the truck with the anti-Putin slogan is Ms.
Koszarny of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress. When the convoy
arrives at an abandoned school that’s been converted into a
military base in Konstantynivka – a former industrial town just 30
kilometres from the rebel front line – she gives the troops a
message along with the new kit.

“We pressed the Canadian government to give as much aid as they
can to Ukraine,” the mother of three says. “There are 20 million
Ukrainians outside Ukraine doing all they can to support you.”

They are, especially in Canada. Earlier this month, the
English-language Kyiv Post printed a list that ranked Prime
Minister Stephen Harper among the 10 “most influential promoters”
of Ukraine in the international community. The article noted that
“perhaps Stephen Harper would not support Ukraine that actively if
Canada did not have the world’s largest diaspora community.”

Indeed, Canada is often the Ukrainian government’s most fervent
foreign backer, going first and furthest in terms of aid for
Ukraine, including non-lethal military supplies and sanctions
against the Kremlin. (However, Britain arguably leaped deepest into
the confrontation on Tuesday when Prime Minister David Cameron
announced he was sending 75 military advisers to help train the
Ukrainian army.)

Prof. Wynnyckyj says the diaspora deserves much of the credit
for putting the Ukraine file onto the desks of politicians in
Ottawa.

“The cause is just, but it is in the limelight and the attention
of politicians because there is a large and organized
Ukrainian-Canadian community that brings it to the attention of
politicians. … The Conservatives have done an excellent job of
supporting Ukraine and the Ukrainian cause.” The tradeoff is
obvious: “There’s a lot of support for the Conservatives in the
Ukrainian community,” he says. The gratitude of a community once
seen as favouring the Liberal Party could tip key ridings in the
Conservatives’ favour, particularly in and around cities with large
Ukrainian populations, such as Toronto and Winnipeg.

Many of the most active members of the 1.2 million
Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora had parents and grandparents who fled
Ukraine either during the Stalin-engineered famine of the 1930s or
the crackdown on Ukrainian nationalism that followed the Second
World War. To them, this war is just the latest chapter in a long
struggle to free their homeland from Moscow’s grasp. Russia, to
them, is an eternal enemy.

Piotr Dutkiewicz, director of the Centre for Governance and
Public Management at Carleton University, says that Canada has
squandered the “very good” relations it had with Moscow prior to
the conflict in favour of a one-sided pro-Kyiv stance.

“We were in an almost ideal position to be good negotiators and
brokers of peace,” Prof. Dutkiewicz says. Instead, “Ukrainian
organizations in Canada are forcefully and loudly feeding the
anti-Russian foreign policy.”

The Russian embassy in Ottawa did not respond to a request for
comment.

Canada’s prominent role in the war in Ukraine is the latest
iteration of the loudly pro-Ukraine stance that Ottawa – in both
Liberal and Conservative periods – has taken since 1991, when
Canada was the first government in the world to recognize Ukraine’s
independence from the collapsing Soviet Union.
Government-to-government support in the 1990s was accompanied by
backing for the political opposition in the early 2000s, as the
country drifted back into Moscow’s orbit. The Canadian embassy in
Kyiv provided startup cash to some of the civil-society groups that
helped organize the Orange Revolution, which swept the pro-Western
government of Viktor Yushchenko to power in 2004.

While the 2010 election of the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych
effectively undid the Orange Revolution, the embassy continued to
pour money into independent media and organizations opposed to Mr.
Yanukovych’s authoritarian style. When new pro-Western protests
erupted in late 2013, Canada again joined a consortium of Western
embassies in Kyiv that provided cash and advice to the
protesters.

A Canadian embassy source told The Globe and Mail that
“millions” were dished out by Canada over several years to support
both the anti-government Hromadske television network and Internet
news portal and non-governmental organizations such as Opora and
Euromaidan SOS that played organizing roles in the uprising against
Mr. Yanukovych.

Canada’s involvement was so well-known in Kyiv that embassy
staffer Inna Tsarkova had her car torched by pro-Yanukovych thugs
during the protests.

Ms. Koszarny, a London, Ont., native who is chief executive
officer of an investment bank in Kyiv when she’s not driving around
the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, speaks glowingly of Mr.
Harper. Her job, as she sees it, is to make sure that Canada’s
official support doesn’t waver. Rattled by online rumours that some
Canadian military supplies delivered last year had been sold for
cash on local markets – and worried that Canada and other countries
would curtail their help – Ms. Koszarny and a team of volunteers
began trailing the delivery trucks into the war zone, taking
photographs and ensuring the Canadian aid goes to the units and
soldiers it’s intended for. Her recent trip to Konstantynivka took
her to four other stops near the front line.

On the day she sports the Roots sweatshirt, Ms. Koszarny is
accompanied by Volodomyr Nabir, a 22-year-old soldier from western
Ukraine who returned to Kyiv in January following a 13-day stint
fighting in the epic, but ultimately failed, effort to hold Donetsk
airport against a rebel siege. He says the Canadian aid and the
knowledge that the diaspora was behind the war effort was crucial
to the defenders’ being able to hold out as long as they did.

“Without the volunteers, we would have frozen and died a long
time ago,” Mr. Nabir says. Smiling ear-to-ear at the compliment,
Ms. Koszarny leans over and gives the young soldier a warm hug.

