Dan Bilok grew up in Canada, went to law school in Ukraine, and fell in love with the country. He spent the next year and a half fighting for the Ukrainian people. And then, one day, he was faced with a choice: go back to Canada or stay in Ukraine.
00:02:28.700The conversation went from theory to reality very quickly just over a year ago as Dan Bilok traded his business suit for combats after Russian invaded Ukraine.
00:02:38.800Over the next while, we're going to talk to Dan about that, about his experience.
00:02:41.940But before I bring him on, I just want to remind you that if you enjoy the conversations, the explorations of ideas that we do here, then I'm going to ask you to help.
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00:03:04.700And as I mentioned, Dan's not only been someone who has taken up arms over the last year, he spent a lot of time spreading the word about the fight in Ukraine, the total resistance of the Ukrainian people.
00:03:15.640And he joins us now from Montreal, where he's on a bit of a break from his time in Ukraine.
00:03:37.280I was practicing law in Toronto, and one of our clients got an order, actually, from the Canadian government in 1991, right after Ukraine declared its independence, to print Ukraine's new currency, the Hryvnia.
00:03:53.220The Ukrainian parliament had declared independence, and, you know, as an attribute of sovereignty, it wanted its own currency.
00:04:02.380And so that was the first deal I did in Ukraine.
00:04:18.200I mean, sometimes there is a real difference between diaspora culture, the immigrant culture that many of us have grown up with, and, well, what people still live back in the home country.
00:04:28.300Like, what was that culture shock like for you going over?
00:04:31.320Yeah, I'd grown up in the Ukrainian-Canadian community.
00:04:35.320I was quite involved throughout my childhood and my youth.
00:04:40.720And, you know, I spoke diaspora Ukrainian, if you like, sort of a mix of English syntax and Ukrainian.
00:04:49.500But when I went to Ukraine, especially to Kiev the first time in October of 91, I was shocked that most people actually spoke Russian, which I didn't speak and I didn't understand.
00:05:03.140And so I was wondering, like, where are all the people that they taught me about in Ukrainian school on Saturdays?
00:05:11.060And it's actually an interesting metaphor for what's happened over the years.
00:05:20.260And my career took a very, very different track than the one I had anticipated.
00:05:24.620And I ended up being in Ukraine for the last 32 years, essentially.
00:05:30.640And basically, you know, in some small way, hoping to contribute to the building of a nation, essentially, from scratch.
00:05:40.160Ukraine was basically a colonial outpost of the Soviet Union at the time.
00:05:46.160And, you know, heavily Russified in the cities because of the Russians.
00:05:50.860This is what Russians do when they colonialize people.
00:05:54.680They tell them, you're not really who you say you are.
00:06:03.880And we're here to liberate you from all of your preconceived notions.
00:06:07.680And if you don't like it, we'll kill you.
00:06:09.160And, you know, it's ironic because all the progress that Ukraine has made over the past 32 years is this is the end result, is that Russia could not handle it.
00:07:08.480That is the story of the development of Ukraine.
00:07:11.980I mean, you know, every country that goes through a transition to democracy from totalitarianism is going to be faced with these challenges.
00:07:21.500All of our Eastern European neighbors went through it.
00:07:24.400Many other countries that weren't part of the Soviet Union but went from dictatorship to trying democracy.
00:07:30.260It's extraordinarily difficult because, you know, in Canada, we take all our democratic institutions, our courts, our parliament, our voting, the rule of law, fairness.
00:07:40.180We sort of accept that that's the norm.
00:07:44.140And when you're actually building a society moving from repression and arbitrariness and, you know, basically treating people like slaves to one where people have voice and agency, it's extraordinarily difficult.
00:08:00.140And really the driver in that process over the past 30 years has been Ukrainian civil society and Ukrainians' desire for freedom and self-determination.
00:08:11.420It's what's driving the change, what drove the changes in the country then and what's driving the war now is people's desire to have the right to choose, things that we in Canada take for granted.
