It was just past midnight on August 24, 2001 the night before Ukraine's 10th anniversary of independence celebration. A cousin from Winnipeg and I decided to head down to Khreschatyk, Kyiv's wide central boulevard, on which the next morning's massive Independence Day parade was to take place.  The boulevard was barricaded in preparation for the morning's festivities and the sidewalks were packed with people.  Unable to move through the crowds I walked up to a barricade, moved it aside, and walked onto the boulevard.  Surprisingly a group of approximately a dozen men casually dressed in leather jackets and jeans followed.  As I walked further into the boulevard I ended up in the middle of the group next to a man of small stature, Vladimir Putin.  We walked down Khreschatyk surrounded by bodyguards.  As I watched his face and body language, a feeling of dark foreboding came over me.After some 50 meters I walked aside to look for my cousin (later he related that the bodyguards had picked him up by his elbows and tossed him over the barricades).My unease was such that I spent the rest of the night until daybreak walking the streets of Kyiv.  Observing Putin I had had a déjà vu from video clips of Hitler strolling along the Champs Élysées surrounded by his officers; the difference being Putin and officers did so in civilian clothes and under the cover of darkness.Recently, my cousin and family members who were in Kyiv at the time reminded me how, with conviction, I had suggested to everyone on that Independence Day that Putin's body language and malevolent smirk were saying “One day this will all be mine.”Just over three years later I was on Khreschatyk walking down the middle of the boulevard in the exact same place, this time amongst thousands of protestors during the 2004 Orange Revolution.  They had come out to protest the electoral fraud being committed against the will of the people and which intended to install Putin's man Yanukovych into the presidency.  The pro-democracy and pro-western candidate (and personal friend) Victor Yushchenko had miraculously survived a face disfiguring poisoning by Russian produced dioxin during the election campaign, and now his electoral win was being stolen.During the subsequent weeks I observed what appeared to be sniper positions on top of Khreschatyk buildings, obtained photographs of Kalashnikovs being unloaded by soldiers into downtown government buildings, and received credible reports of Russian special ops units being brought to Kyiv.  I stayed in regular contact with then-Prime Minister Paul Martin's office and the PM himself.  Late one evening I was sitting with a member of the Ukrainian Central Electoral Commission, Yaroslaw Davydowich, who had refused to sign off on the fraudulent presidential election results, and whose refusal began a chain of events that eventually led to the fraudulent results being overturned.  As we spoke, both of us began receiving phone calls on our cells from junior Ukrainian intelligence officers; the order had been given from “the top” to arm Interior Ministry troops with live ammunition. On the outskirts of Kyiv the soldiers were being loaded onto a convoy of buses heading towards Khreschatyk.  They would arrive in a matter of hours.As the buses neared the centre of the city they stopped; thousands of calls had gone out throughout Kyiv and as many as 60,000 Kyivans flooded Khreschatyk and Independence Square.  There wasn't the political appetite for this scale of bloodbath nor were there enough bullets.  In Canada, in response to a question from MP Walt Lastewka in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Martin unequivocally told Putin to keep his hands off of Ukraine.Over the subsequent weeks the world watched as events unfolded.  A month later I stood in Independence Square next to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell as the new President Yushchenko swore his allegiance to Ukraine and her people.  Half a million people cheered and on the podium we could literally feel the sound wave against our chests.  The Secretary of State turned to me and said “I'll remember this moment the rest of my life”.  “It's the sound of freedom”, I replied.Putin's first attempt to reverse Ukraine's independence, “The Yanukovych Project”, had fallen apart.Not quite nine years later, in the place I had stood with Secretary Powell, snipers were mowing down protestors.  It began when now President Yanukovych reneged on signing the “European Union Ukraine Association Agreement” and instead pivoted to join the Kremlin “Customs Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan.” Ukrainian students formed a protest camp with Ukrainian and E.U. flags on Independence Square.On the night of November 30, 2013, these students were brutally beaten and dispersed by special Omon police.  As images of bloodied students flooded the internet and as Kyiv's golden domed church bells rang through the night, the Revolution of Dignity ignited.  In the subsequent weeks at times 500,000 people flooded the main boulevard and square.  Repressions escalated as did beatings and disappearances of protestors off of streets, from hospital beds and even morgues. At the Kremlin's urging and with Russian special operations teams on the ground the next bloody phase began.In February, a government decree authorizing live ammunition was signed.  As snipers shot protestors (and unlike in Kazakhstan recently) protestors continued to advance toward government buildings and the Yanukovych Party of Regions offices.  The snipers abandoned their positions and President Yanukovych fled Kyiv.Putin's second attempt to subvert Ukraine's independence, Plan A, the so-called “Customs” Union of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan had failed; it was time for Plan B.Yanukovych fled to Kharkiv; symbolically important as the Bolshevik-occupied and declared Ukrainian capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1918, in opposition to the democratic Ukrainian People's Republic with its capital in Kyiv. In Kharkiv, a congress was being prepared which governors and delegates from oblasts (provinces) in the east and south were to attend.  “Novorosiya” (New Russia) was to be declared the following day, carving Ukraine in half.Outside the congress hall the crowd brought in to support this project overnight transformed into an anti-Yanukovych Maidan.  Yanukovych fled Kharkiv to Crimea and from there was flown out to Russia. The Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) voted to remove him from office.  Putin's Plan B, “Novorosiya” by Congress, had failed; it was time for Plan C.Within days “little green men” -- i.e., Russian soldiers without insignia -- swarmed and occupied Crimea.  Next began the violent takeovers of government buildings in all major Ukrainian cities in the east and south directed and led by Russian special ops teams (recognized by their non-Ukrainian accented Russian) along with local “separatists”. With a hollowed out Ukrainian army and general staff of dubious allegiance, civilian volunteer units organized.Thousands of volunteers wearing running shoes and carrying hunting rifles headed east and south. This volunteer army grew to tens of thousands and was supplied by the invisible hand of millions of Ukrainian volunteers bringing food, clothing, and arms to the multiple front lines.  While the West wrung its hands over supplying lethal weapons, the Ukrainian invisible hand created a network of supply lines which even extended into the diasporas. Amongst the various types of aid Ukrainian Canadians provided, there were tens of thousands of updated and translated copies of “Total Resistance”, a Swiss guerilla warfare manual.As Putin's secret hybrid army of special ops, hastily recruited mercenaries, and “separatists” began to lose ground in his war in Ukraine's Donbas, he unleashed the regular Russian Forces based near Ukraine in the Southern Military District backed up by Grads carpet bombing Ukrainian positions.  Notwithstanding all of the Kremlin's resources and their Ukrainian assets including a visible (pro-Russian political parties) and invisible (generals, ministers) 5th column, they were losing this war.  It was a huge intelligence failure on the part of the FSB and GRU; they could not see into the minds of millions of Ukrainians nor comprehend their determination and willingness to pay the ultimate price for their hard won freedom and democracy.  Unprepared for this resistance and not having assembled the required soldiers and weapons for all out war, Putin negotiated for a Ukrainian treasury draining “frozen” conflict with the poison pill of a new federal structure for Ukraine as part of the Minsk Accords.Putin's Plan C -- “Novorosiya” through “Civil War” -- failed, however at a cost of over 10,000 dead Ukrainians and over a million internally displaced.For the past 7 years, since 2014, as his Minsk poison pill and sequential hybrid destabilizations proved unsuccessful in making democratic Ukraine a failed state, Putin's Ukraine obsession has continued to brew.  On July 12, 2021 his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” was posted on the President's Kremlin website.  Its first line opens with the statement that, “Russians and Ukrainians were one people.”  It is a thousands of words project at history-altering and distorting revisionism.As historian Timothy Snyder noted: “A historian confronted with this sort of mess is in the same unhappy situation as a zoologist in a slaughterhouse.” Putin's “historical” essay concludes with “we will never allow our historical territories (Ukraine) and people living there to be used against Russia... For we are one people.”While academics and historians poked fun at Putin as historian, hundreds of thousands of copies of “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” were distributed as compulsory study to every Russian soldier.  Moskovsky Komsomolets stated at the time, this was Putin's “Final ultimatum to Ukraine.” Reading the essay one realizes that it's not only Putin's declaration of an existentialist threat to the state of Ukraine, it goes further; it is a denial of the right to exist of a people, the Ukrainian nation.For centuries, Ukraine's people have survived ethnocide and genocide under the directives of the Kremlin; their language banned by legislation, leaders killed, suffered repeated mass deportations and slaughters.  It is a part of not only my family history for generations, but the personal history of virtually every Ukrainian family in Ukraine and its diasporas. It's in this context and upon reading Putin's essay that once again a dark foreboding kept me up that night as it had on Khreschatyk over 20 years earlier. It became clear to me that this essay, distributed to every Russian soldier, was in preparation for not just an imperial revanche of the territory of Ukraine, her people were to no longer exist.While Vladimir Putin waits for his new best friend Xi Jinping's Winter Olympics extravaganza's closing ceremonies; the Kremlin's army, air force and navy brought together from across nine time zones to Ukraine's borders continue to prepare for their orders.  One hundred and thirty thousand soldiers and countless war machines (tanks, fighter jets, warships) are not amassed for a “small incursion” -- the intent is geo-politically altering.Will there be war?  Although we pray war will not occur there is a significant chance that it will, and we must be cognizant of its consequences.  We are within a window of a few weeks of what would be the most horrific war on the European continent since World War II.  The death toll of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, and Ukrainian civilians would be unimaginable, cities would lie in ruins as millions of refugees flood Central and Western Europe.Its impact would be global. Ukraine's pipelines feeding Russian gas to Western Europe would be amongst the early targets; with freezing Germans demanding that North Stream II be activated.  For centuries Ukraine was known for her fertile black soil and as the breadbasket of Europe; today Ukraine's wheat and agricultural commodities are crucial for the food security of some of world's most vulnerable and politically unstable countries.In Lebanon, 35% of its population's caloric intake comes from Ukrainian agriculture, 43% of Libya's wheat, 22% of Yemen's wheat, 21% of Bangladeshi wheat, 14% of Egypt's wheat.  