Ukraine's winter warning to Canada: Help us keep the lights on

Ukraine's winter warning to Canada: Help us keep the lights on

Visiting lawmakers urge Ottawa, provinces to help rebuild a battered energy grid

A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians called on Canada's federal and provincial governments on Wednesday to help fund electrical transformers as Russia steps up attacks on the Eastern European country's energy grid.

"We are getting ready for the potentially extremely harsh winter," said Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, chair of Ukraine's committee on integration into the European Union.

She said Russia is weaponizing the coming cold weather by focusing attacks on energy infrastructure, water supplies and sewage systems.

"We could have humanitarian disasters of the magnitude that nobody has seen," Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

Throughout the summer Russia has drastically escalated aerial assaults on Ukraine, pounding cities day and night.

Over 800 civilians were killed in July and August, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Moscow has deployed massive, relentless waves of advanced jet-powered drones, ballistic missiles and guided glide bombs to overwhelm air defences.

Klympush-Tsintsadze said Russia's aim is to depopulate the cities and make them unlivable.

She and fellow Ukrainian parliamentarian Oleksandr Merezhko were in Ottawa meeting with Canadian politicians and senior officials and took part in a roundtable discussion with journalists and other Baltic politicians at the Estonian Embassy.

Aside from an urgent, renewed pitch to Canada to sell high-end electronic warfare equipment to combat drones and to help purchase more air-to-air missiles, Klympush-Tsintsadze said they're asking the federal government and provinces to buy into funding packages managed by the Energy Community, an agency of the European Union.

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Electrical transformers made in North America are not compatible with the ones built in Europe and contributing to the transformer construction ahead of winter would be helpful.

One Canadian province, which Klympush-Tsintsadze declined to name, has already stepped forward and there's a plan to raise the idea with the Ontario government in a meeting on Thursday.

"That's something very specific that can be done," she said.

Merezhko said the war — now four-and-a-half years since the full-scale invasion — is evolving into a more dangerous phase where Ukraine is fighting a "whole coalition" of countries.

"It's not only Russia, which is weak in itself, but it's also Iran, because it provides thousands and thousands of drones. It's also North Korea, which has been providing munitions, continuous, and even armed force, you know, manpower."

His remarks echoed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who delivered a 26-minute address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Zelenskyy highlighted how Russia is actively globalizing the conflict by drawing in external personnel. He revealed that citizens from 47 countries are being enlisted by Russia to fight. He pleaded with the leaders of those nations to intercede and stop their citizens from being dragged into Moscow's war.

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Speaking in English, he also defended Ukraine's strikes on Russia's oil infrastructure.

"Oil itself is not Ukraine's target," Zelenskyy told world leaders. "Our target is Russia's ability to finance this war to drag it out … Russia's finances and Russia's production are what must be stopped if Putin is to be stopped."

He called on the international community to escalate economic sanctions and permanently drain Moscow's war revenues.

In Ottawa, Klympush-Tsintsadze said her view is that the further west she travels from Ukraine, the less the war and the threat from Russia is understood.

She said the Baltic nations — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — understand, as do Poland, Romania and Moldova.

Russian President Vladimir Putin "wants to destroy your way of living, your way of functioning, and insert their own chaotic rules into your reality," she said.

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Despite the massive increase in defence spending among NATO nations, including Canada, there's no sense of political urgency and frightening lack of resolve in the face of increasing grey zone attacks in Europe.

"Everyone sees the reporting of a lot of the media: this resolve and resilience of the Ukrainian people," she said. "I think that this is also pretty misleading because it serves the purpose of understanding that somehow this conflict, this war, is taken care of and those Ukrainians are carrying on."

North American media, she said, seems to have lost interest in the fate of Ukraine.

"I think everybody is getting used to this war. I don't know what has to happen for us to make it to the front pages. We are dying every single day in the middle of Europe," Klympush-Tsintsadze said.

Senior reporter, defence and security

Murray Brewster is the senior defence writer for CBC News, based in Ottawa. He has covered the Canadian military and foreign policy from Parliament Hill for over a decade. Among other assignments, he spent a total of 15 months on the ground covering the Afghan war for The Canadian Press. Prior to that, he covered defence issues and politics for CP in Nova Scotia for 11 years and was bureau chief for Standard Broadcast News in Ottawa.