Last Night

I was at a dinner here in Ottawa last night with about 400 of my closest buddies where Ukrainian Ambassador to Canada Ihor Ostash presented former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney with the Yaroslav the Wise Medal, the highest honour that the President of Ukraine can bestow on a foreign citizen.

There was some CBC video footage from about twenty years ago, when Mulroney famously went to meet protestors who were waving the then illegal Ukrainian flag. Mulroney spoke eloquently about how during that trip he decided to open the Canadian consulate in Ukraine and met with the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party who spoke to him in Ukrainian (also illegal then) and had to switch from his official Russian translator to Roman Waschuk, then a junior foreign service officer from Canada who was seated a few rows back, who translated from Ukrainian for Mulroney.

Mulroney was awarded the Medal for being the first Western leader to recognize Ukrainian Independence, against the wishes of Gorbachev, Thatcher and George Bush senior. While not a Conservative, I believe that his actions in this instance were appropriate.

Having seen these pictures on Nezalezhnosti site, sometimes given the current situation in Ukraine, we forget what a long way the country has come in the last 15-20 years.