Full Comment - The Canadian lawyer taking up arms to fight for Ukraine

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00:02:28.700 The 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.

00:02:38.800 Over the next while, we're going to talk to Dan about that, about his experience.

00:02:41.940 But 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.

00:02:50.280 Hit the subscribe button or whatever app you're listening to is on, Apple, Spotify, Google, Amazon.

00:02:55.700 But also share, share this conversation on social media, email it to your Aunt May and Red Deer.

00:03:01.960 But if you're enjoying the show, spread the word.

00:03:04.700 And 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.

00:03:15.640 And he joins us now from Montreal, where he's on a bit of a break from his time in Ukraine.

00:03:21.700 Dan, thanks for joining us.

00:03:23.220 And before I ask you about trading in your business suit for combats, you grew up in Canada.

00:03:29.160 How did you end up in Ukraine?

00:03:32.880 Thanks for having me on your show, Brian.

00:03:35.620 It's a pleasure to be here.

00:03:37.280 I 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.

00:03:53.220 The Ukrainian parliament had declared independence, and, you know, as an attribute of sovereignty, it wanted its own currency.

00:04:02.380 And so that was the first deal I did in Ukraine.

00:04:05.440 It was quite exciting.

00:04:07.380 Yeah, you have Ukrainian background through your parents, is that correct?

00:04:11.800 That's right.

00:04:13.140 Okay, so did you speak the language going over?

00:04:15.320 Did you understand the culture?

00:04:18.200 I 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.

00:04:28.300 Like, what was that culture shock like for you going over?

00:04:31.320 Yeah, I'd grown up in the Ukrainian-Canadian community.

00:04:35.320 I was quite involved throughout my childhood and my youth.

00:04:40.720 And, you know, I spoke diaspora Ukrainian, if you like, sort of a mix of English syntax and Ukrainian.

00:04:49.500 But 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.

00:05:03.140 And so I was wondering, like, where are all the people that they taught me about in Ukrainian school on Saturdays?

00:05:11.060 And it's actually an interesting metaphor for what's happened over the years.

00:05:20.260 And my career took a very, very different track than the one I had anticipated.

00:05:24.620 And I ended up being in Ukraine for the last 32 years, essentially.

00:05:30.640 And basically, you know, in some small way, hoping to contribute to the building of a nation, essentially, from scratch.

00:05:40.160 Ukraine was basically a colonial outpost of the Soviet Union at the time.

00:05:46.160 And, you know, heavily Russified in the cities because of the Russians. 0.74

00:05:50.860 This is what Russians do when they colonialize people. 1.00

00:05:54.680 They tell them, you're not really who you say you are.

00:05:57.080 Your language isn't really your own. 0.93

00:05:58.660 It's only some sort of guttural dialect.

00:06:00.860 You don't really have a culture.

00:06:02.380 And you're actually Russian.

00:06:03.880 And we're here to liberate you from all of your preconceived notions. 1.00

00:06:07.680 And if you don't like it, we'll kill you. 0.97

00:06:09.160 And, 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. 0.98

00:06:20.400 Putin could not handle it.

00:06:22.460 And this was especially the democratization of Ukraine and had to be stopped and stamped out.

00:06:29.200 And that's where we are today.

00:06:32.140 So you've watched Ukraine grow and change then.

00:06:35.180 Well, how has it changed?

00:06:36.780 How has it grown from that Sylvia outpost that you described to the country that it is now? 0.98

00:06:42.960 And, you know, look, there's a lot of critics of Ukraine.

00:06:45.460 And you know that.

00:06:46.020 I'm sure you hear that.

00:06:47.720 And I want to get into questions about corruption and everything else.

00:06:51.680 Ukraine's not the only country to either deal with that or face accusations.

00:06:56.100 But there has been a tremendous growth in democracy and civil society over the past 32 years, hasn't there?

00:07:04.620 No, absolutely, Brian.

00:07:06.020 And in fact, that's the whole story.