00:08:24.920And, you know, one of the things that I've learned over 32 years abroad is that, you know, we in Canada and North America and parts of Europe, we sort of take our freedom as an entitlement.
00:08:38.220And, you know, one of the lessons, I think, is that freedom is not free, that you actually have to stand up and fight for it.
00:08:47.300And, you know, fundamentally for me, both as a Canadian trained and educated lawyer and as somebody who lived in that environment in Ukraine for this period of time, is the important, you really understand what the importance of institutions are.
00:09:02.660Because if you're relying just on people, you will always end up with a corrupt society, because power corrupts.
00:09:10.160I've been an advisor to two ministers.
00:09:13.160I was chief of staff twice to the Minister of Justice of Ukraine, and I've advised two prime ministers.
00:09:18.300My last incarnation, I was the chief investment advisor to Prime Minister Grosman.
00:09:23.440And from 2016 to 2019, I ran, I founded and ran Ukraine Invest, the Ukrainian government's investment promotion agency.
00:09:31.780And I had to deal with all of this, the issues that you raised about, you know, corruption, transparency, accountability, etc.
00:09:38.920And, you know, Ukraine during that period, post-Maidan, post-Revolution of Dignity, after the Russians invaded, annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbass, you know, Ukraine made greater strides than probably any country in the world in building institutions of an anti-corruption architecture, public procurement, transparent public procurement system.
00:10:06.320We actually won an international award for the best public procurement system, if you can believe that there's such an award.
00:10:31.300And, you know, because I was right in the thick of it, I could understand where this was starting to come from.
00:10:37.320It was the fact that the Russians were putting out, they were just trolling us day and night, putting out the narrative of a failed state.
00:10:44.080And this gets picked up by the media and it goes into this echo chamber that you just can't crack of, you know, it's corrupt, it's bad, it's corrupt, it's bad.
00:10:54.000But Ukrainians didn't help themselves in the sense that many incidences of corruption went unpunished.
00:11:01.160So while we were really good at building, you know, the institutions, which is really the way you deal with corruption long term, you know, a lot of people were getting away with bad behavior.
00:11:11.080And so they were, they either had oligarch ties and things like that.
00:11:14.860But frankly, I mean, when you compare the scale of corruption in Russia, we look at their army now, you know, they spent hundreds of billions of dollars, so-called modernizing their army.
00:11:25.000And it was basically all stolen, as it turned out.
00:11:27.620Today, they're using tanks and weapons from the 1950s on the battlefield.
00:11:33.040And so, you know, I did see firsthand how corrosive corruption is, how it holds you back from democracy.
00:11:43.580But the people always spoke up, you know, we had the orange revolution.
00:11:47.540What would you say then, though, to the people who say, no, it's still corrupt, and it's just a money laundering operation for the West?
00:11:55.660And, you know, I'm sure you see these things, I get them sent to me all the time because of my outspoken support for Ukraine.
00:12:01.440But I get told, it's just a money laundering operation for the West.
00:12:19.940I would tell them, first of all, give me the proof.
00:12:22.080I mean, when you look at what's going on on the battlefield, I would say the evidence shows that we have used all of the equipment that we have used, that we have received.
00:12:32.280Not only are we using it, but we're using it very, very effectively.
00:12:37.020This notion, these are Kremlin talking points that you're telling me.
00:12:40.740So these people are either dupes and quite naive in falling for the propaganda and not willing to educate themselves on what is clearly in the public domain from lots and lots of reports as to what is happening.
00:12:55.580We've had some incidences recently where corruption has been uncovered.
00:12:58.980And the difference this time, Brian, is that it's been dealt with very, very quickly.
00:13:12.460So that institutional infrastructure that we've put into place is now coming into being implemented and being used effectively.
00:13:24.240So, frankly, I think this is a great story.
