Rising tensions over the war in Ukraine may be behind a graffiti attack on the Ukrainian National Federation over the weekend, says the president of the UNF’s Edmonton branch.
Ivan Lypovyk is calling for investigation of hate crimes and condemnation of Russia propaganda after the letter Z was emblazoned on the building at 10629 98 St. NW.
“That (letter’s) the symbol of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,” said Lypovyk.
It’s the second time the UNF has been vandalized since the launch of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
“We think it’s hate speech against the Ukrainian community, and with similar attacks on other Ukrainian community halls, it’s a pattern,” he said.
“We want the Edmonton Police Service to take these acts seriously, especially when there is such tension because of the war in Ukraine.”
Other campaigns, other histories
Previous graffiti incidents with swastikas on Ukrainian sites in Edmonton and other places have dredged up Ukraine’s Second World War history of pro-Nazi and anti-semitism.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently tried to connect the dots between modern Ukrainians and their Second World War history.
“That’s how Putin justified this war — that he’s ‘cleaning up Nazis’ in Ukraine, and that’s why he started this genocidal war against Ukrainians — and to weaken international support of Ukraine from Western allies,” he said.
Jars Balan said there’s the war’s combat front — but there’s a social media front, too.
The director of the Kuul Ukrainian Canadian Studies Centre sees waves of cascading disinformation composed to weaken Western support of Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“The Russians devote a great deal of resources just spreading disinformation and creating a false picture of what’s happening in Ukraine, to discredit the Ukrainian side and to weaken Western support and one of the ways they do this is by besmirching the Ukrainian diaspora, to paint us as Nazis and fascists, which is the furthest thing from the truth,” he said.
“The president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish. His family were victims of the Holocaust. There are Jews fighting in the Ukrainian armed forces, along with Tatars and all kinds of other citizens of Ukraine.”
The disinformation is quite deliberate, Balan said.
“It’s a sign of how Russian propaganda permeates many, many places. With the internet, you can find all kinds of garbage and false information, and there are people here who naively or annoyingly feed on that stuff and spread it,” he said.
“There are politically active people in Canada who have bought into Russian propaganda. For their own reasons, they’re just helping to disseminate it.”
Not without controversy
Ukrainian icons in Edmonton have been a lightning rod for controversy.
In 2021, Postmedia reported the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies (FSWC) called for the removal of a bust of Roman Shukhevych, which stood outside the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex in Edmonton since the 1970s.
The statue, along with a memorial in St. Michael’s Cemetery to Ukrainian soldiers who fought in Nazi units, were vandalized with red paint, the words “Actual Nazi” smeared on the statue of Shukhevych, the St. Michael’s memorial defaced with “Nazi Monument 14th Waffen SS.”
Shukhevych variously commanded both the German-backed Nachtigall Battalion and the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (which fought both the Nazis and the Soviets).
He died fighting Soviets in 1950. In 2007, the Ukrainian government posthumously declared him “hero of Ukraine.”
Shukhevych’s reemergence as a nationalist figure prompted formal protests from both Israel and Poland, whose people primarily remember him as an architect of ethnic cleansing.
What is hate speech?
The Government of Canada has defined “hate speech” as the content of a communication that expresses detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of prohibited grounds of discrimination, including national or ethnic origin, “communicated where it is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group on any of these prohibited grounds,” says the Government of Canada website.
Lypovyk believes politicians who don’t watch their words are helping to spread Russian propaganda — and Russian narratives.
“Their words create these actions. That’s why I call to our provincial government, to our premier, to condemn such actions and to make sure they do not help in spreading the misinformation and Russian narratives in our democratic society,” Lypovyk said, pointing to widely-reported remarks at a UCP town hall by UCP Lougheed constituency president Darrell Komick.
As covered by journalist Katie Teeling, the remarks criticizing displaced Ukrainians in particular as entering Canada with “zero screening.”
“We have people walking around wearing swastikas because no screening was done,” Komick is quoted as saying.
“They walk in proudly wearing them and they give you the evil look like, ‘I’m here because I was allowed to be here.’”