On February 24, the President of Ukraine signed in Kyiv relevant bilateral agreements on security cooperation with the Prime Ministers of Canada and Italy. Both agreements further reaffirmed unwavering support for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders as of 1991, including the territorial sea, which undoubtedly includes the Crimean Peninsula.
Interestingly, that the Ukrainian-Italian agreement, among other things, states the exchange of “intelligence and expertise in the areas of cybersecurity and advanced communications technologies, including, but not limited to, cloud and quantum computing, advanced networking technologies, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, etc., as well as by taking cyber capacity building measures to counter this threat”.
As in the Ukrainian-French agreement, the parties to this agreement mention the need to counteract “the activities of serious and organized crime, in particular individuals and groups that are trying to infiltrate across Ukrainian society, have criminal influence in certain regions, including the temporarily occupied ones, and are actively used as a tool of hybrid warfare to counteract the processes of recovery and reconciliation in Ukraine”. In turn, the Ukrainian-Canadian agreement recalls the unprovoked attacks of the Russian Federation on Ukraine since 2014, introduces the Canada-Ukraine Strategic Security Partnership and states that the Russian war against Ukraine is aimed at destroying Ukrainian identity and muffling the voices of Ukrainians.
The agreement provides for the parties to work together to expose the theft of works of art by Russia, as well as the Russian efforts at rewriting history and removing the Ukrainian language from school curricula in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. In this dimension, Canada undertakes to cooperate with Ukraine in order to gain access to audiences in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, recognizing that Russia is deliberately targeting radio, television and other broadcast infrastructure in Ukraine and redirecting Internet traffic in these territories.
This agreement recognizes Canada’s leading role in the return to Ukraine of Ukrainian children illegally deported to Russia or forcibly displaced within the Russian-occupied or Russian-controlled territories of Ukraine. The agreement notes that the immediate release and return of all unlawfully detained, forcibly displaced and unlawfully deported civilians, including children, is one of the principles of supporting a comprehensive, just and lasting peace.