00:13:27.560And the fact that these cases are actually bubbling to the surface and they're being dealt with very, very quickly and ruthlessly shows that we are on the right track, actually.
00:13:37.760So in the past, if an official was caught siphoning off money, nothing would necessarily happen.
00:13:45.700Now, if that happens, they're facing jail time.
00:13:51.260But it's also part of a larger picture that, like many, many countries that are undergoing this transition from totalitarianism to democracy, you have state capture along the way.
00:14:03.440It's sort of an unholy alliance between the political elites from the old system, in our case, the so-called nomenclatura, communist era nomenclatura, who now have total power, and oligarchic elites that seize the economic power.
00:14:21.580They basically acquire state-owned assets at very, very nominal sums and make fortunes off of them.
00:14:28.320And because of their clout and the economic levers that they possess, they also acquire political levers in those areas and are able to put their own representatives that will protect their interests in parliament.
00:14:43.320And that makes it very, very difficult to fight corruption effectively when many of the people that are either in the courts or in the parliament or in the government are working either in concert with or directly for oligarchic interests.
00:15:00.240Well, Brian, that president or Vladimir Putin has has solved that problem.
00:15:06.400Many of those assets that are oligarchs controlled are now lying in ruins and rubble across the nation.
00:15:13.680I really think and the sacrifices of the Ukrainian people have been so immense that, you know, even with my Eastern European Ukrainian cynicism that I've acquired over the 30 years, I think it would be a very hard time to see that kind of an oligarchic clan emerge again.
00:15:34.820This is going to be civil society had already come to a point where it was very, very strong, where government feared it.
00:15:40.960I was in the government after the Maidan.
00:15:43.280Let me tell you, there were sessions where the prime minister would listen to somebody talking about curtailing some sorts of freedoms on, you know, for businesses.
00:15:51.480And he said, you know, if we pass this, they're going to carry us out of here on pitchworks.
00:15:56.820And that was that that was, you know, it was very much oriented to we got to make this a people centric, a citizen centric society.
00:16:05.260And before the war, the fact that we received Schengen free visa travel to the EU for Ukrainian passport holders in 2016 transformed the country.
00:16:17.34020 million people went abroad and came back and they saw how these societies are organized.
00:16:23.360They saw how they function and they said, we want that.
00:16:27.200So has there been a transformation from Ukraine being Moscow looking to being looking towards Europe?
00:16:40.220I mean, in fact, in fact, that that Rubicon was essentially crossed with the Maidan revolution, the revolution for dignity of dignity in 2014.
00:16:50.240Not, you know, it wasn't across the country.
00:17:50.120And they turned out to be rabid patriots.
00:17:54.960And, you know, when, you know, the Russians expected people to greet them with flowers and bread and salt, which is a traditional Ukrainian greeting.
00:18:03.600And instead, they were met with ferocious, ferocious resistance.
00:18:09.480And it shocked them because Putin made three big mistakes.
00:18:12.980He believed his own propaganda about the West.
00:18:16.840He believed his own propaganda about Ukrainians.
00:18:20.180And he believed his own propaganda about his own army.
00:18:23.440And the Ukrainians was the biggest shock because, you know, in his mind, we have no agency.
00:18:36.340And if we're not going to be colonized and we don't recognize that we are Russians and that we should all be speaking Russian, then we'll be killed because we're Nazis.
00:19:49.300The total resistance of the Ukrainian people is something that I don't think Vladimir Putin expected when he launched his invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago.
00:20:00.060Dan, you mentioned that off the top, that you're either working on the front or working for the front.
00:20:12.100I don't want to age shame you or anything here.
00:20:15.680But you're 62 years old and you went from the life you knew to going to military training.
00:20:22.700I did my basic training when I was 18 and it was tough.
00:20:26.620What's it like for you as part of this total resistance, flipping around and as a 62-year-old, going and learning how to, you know, putting on combats and learning how to do maneuvers?