00:07:08.480 That is the story of the development of Ukraine.

00:07:11.980 I mean, you know, every country that goes through a transition to democracy from totalitarianism is going to be faced with these challenges.

00:07:21.500 All of our Eastern European neighbors went through it.

00:07:24.400 Many other countries that weren't part of the Soviet Union but went from dictatorship to trying democracy.

00:07:30.260 It'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.

00:07:40.180 We sort of accept that that's the norm.

00:07:42.460 Well, that isn't the norm, actually.

00:07:44.140 And 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.

00:08:00.140 And really the driver in that process over the past 30 years has been Ukrainian civil society and Ukrainians' desire for freedom and self-determination.

00:08:11.420 It'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.

00:08:24.920 And, 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.

00:08:38.220 And, 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.

00:08:47.300 And, 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.

00:09:02.660 Because if you're relying just on people, you will always end up with a corrupt society, because power corrupts.

00:09:10.160 I've been an advisor to two ministers.

00:09:13.160 I was chief of staff twice to the Minister of Justice of Ukraine, and I've advised two prime ministers.

00:09:18.300 My last incarnation, I was the chief investment advisor to Prime Minister Grosman.

00:09:23.440 And from 2016 to 2019, I ran, I founded and ran Ukraine Invest, the Ukrainian government's investment promotion agency.

00:09:31.780 And I had to deal with all of this, the issues that you raised about, you know, corruption, transparency, accountability, etc.

00:09:38.920 And, 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.

00:10:06.320 We actually won an international award for the best public procurement system, if you can believe that there's such an award.

00:10:13.860 That does seem like an oxymoron.

00:10:16.100 Well, it sounded like a riveting evening at a banquet anyway, but, you know, it was an important signal.

00:10:24.040 But we couldn't get any traction.

00:10:26.840 People were always telling us, yeah, but what about this?

00:10:30.040 Yeah, but what about that?

00:10:31.300 And, you know, because I was right in the thick of it, I could understand where this was starting to come from.

00:10:37.320 It 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. 0.66

00:10:44.080 And 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.

00:10:54.000 But Ukrainians didn't help themselves in the sense that many incidences of corruption went unpunished. 1.00

00:11:01.160 So 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.

00:11:11.080 And so they were, they either had oligarch ties and things like that.

00:11:14.860 But 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.

00:11:25.000 And it was basically all stolen, as it turned out.

00:11:27.620 Today, they're using tanks and weapons from the 1950s on the battlefield.

00:11:33.040 And so, you know, I did see firsthand how corrosive corruption is, how it holds you back from democracy.

00:11:43.580 But the people always spoke up, you know, we had the orange revolution. 0.88

00:11:47.540 What 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?

00:11:55.660 And, 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.

00:12:01.440 But I get told, it's just a money laundering operation for the West.

00:12:05.240 Zelensky's a bag man.

00:12:06.620 They're just stealing all these billions that we're sending over.

00:12:10.820 What would you say to your fellow Westerners who have fallen prey, I think, to Russian propaganda, but you were in the thick of it?

00:12:18.200 What would you say?

00:12:19.940 I would tell them, first of all, give me the proof.

00:12:22.080 I 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.

00:12:32.280 Not only are we using it, but we're using it very, very effectively.

00:12:37.020 This notion, these are Kremlin talking points that you're telling me.

00:12:40.740 So 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.

00:12:55.580 We've had some incidences recently where corruption has been uncovered.

00:12:58.980 And the difference this time, Brian, is that it's been dealt with very, very quickly.

00:13:04.760 Arrests have been made.

00:13:05.920 Prosecutions have been made.

00:13:07.240 We have a new anti-corruption prosecutor.

00:13:09.520 Cases are coming to the court.

00:13:10.860 People are being sentenced.

00:13:12.460 So that institutional infrastructure that we've put into place is now coming into being implemented and being used effectively.

00:13:24.240 So, frankly, I think this is a great story.

00:13:27.560 And 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.

