1.
There’s a place about a two-hour drive south of Kyiv, where bare-branched winter forest covers the top of low cliffs, below which the Dnipro River spans toward the horizon like a saltless slate sea. We stopped there a night, on our way back from a quick work trip south. We stayed at a tiny cabin in a clearing I found on AirB’n’B.
On the way to the cabin, we passed through an endless series of tiny villages, each a cluster of small shops, low houses surrounded by rusted fences, and a name nobody except residents remembers. No military, no strategic objects, nothing to spark the interest of Russian soldiers who program missiles. Just the quiet, and the forest.
It feels magical, that forest, in both benevolent and ominous ways. We wandered the tilting metal crosses of an old cemetery, perilously clinging to the crest of a steep hill. We hiked through the naked trees until they opened up to show us the ruin of a long-abandoned log-and-plaster khata hut. A young buck deer peered at us from a distance, then turned hoof and danced away. After that, only the wind tracked our steps.
That night at the cabin, we stood in the silent clearing and grilled sausages over coals. Suddenly, the familiar whine of a Shahed assault drone pierced the sky, crawling over nearby treetops on its way to terrorize Kyiv. We stood in a tense darkness and listened to the low fireworks of anti-aircraft guns firing over the forest, backed by the crackles of sausage fat dripping onto the coals.
I thought about the soldiers positioned somewhere in that forest. It must have been cold for them as they waited. So far from the front, so far even from Kyiv, but always ready to face what might be coming.
What I’m saying is this: we can run, if we want. We can run until we think we’re out of the way, out of danger, even a little bit out of the world. But when the forces of evil are fully unleashed, we can’t really hide. They’re just out there, now. All we can do is keep turning towards them, and shooting them down.
2.
I’ve been struggling for a week to write about the nightmare news churning out of the United States, in regard to Ukraine. It’s been impossible to keep up. Each time I try, it either descends into furious rambling, or else the horrible new headline I’d started to write about is wiped off the news by something even worse.
Basically, in a matter of weeks, the United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, but now actively turned against it, blamed it for the war, and made it the villain of its own victimization. This week, the U.S. stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine, such as early warnings about incoming strikes; it even made Maxar, a company that provides satellite imagery, cut off access to Ukraine. These will directly lead to more military and civilian deaths; at a forum talk, Trump’s Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg said the Ukrainians “brought it on themselves.” They have not had even one bad word to say about Russia or its president.
So the American goal is quite clear: to force Ukraine to total capitulation to Russia, and feast off its resources. This is a nightmare that I still can’t quite believe is real; everyone knew Trump would be terrible for Ukraine, but even still few would have imagined he’d be not just abandoning it, but actually trying to harm it.
The scope of Trump’s open siding with Russia is alarming. The implications are even worse. It’s obvious that Trump’s entire worldview, and foreign policy, are reducible to a simple equation: the strong deserve to keep what they take by virtue of being strong. Everyone else deserves whatever abuse and degradation they receive. There’s no other metric, no other consideration, no moral binds that ought stay the hand of the strong, and no hope for a mechanism by which those harmed might find justice.
We cannot live in this world, not safely, not peacefully. What’s just as alarming is how it’s been achieved, which is to say: an absolute torrent of propaganda. A storm of false but terrifyingly effective garbage, originating in halls of power and laundered through social media and compliant big-media mouthpieces.
The pace of it should alarm us. While the public framework for Ukraine’s vilification was laid over the last two years — a U.S. Department of Justice file, unsealed late last year, gives a glimpse of the process — it took just a few weeks for it to be complete. In that time, in the minds of a staggering number of Americans, Ukraine became the bad actor in the war, and its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator” and the obstacle to peace. These are lies, unsupported by reality. But look how effective it’s been:
That drop is shocking, all the more because it isn’t organic; it’s not an accumulation of things. They were told exactly when to start hating Zelenskyy, and why.
They’re doing it now to Canadians, too. We ignore it at our peril.
Consider this, as American commentator recently Chris Hayes pointed out: six weeks ago, exactly zero Americans held a belief that mean Canadians controlled by Mexican cartels were ripping them off on trade, killing them with rampant fentanyl trafficking, and blocking their banks from entering Canada. It certainly wasn’t an issue when they went to the voting both, or something about which they felt a deep, personal anger.
Now, even though none of that is true, a disturbing number of Americans do believe those things — and that Canada has to pay a high price to right these wrongs, or face annexation. And the flip happened in a matter of just a few weeks: once they were told who the newest target for their anger was, they immediately turned that direction, like a school of fish.
This reference is often overused, but it is literally Orwellian. The Two Minutes Hate of Orwell’s 1984 now comes through Tweet. In a few words, in a blink, a distressing number of Americans are convinced they are at war with Canada, and have always been at war with Canada. It’s not a majority of Americans who swallow it back so easily. But it’s enough to whip up confusion, render sane discourse impossible, and give shelter to Trump’s unhinged behaviour.