Other Ukrainian-Canadians have waded even more directly into the
conflict. The new strategic director of Ukraine Today – an English-language
network that aims to counteract the spin promulgated by the
Kremlin-funded RT (Russia Today) news
channel – is London, Ont., native Lada Roslycky. While Ms.
Roslycky, the author of a book on soft power, avoids the words
“propaganda war,” her reporters see themselves as being on the
media front line.

“Russia is fighting an information war,” says Ukraine Today
editor Steven Brese, a 29-year-old Edmonton native. “I hope this
channel can help shine a light on what’s happening here.”

Volunteer battalions

Some in Kyiv worry that the volunteer battalions supported by
Army SOS pose a future threat to the internal stability of Ukraine,
whenever this war ends. Half a dozen of the most battle-hardened
groups (and also Ukraine Today) are funded by Ihor Kolomoisky, a
billionaire oligarch who is increasingly at odds with President
Poroshenko about military strategy and the overall direction of the
country. Some of the battalions affiliated with Mr. Kolomoisky have
earned notoriety with their use of far-right rhetoric and
iconography.

Fears that the battalions – and thus the aid they receive from
the Canadian diaspora – could later cause trouble inside Ukraine
were heightened last week in the wake of the separatists’ capture
of the strategic transportation hub of Debaltseve. Amid conflicting
reports of how many Ukrainian soldiers and volunteers were killed
and wounded during a chaotic retreat from the town, Semen
Semechenko, the head of the Kolomoisky-funded Donbass Battalion,
said he would establish a “parallel” headquarters for 17 of the
volunteer militias, moving them further outside Kyiv’s control.

“There is a clear danger from the volunteer battalions and
Kolomoisky at some stage,” says an adviser to the Ukrainian
government who asked to remain anonymous because of the sensitivity
of the topic. “If there is a huge military defeat [suffered by the
rebels], the battalions could come to Kyiv and stage a coup.”

That view, to many in the diaspora, is alarmist. Marko Suprun, a
Winnipeg native now living in Kyiv, co-founded Patriot Defence, a volunteer
group that raises money in Ukraine and the diaspora to provide
medical kits and combat medical training to both the regular army
and the volunteer battalions. He called the debate around the
volunteer fighters “ridiculous.”

“Out there in the [war] zone, Azov, Donbass, Dnipr [three of the
most prominent volunteer battalions], and the Ukrainian forces,
they just work together,” says Mr. Suprun, who in the past has
worked as a translator for The Globe and Mail. It’s the Russian
side, he says, that’s flooding the war zone with mercenaries from
all over the former Soviet Union.

And the threat posed by Mr. Kolomoisky’s battalions? “A
lot of people are saying he’s getting too powerful, etc., etc. But
for the time being, a lot of people are happy he’s there,” Prof.
Wynnyckyj says. “Would I like these people [fighters in the
right-wing battalions] to be my neighbour? Probably not. But when
you’re fighting a war, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

The Globe and Mail knows of at least two Canadians who played
front-line roles fighting in the Kolomoisky-sponsored battalions,
and a third who is enlisting in the Ukrainian army.

One of the fighters, who goes by the nom de guerre “Lemko,”
fought as a member of the far-right Azov battalion near the port
city of Mariupol last summer. He told reporters there that he was a
“national socialist” who had faced persecution in Canada for his
political beliefs. “Ukraine should be for Ukrainians,” he was
quoted saying. “We don’t need the European idea of multicultural
extremism here. Ukraine must protect its cultural and ethnic
integrity.” (The Azov Battalion’s symbol is a modified version of
the “Wolfsangel” symbol used by some Nazi units in the Second World
War.)

Lemko is also believed to have led a group of protesters that
stormed the Canadian embassy and forced it to close during the
Maidan protests last year. His current whereabouts are unclear.

Another Ukrainian-Canadian fighter, Nazar Volynets – a
30-year-old construction worker and artist who was born in western
Ukraine – is now back in Canada and will be a featured speaker at
the Feb. 28 Army SOS fundraiser organized by Mr. Hareychuk, the
Toronto optometrist.

Ex-comrades-in-arms say Mr. Volynets fought last summer and fall
in the Lugansk region as a member of the Aidar Battalion, a group
accused last year by Amnesty International of war crimes, including
abductions and “possible executions.” The group, which is partly
funded by Mr. Kolomoisky, has since been folded into the army’s
24th Assault Battalion.

Mr. Volynets says he went to war with no equipment, other than
two grenades, until he commandeered a rifle on the battlefield.
“The volunteers, they come with what they have, some have shotguns
or self-made guns. Maybe only 20 per cent had guns,” he says in an
interview conducted via Skype. But the volunteers, he says, made up
for the lack of equipment and training with adrenalin and
patriotism. “Their morale is high, they are eager to fight.”

Mr. Volynets says there was no question in his mind that he had
been fighting against well-trained Russian troops (“because of
their tactics”). He calls for Canada and other Western governments
to send weapons to the Ukrainian army and volunteer battalions.

He says he plans to return soon to the front line – with some
company, he hopes. “I think I will go back with some kind of group
of Canadians. That would be really nice, because this is a fight
for democracy. … I think Western societies have to fight for what
they have, because Putin is not going to stop.”