00:13:37.760 So in the past, if an official was caught siphoning off money, nothing would necessarily happen.

00:13:45.700 Now, if that happens, they're facing jail time.

00:13:49.380 Well, yes, that's correct.

00:13:51.260 But 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.

00:14:03.440 It'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.

00:14:21.580 They basically acquire state-owned assets at very, very nominal sums and make fortunes off of them.

00:14:28.320 And 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.

00:14:43.320 And 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.

00:15:00.240 Well, Brian, that president or Vladimir Putin has has solved that problem.

00:15:06.400 Many of those assets that are oligarchs controlled are now lying in ruins and rubble across the nation.

00:15:13.680 I 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.

00:15:34.820 This is going to be civil society had already come to a point where it was very, very strong, where government feared it.

00:15:40.960 I was in the government after the Maidan.

00:15:43.280 Let 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.

00:15:51.480 And he said, you know, if we pass this, they're going to carry us out of here on pitchworks.

00:15:56.820 And 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.

00:16:05.260 And before the war, the fact that we received Schengen free visa travel to the EU for Ukrainian passport holders in 2016 transformed the country.

00:16:17.340 20 million people went abroad and came back and they saw how these societies are organized.

00:16:23.360 They saw how they function and they said, we want that.

00:16:27.200 So has there been a transformation from Ukraine being Moscow looking to being looking towards Europe?

00:16:39.760 Oh, yeah.

00:16:40.220 I mean, in fact, in fact, that that Rubicon was essentially crossed with the Maidan revolution, the revolution for dignity of dignity in 2014.

00:16:50.240 Not, you know, it wasn't across the country.

00:16:54.460 The Maidan was in Kiev.

00:16:55.760 It was people came from around the country.

00:16:58.280 But, you know, eastern Ukraine was still sort of saying, you know, who are these people?

00:17:02.700 What are this?

00:17:03.160 What is this for?

00:17:03.940 Very paternalistic Soviet kind of societies.

00:17:07.240 It's not that they loved Russia.

00:17:09.020 They kind of missed the Soviet Union.

00:17:11.260 And that's what Putin was offering them.

00:17:13.040 He said, we're going to go back to the USSR.

00:17:14.840 And that was sort of the siren call for a lot of people.

00:17:20.740 But that eight years between the Maidan revolution and the full-scale invasion transformed eastern Ukraine, as it turned out.

00:17:31.080 And places like Mariupol, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Kherson, which, you know, were Russian-speaking and, you know, they were patriotic.

00:17:41.360 But it turns out that the next generation of kids, they were born already in independent Ukraine, came of age.

00:17:48.800 They were in their 20s and their 30s.

00:17:50.120 And they turned out to be rabid patriots.

00:17:54.960 And, you know, when, you know, the Russians expected people to greet them with flowers and bread and salt, which is a traditional Ukrainian greeting.

00:18:03.600 And instead, they were met with ferocious, ferocious resistance.

00:18:09.480 And it shocked them because Putin made three big mistakes.

00:18:12.980 He believed his own propaganda about the West.

00:18:16.840 He believed his own propaganda about Ukrainians.

00:18:20.180 And he believed his own propaganda about his own army.

00:18:23.440 And the Ukrainians was the biggest shock because, you know, in his mind, we have no agency.

00:18:29.660 We are just a colonial.

00:18:30.980 We are Russians.

00:18:33.380 We deserve to be colonized.

00:18:35.020 We must be colonized. 0.66

00:18:36.340 And 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. 0.68

00:18:44.140 And this is the calculus.

00:18:45.940 And this is why this is a war of extermination right now.

00:18:48.420 It's a war of annihilation.

00:18:49.940 And we have no choice but to fight it.

00:18:52.220 And that resistance started, really came to life during the Maidan.

00:18:57.600 And it carried our army throughout the period, the eight years where we were fighting the Russians in the Donbass.

00:19:03.660 They were largely supported by a volunteer army of citizens that rallied and was providing humanitarian and medical aid, etc.

