Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canadians shouldn’t fall for Vladimir Putin’s propaganda after the Russian president appeared in an interview with U.S. media personality Tucker Carlson.

Putin used the interview to mock Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Canadian officials for applauding Yaroslav Hunka during Zelenskyy’s visit to Parliament in September.

Hunka was introduced in the House as a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran who fought against the Soviet Union in the Second World War. It was later revealed that Hunka was part of a division of Ukrainian volunteers under Nazi command.

Trudeau said Putin’s comments on the Hunka incident were an attempt to “distract” from his real motivations for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“Putin chose to invade a neighbouring sovereign country, violating the rights, the sovereignty, the territorial integrity of Ukraine and violating the rules-based order that underpins the safety, the security of all of us living in free democracies around the world,” he said.

  • m0darn@lemmy.ca
    3·
    9 months ago

    Hunka was part of a division of Ukrainian volunteers under Nazi command.

    This is minimizing it. He was part of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS. (From Wikipedia:) The SS was the military wing of the Nazi party. The man swore an oath to Hitler.

    I understand that a young man that:

    -Grew up in a region recovering from the Russian Civil War
-Grew up during the mass murder and starvation of the soviet purge of the kulaks
-Was subjected to nationalistic propaganda  (Nazi and other)

    might have great animosity towards the Soviets, and be inclined to join any force opposing them. I’m not asserting that Hunka was a bad person and should have known better, but he may have been. I’m not saying Canada was wrong to admit him as a displaced person, but we might have been. To minimize the Nazi ties of the Waffen SS is not responsible.

    His division might have:

    Trigger Warning Gore

    cut open the belly of a pregnant Polish woman and smashed the infant on the wall so that it was the last thing the mother saw before she died.

    (This is one of the allegations against the SS division he served in, just a small example of what’s alleged at the massacre at Huta Pieniacka)

    Wikipedia references a publication that claims the Soviets managed to capture several hundred of the SS division in question, a few weeks after the massacre and concluded they had participated in the massacre. The captured SS soldiers were executed. Maybe none of the guilty survived.

    Parliamentary guests should be vetted. I actually think a letter from Hunka decrying propaganda, dictatorship and imperialism and celebrating a democratic and pluralistic Ukraine would have been a great thing to applaud in Parliament.

    We should mock anyone saying this procedural failure shows Ukraine has significant Nazi sympathies. Or that Canada is soft on Nazis. This was a bureaucratic oversight that had embarrassing fallout. I’m angry that it happened, but let’s have a sense of scale.