In a war, Ukraine's ports would be blockaded by the Russian navy, their infrastructure damaged, in the Spring the black soil of Ukraine would lie unseeded due to the war and occupation; already inflated global food prices would spike, with the potential of major civil unrest and even famine in a number of the aforementioned countries.In the ruins of Ukraine will lie the ruins of a post-World War II international rules-based order which has brought 75 years of relative peace and its consequent prosperity to a continent where two world wars began.  During the past 30 years the West by arm twisting Ukraine to give up her nuclear deterrent in return for security guarantees from Russia (Budapest Memorandum); by its well intentioned naive “resets” with Russia after its invasion of Georgia; with its weak and loopholed sanctions against Russian kleptocrats; and its fearful unwillingness to properly arm Ukraine; is culpable of having encouraged Putin to bring us to the brink of this potentially apocalyptic scenario.War is not inevitable, however time is of essence.  Publishing his essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, and then methodically massing the weight of his war machine on Ukraine's borders, Putin may have once again seriously miscalculated.  In the democratic West some have learnt from past failures and come to understand the Kremlin's political culture; that for deterrence to be effective it must be credible and timely.The Kremlin had counted on the usual divisions in the West facilitated by Russian petrodollar corrupted politicians and corporate bedfellows; surprisingly, the Biden administration's capable diplomacy has largely kept the alliance united.  The Kremlin had counted on the West to once again make deals about Ukraine in the spirit of Yalta without taking into account the interests of the Ukrainian people; instead a new principle has been adhered to “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.”The Kremlin had counted on the West standing aside as the Russian army faced an outgunned and out-tanked Ukrainian Army; Putin's calculus was significantly altered as unexpectedly Great Britain, in the spirit of the Berlin air lift, began sending an air convoy of critically important lethal military equipment including over 2,000 game changing light anti-tank rockets.  This was followed by American anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, along with small arms and ammunition from the Baltic states, Poland, and Czech Republic.Canada's closest allies, the U.S and Great Britain, have shown international leadership.  Meanwhile Canada, to the much evident public pleasure of the Russian ambassador in Ottawa, has stood aside and not provided defensive weapons joining the Schroederized Germans, an unexpected gift to the Kremlin.This consequential policy failure and lack of leadership can be reversed.  The Prime Minister can rise in the House of Commons and state unequivocally that Canada supports Ukraine's NATO aspirations.The Canadian military has amongst the best snipers in the world, they continue training Ukraine's highly motivated and dedicated soldiers. We also have a large store of world class sniper rifles and ammunition.  We can increase the calculus of deterrence by providing Ukrainian snipers with these and other small arms.We can also show leadership by ramping up Magnitsky sanctions targeting Putin's inner circle, as well as through sectoral sanctions targeting Russia's petro economy, the corporate entities involved in its oil and gas sectors.We can lead by initiating international emergency diplomacy on the Russian threat to global food security, and declaring the global importance of guaranteeing that Ukrainian port cities, and coastal waters be protected from military invasion.Canada must stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Ukraine not just because of the over 130 years of nation building contributions of Ukrainian Canadians; we should do so because of our geopolitical interests and common values. In Canada, we often boast of having the longest unprotected border in the world with the United States.  We overlook that we have an even longer border in our Arctic.  Our neighbour in this region -- Russia -- has already publicly laid claim to parts of this coastal territory and violates our sovereignty by clandestinely sending submarines into our Arctic waters.Just as today Ukraine faces Russian challenges to her territorial integrity, similar challenges to Canada's sovereignty are on the horizon.  Most importantly, it is in our common interest to stand with Ukraine's nascent democracy because liberal democracy is under threat.  Ukraine is de facto a shield for a liberal democratic Europe; it was on Khreschatyk that for the first time in the EU's history people were shot and killed for flying the EU flag and what it symbolized.  During these next weeks of the Winter Olympics the West, including Canada, will determine if in the next month the nightmarish scenario of war will return to the European continent, to its bloodlands of Ukraine.  Indeed, the next month will determine the outcome of Putin's final solution, his obsession “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”[caption id="attachment_608112" align="alignleft" width="534"] Borys Wrzesnewskyj, in the Donbas “grey zone” with Ukrainian soldiers[/caption]In 1989 Borys Wrzesnewskyj was an early member of “Rukh” Ukraine's democratic opposition to Soviet rule, was directly involved in the 1991 Independence Referendum, and for over 30 years has been involved in numerous democracy building projects in Ukraine.  He was a four term member of parliament, founded the Canada Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group and most recently chaired the Canadian NATO Parliamentary Association.  He dream of bringing his family to Kyiv this summer, to stroll along Khreschatyk's wide boulevard, and to tell his children the stories of their ancestors and the dream fulfilled of a free and democratic Ukraine.