00:19:13.200 This concept that you mentioned right at the beginning of total resistance is very profound.

00:19:19.260 You're either on the front or you're working for the front.

00:19:22.060 And I want to get into that in a moment.

00:19:25.840 That's where I planned to start.

00:19:27.420 And our conversation took a different path.

00:19:29.520 But we'll take a quick break and come back and I'll ask you about that total resistance.

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00:19:47.580 Scotiabank.

00:19:48.260 You're richer than you think.

00:19:49.300 The 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.

00:20:00.060 Dan, you mentioned that off the top, that you're either working on the front or working for the front.

00:20:07.000 You're someone who was a lawyer.

00:20:09.620 You were in business.

00:20:10.620 You were in government.

00:20:12.100 I don't want to age shame you or anything here.

00:20:15.680 But you're 62 years old and you went from the life you knew to going to military training.

00:20:22.700 I did my basic training when I was 18 and it was tough.

00:20:26.620 What'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?

00:20:38.120 Yeah, to say it's surreal doesn't tell you anything.

00:20:44.200 You know, at my age, in my profession, you should be hanging out at the country club sipping whiskey with your clients.

00:20:51.120 But, you know, life takes its churns.

00:20:56.000 I made my choice a long, long time ago, Brian.

00:20:59.620 I'm all in.

00:21:01.440 My younger children live in Ukraine.

00:21:03.160 My family's in Ukraine.

00:21:04.600 And, you know, everything I have is in that country.

00:21:08.000 I've put my, you know, my whole professional career has been around helping to build the country and make it a Western democracy.

00:21:18.120 And whatever small role that I played, I'm very proud of that.

00:21:22.940 And, you know, why should somebody else go and defend all of this when I'm capable of doing that?

00:21:30.500 And so it's also, there's also an aspect that I have as a sort of semi-foreigner, as they call me.

00:21:38.180 I'm a special kind of foreigner, you know, Ukrainian background and speak the language, identify with the culture and everything else and the people.

00:21:45.680 But at the same time, you know, I could leave.

00:21:48.360 It's easy.

00:21:48.820 I have my passport.

00:21:51.100 I have my age.

00:21:52.460 I could leave.

00:21:54.420 I could have left before.

00:21:56.480 But it's also a signal.

00:21:57.980 It's a signal to Ukrainians that there are other people believe that there are things worth fighting and dying for.

00:22:06.220 And 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.

00:22:20.220 There are some fundamental principles that are that are that are that are here at stake.

00:22:25.440 And we touched upon that a few minutes ago with the idea of freedom and justice.

00:22:31.680 And, 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.

00:22:41.300 It's it's it's it's not much more elemental than that.

00:22:45.380 You 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.

00:22:58.400 And 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.

00:23:13.640 Can you explain a little bit of that for the listeners?

00:23:15.520 Um, what does it mean training to go clear a house or a building?

00:23:21.540 Yeah, 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.

00:23:28.100 It's pretty scary.

00:23:29.360 I mean, you you you have to storm storm a building, go inside.

00:23:33.100 You 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.

00:23:48.400 And, you know, how you come into a room with your with your unit, who covers whom, where do you position yourself?

00:23:55.220 And, and, you know, then you go upstairs.

00:23:57.120 I mean, it was it's just like, it's actually in training, it's nerve wracking.

00:24:00.720 And 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.

00:24:11.660 And, 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.

00:24:26.740 You 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.

00:24:38.380 And, 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.

00:24:46.660 Because 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.

00:25:03.640 And during the siege of Kyiv, of Kyiv, we were taking people up to see how they were going to react in this situation.

00:25:11.960 And, 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.

00:25:21.080 But, 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.

00:25:29.220 And, and, and, and, you know, everybody we took up said they wanted to go back.

00:25:34.340 Nobody freaked out.

00:25:36.600 It's interesting that how you describe the training.

00:25:39.340 I mean, you, you are essentially a reservist, territorial defense force.

