By Aaron Gasch Burnett, September 13, 2024
Canada has long paid lip service to its support for Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Its strong words typically fall far behind what it actually commits. As I’ve written before, our own rickety military equipment constrains our assistance, and we still won’t take a leading role in seizing over C$400 billion in frozen Russian state assets to give Ukraine a financial lifeline – at no cost to Canadian taxpayers.
This is especially upsetting since Canadians remain broadly supportive of Ukraine, with 71 percent agreeing that we should support Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s war of aggression. Another poll finds that 64 percent have confidence in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s current leadership of Ukraine. Overall Canadian sentiment values democracy, human rights, and international law, and abhors aggression and genocide. It’s little wonder the public generally leans so pro-Ukrainian.
That’s why it didn’t surprise me to see the scale of uproar against Russian-Canadian filmmaker Anastasia Trofimova’s film Russians at War – indeed, the Toronto International Film Festival finally cancelled a screening of the film after repeatedly insisting it would show it.
Trofimova spent seven months embedded with a Russian battalion in eastern Ukraine – without Kyiv’s permission but certainly with the go-ahead of a Russian brigade commander. Trofimova even donned a Russian uniform so the soldiers she embedded with wouldn’t shoot her. The film paints Russian soldiers sympathetically as pawns in a greater game. Trofimova insists she “saw no war crimes” and her film makes no mention of them – despite the overwhelming evidence we have of mass murder and rape of Ukrainians by Russian soldiers from Bucha to Kharkiv. She maintains that she sought no approval to be there from any Russian government agency.
However, experts on Russia and Eastern Europe pick these arguments apart quickly. They note a formerly accredited Canadian journalist is unlikely to have escaped the notice of Russia’s notorious FSB security service – especially as she ventured closer to the frontline. The brigade commander who allowed Trofimova to embed in the battalion would certainly face reprisal if he allowed her – a journalist – there without permission from higher-ups. Lastly, there is Trofimova’s own history. She previously made at least eleven documentaries with support from Russian state television outlet Russia Today (RT) – a notorious propaganda outlet at the forefront of Putin’s global disinformation campaign. Some have compared Trofimova’s work to that of Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl during the Second World War.
It’s bad enough to see Canada’s flagship film festival platforming Trofimova’s film. But that’s hardly the worst part of this story. Canadians – both in the Ukrainian community and out – have protested the film in the streets and online. One of the film’s backers, TVO, even pulled its screening. But Canadians cannot get back the minimum $340,000 in taxpayer funds Trofimova received to make this movie.
What politicians can do is hold accountable those responsible for this gross misuse of public funds – one that betrays Canadian values and our friendship with Ukraine.
You get a parliamentary summons, and you get a summons, and you get a summons
Trofimova’s film received Canadian taxpayer money from a wide variety of publicly-funded sources – including the Canada Media Fund, the Ontario Creates agency of the Ontario provincial government, the Ontario-funded broadcaster TVO, and the BC-funded broadcaster BC Knowledge Network.
Responses out of Ottawa were anything but swift. It took nearly a week after taxpayer backing of this film first came to light for Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to make her stance clear.
“Canadian public money should not be used to support the production or screening of media that attempts to whitewash Russia’s war crimes,” Freeland tweeted. “Ukrainians are fighting for their sovereignty and for democracy – there can be no moral equivalency in this conflict.”
Freeland’s message – late as it is – is the right one, rhetorically at least. But parliamentarians shouldn’t simply leave it there. What happened here is simply far too serious for that.
The Canadian House of Commons and Senate, as well as the BC and Ontario legislatures, have the power to either invite or summon public servants to appear before committees. If our elected representatives are truly serious about getting to the bottom of how hundreds of thousands in taxpayer money went to a whitewash film, they need to start hauling the officials responsible for disbursing this money in front of our representatives – whose job it is to make sure public money is spent responsibly and in a way that aligns with Canadian values.
Finally, it’s on the Canadian government to apologize to Ukrainians and Canada’s Ukrainian community. The decision to fund this film may have been made by civil servants, but the buck stops at the top. If anything, an apology from the top would send an important tone-setting message about what shouldn’t be considered an acceptable use of public funds.
Canada needs better geopolitical and strategic awareness
Trofimova’s film is just the latest in a series of events to lay bare Canada’s current crisis of geopolitical and strategic awareness.
Whether it’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau turning a blind eye to Chinese interference in two Canadian elections or Trofimova’s whitewashing of Russian war crimes with taxpayer money, the fact that democracies are in a systemic competition of values with authoritarian regimes is evidently lost on too many leaders in Canadian life. This lack of awareness might show up as naïveté in some – and as wilful ignorance in others. Either way, Trofimova’s film demonstrates how a lack of strategic awareness extends far into Canadian cultural institutions – not simply our politics.
It’s also severe. Any number of people could’ve helped stop Trofimova from getting Canadian public money had they read a history book, talked to Ukrainians, taken even a cursory look at the UN Charter, or simply bothered to Google Trofimova’s collaboration history to find her RT associations.
Anyone who read even a little bit about Ukrainian behaviour during this war would’ve found no evidence that ethnic Russians are tortured in Ukraine – as Trofimova claimed during a recent CBC interview, using talking points that could’ve come straight from a Kremlin troll farm. Despite its Canadian taxpayer funding, CBC journalists didn’t challenge her on that point either.
Trofimova’s arguments are very easy to debunk for anyone the least bit familiar with how authoritarian disinformation works – Russian or otherwise. That’s why it’s so disturbing that so many Canadian cultural officials literally bought those arguments — no questions asked – with taxpayer money.
The shameful Trofimova saga should serve as a loud warning about how vulnerable Canada is to authoritarian disinformation – and the immediate need to up our geostrategic awareness to combat it. That starts with a disinformation strategy for public officials that actually works – including mandatory training. It continues with a clear commitment to Ukraine’s victory and resolutely doing what’s necessary to achieve it. Finally, it requires our politicians to have honest conversations with the public about the nature of the systemic conflict we now face between the world’s authoritarians and its democracies.
It would be both a tragedy and a betrayal of our proud democratic history if there was any doubt as to whose side we’re on.
Aaron Gasch Burnett is a German-Canadian security analyst based in Berlin. He is the co-host of the BerlinsideOut podcast on German foreign policy, a fellow with the Democratic Strategy Initiative (DSI), and a regular contributor to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
