Canada and Ukraine signed a free-trade agreement in Kyiv on Monday, hours after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his son Xavier attended ceremonies commemorating victims of mass atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and the Soviets.
Ukrainian officials hope the agreement will spark Canadian investment in Ukraine’s struggling economy as the Ukraine seeks to strengthen ties with the West.
“As much as it’s important to look to the past, it’s also important to look to the future,” said Trudeau prior to his meeting with President Petro Poroshenko to sign the agreement.
Canada has long-standing ties with Ukraine.
An estimated 1,250,000 people of Ukrainian origin live in Canada, making them Canada’s ninth largest ethnic group and giving Canada the world’s third-largest Ukrainian population behind Ukraine and Russia.
Canada currently has 200 troops training Ukrainian forces in the west of the country.
Poroshenko described that arrangement as a “win-win” because, he said, it gives the Canadian military an opportunity to learn more about the so-called “hybrid warfare” strategy that has been adopted by Russia.
In the morning ceremonies, Trudeau and Xavier, his eldest son, laid a bouquet of flowers at a memorial to tens of thousands of Ukrainians, many of them Jews, killed by the Nazis in Kyiv during the Second World War.
The Trudeaus stood side by side to pay a moment of respect at the Babyn Yar monument before leaving hand in hand.
They then presented a wreath at Ukraine’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier before visiting a nearby memorial to the Holodomor, a mass famine in the 1930s that Ukrainians blame on the Soviets.
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