00:25:43.800 You're not the front lines, but you, you're getting more training than the, uh, Russian forces

00:25:50.620 constrips that are being sent out.

00:25:52.360 And I've read many articles on this and it's not just propaganda that the, the Russians just 0.57

00:25:59.100 are not training their military and they haven't trained their military well for a long time.

00:26:04.020 How important for the, the people who are on the front line is the training that Ukraine has

00:26:09.520 received from countries like Canada, the U S the UK, uh, to professionalize the army, uh, since

00:26:17.000 what I think it began really in earnest around 2014.

00:26:21.340 That is a great question, Brian.

00:26:23.340 And, and it's one I don't often get, but I should.

00:26:27.120 Um, and, uh, because it is everything.

00:26:30.840 It is everything.

00:26:32.120 The training that we received from operation unifier, big shout out to the Canadian government

00:26:37.420 and the Canadian armed forces for, for the fantastic work that they've done over, over

00:26:42.740 eight years and, uh, in, in training our troops along with American and other, other countries

00:26:48.220 and, uh, other countries' troops.

00:26:50.820 And that had transformed, uh, our senior officer corps and it's transformed our junior officer

00:26:57.920 corps and non-commissioned officers.

00:26:59.440 And that was the most important difference between the Russians because our guys were taught

00:27:05.500 how to think, not what to think.

00:27:08.640 The Russians teach their officers what to think and they follow orders and they just, and the 0.91

00:27:13.800 Russians have, the Russians are fighting and prosecuting this war the same way they fought 0.94

00:27:18.440 every war for 300 years.

00:27:20.640 It's Stalin said quantity has a quality all of its own.

00:27:25.000 And they just, they, they don't care about lives.

00:27:27.520 It's just meat, right?

00:27:28.580 Just cannon fodder.

00:27:29.440 And you just keep sending waves and waves and waves until the other side runs out of ammunition.

00:27:33.900 And then you just keep going.

00:27:35.840 And the slaughter that is going on in Bakhmut, I mean, we're losing a lot of people too.

00:27:41.220 We're losing our, uh, some of our, our top soldiers that people have fought the whole war

00:27:45.780 and they're sending at us the dregs of their society.

00:27:48.660 They cleaned out their prisons, their penal colonies.

00:27:51.700 I mean, these aren't shoplifters, Brian. 0.98

00:27:53.260 These are murderers, rapists, uh, uh, pedophiles, cannibals, HIV, deliberately taking HIV and 1.00

00:28:01.300 hepatitis C infected people, uh, to rape women so that they, they, they will be infected. 1.00

00:28:06.320 It's just, just awful. 0.76

00:28:07.660 And the thing is, they don't clear their bodies.

00:28:09.880 Then the next wave comes over and they're climbing over the bodies of their, of their 1.00

00:28:13.500 people. 0.60

00:28:13.920 We're, we're killing them at a ratio of seven, five, five or seven to one, depending on your, 0.98

00:28:18.440 your sources. 0.72

00:28:19.220 But, you know, Bakhmut was there to degrade the Russian army and it's happening, but our, 0.74

00:28:24.300 our guys aren't masked as a Russia, as a, as a big, huge, massive army.

00:28:28.240 We are, we, we fight much smarter.

00:28:31.140 We fight much more effectively.

00:28:32.480 We fight more, much more at the unit level.

00:28:35.500 And all of that plays to the strengths of the Ukrainian people, which is we are much more

00:28:40.560 self-organizers than, than taking orders kind of people.

00:28:44.420 But the fact that we had the military training over eight years to actually channel that national

00:28:51.320 characteristic into a battlefield situation has been the entire difference in this war.

00:28:57.180 And, and of course, getting, you know, getting the right equipment and getting the right

00:29:01.820 kit, which we still haven't got enough of, but that's a, that's a different story.

00:29:06.740 Well, yeah, many of us here keep pushing the government to do more and, and we'll continue

00:29:11.380 to do that.