There’s one key difference that makes it even more disturbing. In Orwell’s book, as in real totalitarian governments, people bleat the propaganda because they must: they’re being watched, and any sign of disloyalty, such as showing insufficient enthusiasm for official messaging, can be dangerous. So there’s no way to know who really believes in it, and who is just going through the motions to keep themselves safe.
There’s no pressure like that in the United States, yet. Nobody’s forcing them to take up the party line. Nobody is forcing them say they are victims of Canada and that we must be economically crushed, or annexed. They adopt the propaganda lies willingly, and gleefully. They want to be led, even ruled; they want to be told who to hate.
Look, I try not to be alarmist. I really do. And I don’t think Trump’s America is likely to invade Canada anytime soon. (They can’t even hold the line on their own tariff war.) But one thing Ukrainians here have consistently — and correctly — pointed out to me is just how familiar this process is: from propaganda, to public frenzy, to catastrophic action. They’ve seen it for years, from Russia. It’s the Russian playbook exactly.
In Canada, we absolutely have to see clearly how this playbook is being used against us now; we have to recognize that while it’s tariffs today, it could be mobilized in far worse ways tomorrow. How we combat that, I honestly don’t know. But we can’t look away, and we can’t tell ourselves it can’t get worse. It can. As long as enough voters in the U.S. are willing to follow; and not enough amongst even a majority can resist; then it can always get worse.
3.
On Bluesky — the Twitter replacement that is, at least at this point, mercifully sane and minimally infiltrated by raving propaganda bots — PressProgress editor Luke LeBrun voiced a thought this week, that I’d like to both amplify and add onto.
“The natural reflex to Trump’s aggression will be to mirror him with a ‘Canada First’ or ‘Every Country For Itself’ approach,” LeBrun wrote. “Ultimately, we will all be stronger if democratic forces around the world unite and build new alliances to push back against Trump’s unchecked power.”
This is an important point, I think, especially as Tory leader Pierre Poilievre has made “Canada First” a top slogan. It seems misguided, given what we’re facing. The original “America First” brand was explicitly isolationist, coined to resist America’s entry into the First World War and, later and even more morally unforgivably, the Second. You’d think the ensuing history would have fully discredited it as a slogan; its legacy is being unable to recognize the most dire threat facing the world — or recognizing it, but still being willing to abandon allies to the wolves. “Protect our own, and if everyone else is screwed, so what?” But the world does not work like that; besides the moral elements, we also can never be islands.
Look, Canada is in a tough spot. Our neighbour has flipped from ally to adversary, for no publicly evident reason. (We can certainly surmise several Trump motivations; but none are about the border or, even more bizarrely, banks.) Its government is seized by unabashed kleptocrats and fascists, who are currently running amok dismantling its institutions and bullying anyone who resists into submission.
If I may humbly say: we won’t survive this by aping the slogans and concepts that got them there. We will just doom our own society to be riven and plundered by the same vultures. We also can’t meet this alone. That’s not a statement of weakness. We must be Canada, not always first, but always together. Canada together with ourselves, our allies, and everyone in the world that will not meekly submit to its worst forces.
When I think of my core political values, it looks something like this: yes, when we are under pressure, maybe we have to start by protecting what we love, those closest to us, our community. That’s a natural entry point, to start close to home. But we should also always look to expand that circle, as we’re able; to keep bringing more people into that fold of who we’ll stand with, and who we’ll stand for.
More alliances, not fewer. More openness to the world, not less. If we retreat into the same “every country for itself” mindset that Trump champions, we will not be able to meet what is coming — we will just fall victim to it ourselves.
4.
The truth is, I’m really scared;
scared of what has come, and what will be.
If you are too, just know you’re not alone. It’s okay. These are dark days.
— — —
P.S.
In case you missed it, I was so excited to have a feature in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago. It’s about a Canadian soldier, a gentle black dog stranded in the hell of a modern battlefield, and a community that came together to help get him to safety.
Stories like this are meaningful in ways beyond the specific subject. The war is very big, and one dog’s life is very small. But everyone in Ukraine has lost a lot; what I’ve noticed is that for many people, being able to save one small life becomes healing in and of itself. And with animals, you can fix it for them, truly fix it, in a way you can’t for humans. The war is over now for this dog, in a way it never will be for people.
When I was reporting on this story, and we brought the dog back for one last visit to Artak, a Ukrainian-run shelter for displaced people with disabilities, some residents wept tears of joy to hear he was going to Canada. The residents have lost everything: their homes, their futures, nearly everything they’ve owned. But still, it was a release for them to know this one little being they’d cared for would be able to leave the war behind, completely. Because they knew they never would.
You can’t save everyone; but for the sake of your soul, you gotta save something.
By the way, Artak is a wonderful grassroots shelter. They work to evacuate people — mostly elderly, medically vulnerable folks — from destroyed front-line regions, and transport them to safer and more stable living situations elsewhere in Europe. They are doing this on a very tight budget; if you’d like to support their work, you can find them on Facebook here, and donate online here.