Larisa Galadza: Latest News

Canada’s defence chief has concluded his first trip to Ukraine since the Russian invasion started more than a year ago.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has made a “miscalculation” if he thinks the West will move on from his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, says Canada’s ambassador to the sovereign democracy.In an interview with The West Block guest host Eric Sorenson, Larisa Galadza spoke from Poland where the ambassador and Canada’s diplomatic staff are operating amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.Galadza and the Canadian embassy staff had been based in Kyiv before relocating to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv as the invasion began, and subsequently left the country for Poland.“It’s like a sea of humanity. It’s people standing in lineups, many of them on foot, but a lot of them are still in cars coming over the border,” Galadza said in describing Ukrainians fleeing their country.She said any assumptions on the part of Putin that the West will move on or get over his invasion of Ukraine is just “another miscalculation.”“It’s not the first miscalculation, I think, that Russia has made,” she added.“The response that we’re seeing from our like-minded governments, the response that we’re seeing from Ukrainians themselves, is unprecedented.”Some 1.2 million Ukrainians have been forced to flee as a result of the first land war on the European continent since the Second World War.