00:29:12.320 Tell me about something I've seen you mentioned in other interviews, other podcasts, the

00:29:17.220 babushka is making borscht.

00:29:18.620 Yeah, well, this, this comes back to the total resistance where, you know, and you talk about

00:29:24.180 frontline and, and, and, and a reserve line.

00:29:28.140 And when, when, when you get into a battlefield, a hot battlefield situation, the lines blur and

00:29:33.720 become indistinguishable.

00:29:35.420 This took place in Chinyiv.

00:29:37.220 It took place on the, on the other side of Kiev from where I live in, in, in, in Buczansk

00:29:42.340 and all the places that suffered so horribly under, under Russian occupation.

00:29:47.540 Um, and, uh, it happened in the South when they, when the Russians attacked there and

00:29:52.200 in the East and, you know, territory of defense force working with special forces, working

00:29:57.180 with the army, all in common cause and just doing whatever needs to be done.

00:30:01.840 And then you have the local population pitching it.

00:30:04.460 And this story, which I, I just, I can't find the photo.

00:30:07.700 I'd love to find it again of the, you know, when, uh, when that huge armored column was stalled,

00:30:13.760 uh, outside of Kiev, it was stalled because we, we shot out the tracks of, of the tracked

00:30:19.420 vehicles and we blew up the tires of the, of the, the, the, the, the other ones.

00:30:24.520 And, and so they were rolling on their discs and there's only so fast you can go through

00:30:28.400 on mud and roads, uh, in the wintertime.

00:30:30.600 And so we were, we were taking them out systematically.

00:30:33.920 And, you know, there's this great picture of the grant, this granny coming across the, 0.99

00:30:38.260 the field, uh, on the one hand, she's got a pail of, uh, of Borscht, uh, traditional

00:30:43.460 Ukrainian beet soup.

00:30:44.600 And in the other hand, she's got a pail of Molotov cocktails that she prepared, you 0.98

00:30:48.320 know, feeding the boys, you know, and, uh, and girls too.

00:30:51.740 I mean, 40,000 women serve in the Ukrainian forces, 5,000 of them in, uh, frontline combat

00:30:57.880 positions.

00:30:58.440 Our best snipers are women, by the way, men beware. 1.00

00:31:03.220 You talk to, uh, you, you talk to anybody at any gun club and they'll tell you women 0.99

00:31:07.180 are, uh, are better shots cause the better, better breathing, better patience.

00:31:12.820 And they listen to the instruction.

00:31:14.860 That's what I hear every time I'm at a gun club.

00:31:17.380 So that part doesn't shock me.

00:31:20.320 Your description of, of each level supporting the other, I had very little time in the military,

00:31:26.560 but I did get to train for a little while with the special forces and I knew nothing,

00:31:31.020 but being able to support these guys in a training exercise, you learn so much.

00:31:36.360 So it really is, you know, you can, you're basically doing the things that they don't

00:31:42.540 have time to do.

00:31:43.700 And then the civilians are doing the things you don't have time to do that.

00:31:47.280 That becomes quite powerful.

00:31:48.620 Well, and it, and it, and you keep one line behind.

00:31:51.700 I mean, I do the training and everything else.

00:31:53.340 And if, if, if it came to it, I would, I would be sent or do whatever I'm, I'm told by

00:31:58.860 my unit commander in a, in a, in a difficult situation.

00:32:02.180 But my primary role in the territorial defense forces has been to, because that's, everybody

00:32:08.280 uses their own skillset, right?

00:32:11.060 And, and I, I was able to help kit out my, my battalion in my, the battalion in my region,

00:32:18.500 the territorial defense force battalion at the beginning of the war.

00:32:23.000 I mean, these guys, they're like you and me, Brian.

00:32:25.160 I mean, you're, you're, you're like Rambo compared to these people with, with having 1.00

00:32:29.140 special forces, basic training at 18.

