Ottawa’s policies have aggravated tensions in eastern Europe, writes author, activist and Canadian Foreign Policy Institute director Bianca Mugyenyi. To help ensure the conflict doesn’t escalate even further we need to start asking tough questions of our political leaders. At a minimum we should be told by our government if Canadian forces are on the ground in Ukraine.

The real Zelensky is an anti-hero who has degraded whatever democracy existed in Ukraine, writes Dimitri Lascaris. He instituted a profoundly unpopular program of neoliberalism. He has deep ties to a shady oligarch who funded Ukrainian neo-Nazis. Perhaps worst of all, he betrayed his promise to seek peace with Russia by pursuing policies that greatly heightened the risk of war.

That’s where the actual inflection point lies today—whether the structural contradictions in the Western economies have matured into disorder. Putin sees the West’s future as bleak, hit simultaneously by the blowback from its own imposition of sanctions, and the resultant spike in commodity prices, but lacking agility to deflect the blows due to institutional rigidities.

From the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Western media have systematically misrepresented developments on the battlefield. Time and again, major media organizations have cited military ‘experts’ from NATO armies and officials from Western governments to support the false claim that Ukraine is either winning the war or has battled Russian forces to a standstill.

In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war and the profitable exploitation of battery metals, Canadian politicians have stressed the need to maintain and expand access to critical minerals in Africa. Such access will have the effect of keeping the continent as a crucial supplier of the minerals with which Canada and its allies hope to blunt the economic blowback of the invasion.

Although it faces significant obstacles, the French left is stronger today than it was after the 2017 presidential election. Even if the united left fails to obtain a majority on June 19, its presence in parliament will likely increase significantly, alongside its ability to counter Emmanuel Macron’s Caesarist solutions to crises in contemporary France.

The permanent war economy has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

Last week, in Lviv, an international delegation met with labour organizers and activists. The Swiss weekly newspaper, Die Wochenzeitung, followed the proceedings. What questions are most preoccupying the country’s workers, and why are anarchists angry with parts of the Western left? The following is a report by journalist Anna Jikhareva from Lviv.

With automated systems already trained on inaccurate data—Russia as the trial ground—“publisher classification” systems for analyzing, reporting, targeting and removing dissenting voices, accounts and publications set a dangerous precedent for tracking and blacklisting voices that challenge Canadian foreign policy online with accusations of “fake news.”

While more details on the scope of Western involvement will likely emerge, there is enough information in the public record to conclude that, despite falling below the threshold of direct confrontation with Russia, Canada’s contribution of arms means that we are indeed at war in Ukraine. This reality is compounded by the other retaliatory measures Ottawa has wielded to destroy the Russian economy.