00:20:38.120Yeah, to say it's surreal doesn't tell you anything.
00:20:44.200You know, at my age, in my profession, you should be hanging out at the country club sipping whiskey with your clients.
00:21:04.600And, you know, everything I have is in that country.
00:21:08.000I've put my, you know, my whole professional career has been around helping to build the country and make it a Western democracy.
00:21:18.120And whatever small role that I played, I'm very proud of that.
00:21:22.940And, you know, why should somebody else go and defend all of this when I'm capable of doing that?
00:21:30.500And so it's also, there's also an aspect that I have as a sort of semi-foreigner, as they call me.
00:21:38.180I'm a special kind of foreigner, you know, Ukrainian background and speak the language, identify with the culture and everything else and the people.
00:21:45.680But at the same time, you know, I could leave.
00:21:57.980It's a signal to Ukrainians that there are other people believe that there are things worth fighting and dying for.
00:22:06.220And it's a signal to Canadians and to Americans and others that, you know, and some of the very brave people that have gone to fight in the International Legion from country, from from backgrounds and countries that have no connection with Ukraine because they believe in the same thing.
00:22:20.220There are some fundamental principles that are that are that are that are here at stake.
00:22:25.440And we touched upon that a few minutes ago with the idea of freedom and justice.
00:22:31.680And, and, you know, there were it's better to stand on your feet and die a free man than to to to live on your knees as a slave.
00:22:41.300It's it's it's it's not much more elemental than that.
00:22:45.380You were chatting with your old law school friend, Paul Robitaille, a little while ago, and she wrote that great series for National Post back to the USSR about her experience going back.
00:22:58.400And you described some of the challenges of of going from office work to training, specifically, you know, what it's like to go in in clear a house.
00:23:13.640Can you explain a little bit of that for the listeners?
00:23:15.520Um, what does it mean training to go clear a house or a building?
00:23:21.540Yeah, well, my experience doing that taught me that if I don't have a tank to level the house, I'm probably not going to go inside.
00:23:29.360I mean, you you you have to storm storm a building, go inside.
00:23:33.100You don't know what awaits you, whether, you know, who's hiding where, where the trip wires are, where they're going to lie, where whether you can get a grenade lob that you, you know, of course, we're using fake grenades in in in training, but they still go bang.
00:23:48.400And, you know, how you come into a room with your with your unit, who covers whom, where do you position yourself?
00:23:55.220And, and, you know, then you go upstairs.
00:23:57.120I mean, it was it's just like, it's actually in training, it's nerve wracking.
00:24:00.720And of course, we're in a controlled environment and the same thing that we do with our training and in the open when we go into forests and fields and, and places like that.
00:24:11.660And, and, and, you know, we we practice assaults, we practice ambushes, we practice retreats, which is actually the most important thing to learn how to do, so that you don't fall over each other and shoot each other on when you're when you're when you're when you have to go back.
00:24:26.740You know, I, I when I heard about these, these Russian kids and men that are being mobilized, and being sent to the front with two weeks training, I mean, I've had a year of training.
00:24:38.380And, and, and I just thought to myself, my God, these guys are dead, they're dead, they're not that I mean, you're, you're, they're not going to last 40 seconds out there.
00:24:46.660Because you, you know, even in a controlled environment, it can be chaotic in a, on a battlefield, we were taking people from our battalions, territorial defense force battalions, that had just been formed in January of 2022.
00:25:03.640And during the siege of Kyiv, of Kyiv, we were taking people up to see how they were going to react in this situation.
00:25:11.960And, you know, we weren't frontline, but you know, you're carrying ammunition, you're carrying rockets or RPGs and, and, you know, helping set up and things like that.
00:25:21.080But, you know, there's artillery going around off around you, there's a small arms fire, there's a, I mean, it's just, just, just nuts.
00:25:29.220And, and, and, and, you know, everybody we took up said they wanted to go back.