The latest round of Canadian sanctions against Russia targets members of military units accused of massacring civilians outside Kyiv last spring.
A total of 43 individuals and 17 organizations were added to the existing list on Tuesday.
Several of the military on the Liberal government’s updated list belong to the Russian army’s 64th motorized rifle brigade and were sanctioned months ago by other allies, including members of the European Union.
One of them, Col. Andrey Boyevich Kurbanov, was identified in early April and included in a list of the so-called “Butchers of Bucha” by activists and Ukrainian war crimes investigators.
He and other lower-level commanders were sanctioned by the EU in June.
Some of Kurbanov’s superiors, including Col. Azatbek Asanbekovich Omurbekov, brigade commander, and Lt. Gen. The commander of the 8th Guards General Army, Andrei Ivanovich Sychevoi, was blacklisted by Canada in the spring.
The Ukrainian-Canadian Congress says the sanctions are overdue
However, Ukrainian-Canadian Congress chief executive Igor Mikhalchyshyn said the federal government has been slow to punish lower-level commanders and is still holding back on declaring Russia a state sponsor of terrorism.
Russia has denied killing civilians in Bucha and claims evidence of civilian killings was staged to implicate Moscow.
Forensic technicians exhume the bodies of civilians who Ukrainian officials say were killed during the Russian invasion and then buried in a mass grave in the town of Bucha, outside Kyiv, Ukraine, April 8, 2022. (Valentyn Ogyrenko/Reuters)
The 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade – which was lauded by Russian President Vladimir Putin with the honorary military rank of “Guards” for its deployment to Ukraine – arrived in Bucha, a leafy affluent suburb of Kyiv, in mid-March. The brigade is accused of killing a dozen people in three weeks in the area.
Last spring, Yulia, a saleswoman at a small store called Memory Kings, located behind the Bucha morgue, recounted the harrowing Russian occupation in an interview with CBC News.
She said the first wave of Russian troops was respectful, but those that followed – referring to the 64th Motorized Rifle Brigade – were brutal. She said that although she had never directly witnessed an atrocity, both she and her husband had seen corpses piling up in the street.
They wanted to go out and collect them, Yulia said, and even took a cart before a Russian soldier stopped them and threatened them.
“If you touch them, you’ll be next,” he told us,” said Julia, who asked that only her first name be used.
Laying floral tributes over the mass grave site behind the Church of Saint Andrew and All Saints in Bucha, Ukraine. (CBC News/Murray Brewster)
The horrors of Bucha and the atrocities in places like nearby Irpin – where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited on his trip to Ukraine last spring – are well known and well documented, Mikhalchyshyn said.
“It’s always good to see Canada impose more sanctions, but it’s worrisome and Canada is not keeping up with our allies,” he said, noting that intelligence sharing takes place between the allies and Ukraine.
Before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, the advocacy group had been pressuring Canada to keep pace with other allies in imposing sanctions, notably the Russian paramilitary company Wager Group, which Canada was among the latest to sanction.
The reluctance to act harder and faster on sanctions was hard to understand, Michalchyshyn said.
“We talked to the Canadian government about sanctions for a long time before the war,” he said. “And we’re very disappointed that we were lagging behind and didn’t seem to be doing what other allies were doing.”
Global Affairs Canada has not yet responded to an inquiry from CBC News about the sanctions.
US Considers Designating Russia as a ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’
Last week, the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling on Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. The US House of Representatives drafts official legislation.
“To the Biden Administration: You have the full unanimous support of the United States Senate to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. Do it,” Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said last week.
Michalchyshyn said his group wrote to the prime minister weeks ago asking for similar measures in Canada.
“We think this is a strong next step forward in terms of providing a broad and comprehensive directive to all Canadian government entities, this list of the economy, the military trade, everything else, and it will have, we hope, broad, broad ramifications for – further isolating Russia and further undermining their ability to finance the war,” he said.
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