00:32:32.100 I mean, there were people like me that, you know, I shot skeet twice at the Montreal gun

00:32:35.660 club when I was at, when I was a student at McGill and, uh, that was it.

00:32:39.900 And, uh, never held a rifle.

00:32:41.560 Now I own an AR-15 and I, and I, and I, and I've been issued a Kalashnikov, uh, AK-74.

00:32:47.300 I mean, I could be the NRA's representative in my, in my village if I applied.

00:32:52.000 But, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the essence of this is that, um, you know,

00:32:58.400 I was providing them, I was sourcing them with, uh, with helmets and body armor and IFACs,

00:33:03.560 the, the medical kits, uh, that they wear on the field, because we had nothing.

00:33:08.180 And people came in, in running shoes and boots and jackets and gloves and a, and a toque, uh,

00:33:13.660 to defend their country.

00:33:14.900 And, you know, they didn't know if they were going out in the front line because of the

00:33:18.220 advances that we're making, that the Russians were making, uh, into cave, uh, into cave. 0.70

00:33:22.940 And, um, you know, I had done all of this.

00:33:25.840 I mentioned I was in the government four times and, and, you know, we'd done this policy

00:33:30.320 work and, and reform implementation and many things that, you know, you don't get the impact

00:33:36.080 of for, for, for many, many years.

00:33:38.460 Nothing, nothing compared with handing my neighbor and, and, and, and people in our battalion,

00:33:46.380 out of the people in battalion with a helmet and body armor and seeing the looks on their

00:33:50.840 face, like, man, I may not die in the first volley, you know, it was the most rewarding

00:33:56.400 thing I've ever done.

00:33:57.700 And, you know, I, I, I, I kept trying, I tried to join the regular army.

00:34:02.680 I even, they said, you're too old.

00:34:04.780 I went, I said, I'm in better shape than a lot of these guys.

00:34:07.080 Like, what are you talking about?

00:34:08.360 And, uh, and then I went to the military intelligence and, uh, they said, well, no, we can't take a

00:34:14.460 Canadian, which was really bizarre, but, uh, and then it wouldn't give me Ukrainian citizenship

00:34:19.280 because I, they wanted me to continue doing my information war side as a Canadian.

00:34:24.360 So everything pointed going back to the territorial defense forces.

00:34:27.420 And I'm very proud of that.

00:34:28.540 I'm very proud of the, of the people I serve with.

00:34:30.540 And, and, uh, you know, we, we've got a, a very good battalion and we've got very good

00:34:35.440 volunteer units that are attached to the battalion.

00:34:38.060 And we've sent out routinely three to three to 400 people from our, our communities, uh,

00:34:44.440 to, as volunteers to, to go to Bachmoot and Soledar and Luladar and, and places like that.

00:34:51.100 The spring promises to be challenging.

00:34:54.220 What's your sense?

00:34:56.220 Yeah.

00:34:56.760 Sorry.

00:34:57.100 There's an air raid warning that just went off on my app here.

00:35:01.060 And to Kiev.

00:35:02.640 Um, I hope it's not going to be another one like the, the other day, cause that was brutal.

00:35:07.260 Um, uh, my sense is that, uh, you know, we have, we have to move to an end game, uh, Brian.

00:35:14.340 I mean, you've got to, we, we, we need to get the equipment and the kit that we've been promised

00:35:20.140 in on now, even in an accelerated format, we were supposed to get this stuff in, in November

00:35:25.340 and December.

00:35:26.240 Uh, we were actually playing, I, I might, I mean, I'm not privy to super secret information,

00:35:32.440 but basically we were, we were, the plans were made to do a winter campaign, a counter-offensive.

00:35:38.400 And now it's a spring counter-offensive.

00:35:40.660 And, you know, as, as Voltaire said, you know, God is not on the side of the big battalions.

00:35:47.220 God is on the side of those who shoot best.

00:35:50.280 And, you know, if we don't get the equipment, we're outnumbered, we're outnumbered and we're

00:35:54.380 outgunned.

