Russia-Ukraine war updates: Moscow celebrates Victory Day as Ukraine reels from strike on school
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an unannounced visit to Ukraine on Sunday to meet with Ukrainian officials and hoist the Canadian flag again over his country’s embassy in Kyiv.
Oleksandr Markushyn, the mayor of Irpin, a city on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital that was decimated by Russian forces in March, announced the visit on his Telegram channel with photos of the Canadian leader touring Irpin.
Trudeau “came to Irpin to see with his own eyes all the horror that the Russian occupiers had done to our city. And of course, he was shocked,” Markushyn wrote.
Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, and Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister, also were pictured in the photos that Markushyn shared.
Trudeau’s office told The Washington Post that he was in Ukraine to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky and “reaffirm Canada’s unwavering support for the Ukrainian people.”
Trudeau also helped raise the flag over the Canadian Embassy, nearly three months after it suspended operations.
At a news conference with the two heads of state, Zelensky thanked Trudeau for promising more humanitarian and military assistance, including demining Ukrainian areas where Russian forces had left ordnance and munitions.
Trudeau announced that Canada would remove trade tariffs on Ukrainian imports for the next year and add sanctions on 40 individuals and five entities, including Russian “oligarchs, close associates of the regime, the defense sector, all of them complicit in Putin’s war.”
Canada, home to the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora after Russia, has imposed sanctions on “more than 1,000 individuals and entities from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus since February 24, 2022,” according to a news release that Trudeau’s office sent Sunday afternoon.
Markushyn thanked Trudeau on Sunday for supporting Ukraine and sought his help in organizing the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada to help rebuild infrastructure in Irpin. Russian forces retreated from the city in early April, leaving little intact.