00:35:55.320 But, you know, they're like, they're like a, a, a dying dinosaur.

00:35:59.360 You know, you've got the brain of a pea, but you can do an awful lot of damage as you

00:36:03.480 stagger around the forests and the fields.

00:36:06.160 And, uh, there's a lot of them and they, and they're dug in now in the South. 0.51

00:36:10.500 And that's what we have to liberate first in order to gain control of Crimea and, uh, and

00:36:15.200 our ports.

00:36:15.740 That's the lifeline of our economy.

00:36:17.260 And we need to get those, especially the Bradley fighting vehicles, especially the, the anti-aircraft

00:36:23.960 that you saw what happened the other day.

00:36:25.460 They're now using their strategic, uh, uh, high precision, um, uh, bomb, uh, missiles against

00:36:35.800 civilian targets to, to, to try to bring us under.

00:36:38.560 And we can't see those.

00:36:40.000 We don't have anything in our air defense that, that picks them up as they're, as they're

00:36:45.120 coming in.

00:36:46.020 And so, you know, it's, it's, it's a turkey shoot if they're using, if they're prepared

00:36:50.020 to use their hypersonic missiles.

00:36:52.260 Uh, so we need to have, we need the longer range shells that a lot will allow us to take

00:36:57.480 out their, their bases and their, and their, and their depot, their supply depots and their

00:37:02.240 fuel depots and things like that.

00:37:03.900 They're, they're just beyond, we've been limited to 80 kilometers.

00:37:07.020 Now we're getting 150 and so we'll be able to reach a lot of these places, but you know,

00:37:11.900 they won't give us, the Americans won't give us the 300 kilometer ones.

00:37:15.520 I mean, it's just, you know, being on a drip feed is not a way to win a war.

00:37:20.520 And even though I'm, I don't want to sound ungrateful.

00:37:22.900 I mean, I, God forbid, I mean, we're, if, if it had not been for, for, for Canada, the

00:37:27.700 United States, Great Britain, and our, and our other NATO partners, we would have been

00:37:32.580 toast a long time ago.

00:37:33.880 We, we wouldn't even be having this call.

00:37:35.620 We'd be having a very different conversation.

00:37:38.540 But you know, you're either going to, you've got to be in it to win it.

00:37:41.440 You've got to get over the fear of escalation.

00:37:44.180 He weaponizes that fear and doubles down.

00:37:47.360 He sees weakness and it means that it gives, it encourages him to, you know, go to, to,

00:37:52.700 to, to go further.

00:37:54.400 And, you know, I understand that there were shortages in the West and things like that,

00:37:59.060 but come on, I mean, it costs, the cost of this battle of supplying Ukraine has been

00:38:05.000 0.01% of the GDP of NATO countries.

00:38:09.460 I mean, it's, it's not even a rounding error and, and it's not a cost factor.

00:38:13.380 It's, it's just, it's about the, the, you know, the fear that something is going to escalate.

00:38:17.620 We have crossed so many of his red lines that, you know, it doesn't make any sense anymore.

00:38:23.260 You call his bluff.

00:38:24.240 That's what you do with a, with a KGB agent.

00:38:26.660 He's weaponizing psychological warfare.

00:38:30.060 And, and that's how you deal with a bully.

00:38:32.240 Exactly.

00:38:34.100 Dan, thanks so much for your time and hope to God you stay safe over there.

00:38:39.380 Well, thank you for having me.

00:38:40.680 God bless the people of Canada and thank you so much for all your help.

00:38:44.740 All right.

00:38:45.320 Dan Bielek journey is from Montreal on his way back to Kyiv shortly.

00:38:49.520 Full comment is a post-media podcast.

00:38:52.080 My name's Brian Lilly, the host.

00:38:53.640 This episode was produced by Andre Prude with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:38:58.040 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

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00:39:09.000 And as always, thanks for listening.

Full Comment - March 20, 2023

The Canadian lawyer taking up arms to fight for Ukraine

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